Coffee-Table Notes

The gang are all here in Party Game , the latest communal experience from Canada's Bluemouth Company and Necessary Angel. As the audience enter Edinburgh College of Art's student union and musical institution transformed here into a lo-fi function room, the chairs are out, Bruce Springsteen's playing on the stereo and our hosts are rounding us up to surprise a very special guest. Instead, as the four performers and in-house backwoods band welcome us over the threshold, co-opting us to shift furniture, pour wine and hang bunting, we get to eavesdrop in on a series of intimate exchanges that hint that all may not be as fun as it initially looks. Anecdotes turn into bittersweet deliberations of regret, and all that's left are the most private of memories. Bluemouth last appeared in Edinburgh in 2011 when they brought the self-explanatory Dance Marathon to town. This new work is a more personal and infinitely sadder affair that taps into a sense of shared loss and collectiv

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, August 17th 2017 Given events in Charlottesville, Virginia over the last week, the symbolic significance of statues couldn't be clearer. Virginia, after all, was one of the key points of the global perambulations of the nineteenth century slave trade. It was also the state where confederate general Robert E Lee commanded his army. More than a century on, the proposed removal of Lee's statue in Charlottesville became the alt.right/fascist mob's main battleground. In the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, meanwhile, John Flaxman's 1828 white marble statue of Robert Burns stands centre stage tall and proud at the centre of the Grand Hall, not giving an inkling of the national bard's own flirtation with the slave trade. Burns made plans several times to embark on a ship to the West Indies to become a slave driver. In the end he never set sail, but the intention was there. As part of Edinburgh Art Festival, the Scottish Nat

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