Coffee-Table Notes

Edinburgh Playhouse, August 17 th 2017 “Welcome to 1967,” says Robyn Hitchcock at the opening of Edinburgh International Festival's all-star celebration of the group whose seminal albums, The 5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter epitomised getting-your-head-together-in-the-country hippiedom. The Incredible String Band's central duo of Mike Heron and Robin Williamson also pursued the strangest strains of Caledonian psych-folk whimsy en route. Hitchcock is acting as a kind of MC as controlled chaos reigns amongst a cross-generational cast list that includes Barbara Dickson getting back to her folk roots, Scritti Politti's Green Gartside, Karine Polwart and Alasdair Roberts, among the vocalists. The far more together musical back-line features guitarist Neil McColl, world music maverick Justin Adams, penny whistle player Fraser Fifield and legendary bass player Danny Thompson amongst its line-up. The gaggle of singers and p

Gary McNair is standing on the edge of the River Clyde gazing up at the Glasgow sunset. As inner city idylls go, it may not be in the same league as a monochrome Manchester canal, but McNair is basking in the poetry of the moment anyway. In terms of scene-setting preparation for Letters to Morrissey, McNair's latest piece of solo stand-up theatre that charts his personal liberation through sending real life epistles to the now largely deposed pope of mope, it's perfect either way. Following on from his previous semi-autobiographical solo shows, Donald Robertson is Not A Stand Up Comedian and A Gambler's guide to Dying, as the title suggests, Letters to Morrissey is a look back in languor at one of McNair's musical heroes. The singular former Smiths singer turned hit and miss solo artist isn't some everyday musical hero, however. Notwithstanding some of his more distasteful political pronouncements of late that were the latest in a long history of controversy, Mor

Milly Thomas was about to go onstage when she first read the script for the pilot episode of Clique, BBC3's online only Edinburgh set university thriller created by Skins alumni Jess Brittain. The twenty-something actress and writer had been put up as a possible writer on the glossy six part drama by Balloon Entertainment, who she worked with on a Writers Room development project, and who thought she would be a perfect fit.  Here, after all, was a dark thriller that dragged The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie's concept of the crème de la creme into the twenty-first century to look at the power games that can be played among an on-campus elite of young women desperate to make the grade. Thomas was initially sceptical, but after her dressing room read-through, was smitten. “Twenty minutes before I was due onstage, and I couldn't stop thinking about it,” Thomas says as she prepares to bring two original plays to Edinburgh, one of which she will be performing in. “I thought it was br

A steel shipping container stands at the back of the stage at the opening of Old Stock , Hannah Moscovitch's moving personal history of how her descendants left Romania for Canada and carved out a life for themselves. When the container opens, it reveals a cluttered world occupied, not just by Chaya and Chaim, the couple who form the play's heart, but on a four-piece junkyard orchestra, who punctuate the play with the songs of Ben Caplan. Caplan narrates proceedings as The Wanderer, a top-hatted master of ceremonies who represents an entire Jewish community's sense of exile, as well as providing levity and a driving live score. Christian Barry's production for the Nova Scotia based 2b Theatre Company is a joy. Moving between a comic courtship and the everyday hardships that shape Chaya and Chaim's future, both Mary Fay Coady as Chaya and Chris Weatherstone as Chaim play instruments inbetween conjuring up a much bigger picture of how the world was built on immigr

Martin Creed's Words and Music is a late night show taking place at the Festival Theatre Studio as part of Edinburgh International Festival. On showings so far, Creed's performance resembles a cross between Billy Connolly, Albert Einstein and a friendly Mark E Smith. In June 2017, Creed came to Edinburgh to look at the space he was due to be performing in, and took part in an interview with Neil Cooper for the Herald newspaper. The full transcript of the interview is published below unedited in a way in which Creed's speech patterns seem to reflect the structures of his work. Creed is probably best known for winning the 2001 Turner Prize with Work No 227: The lights going on and off , in which a light went on and off at five second intervals in an empty room. This provoked a mixture of controversy, ridicule and acclaim, with one visitor to the exhibition throwing eggs in the work's empty room. Creed has confounded and amused ever since, with every work meticulously

Lee Blakeley - Opera and theatre director Born August 16 1971; died August 5 2017 Lee Blakeley, who has died suddenly of a suspected heart attack aged 45, was a fearlessly individual director, who moved between opera and musical theatre in a way that wasn't afraid to be popular, and who, both in his personal and professional life, could find the fun in everything. This was the case whether overseeing a production of Die Fledermaus for Scottish Opera set in the world of Footballers' Wives, or simply indulging in impromptu bouts of ridiculous quick stepping round the studio during breaks in rehearsal with some of his cast. Blakeley's international career saw him work with such luminaries as Gigi star Leslie Caron and Greta Scacchi in a production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris in a production which introduced Sondheim's work to French audiences for the first time. This set the template for a series of visually st

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a busy woman. The thirty-two year old actress who burst onto our TV screens as writer and star of Fleabag, the tragi-comic sort of sit-com about a supposedly independent woman on the verge is currently overseeing Killing Eve, her new TV drama which she's written for BBC America. As an actress, Waller-Bridge is also filming a big screen project which we can't talk about, but which has already been outed as being part of the ongoing Star Wars franchise. These are both pretty good reasons why Waller-Bridge won't be appearing in the brief Edinburgh Festival Fringe revival of the original stage play of Fleabag, when it opens next week at the Underbelly, where it was first unleashed to the world in 2013. In her place, Maddie Rice will take on the role of the potty-mouthed anti-heroine after touring Vickie Jones' production for Waller-Bridge and Jones' DryWrite company in association with Soho Theatre. This doesn't mean Waller-Bridge has turn