Coffee-Table Notes

Queen's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh until November 26 th The image of nineteenth century war photographer Roger Fenton dressed as an Algerian soldier at the start of this major showing of the Rochdale-born snapper's extensive frontline dispatches from the Crimean War says much about the sense of derring-do that pervades early on. With Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia at war with the Russian Empire since 1853, Fenton was hired by Manchester publishers Thomas Agnew and Son to document the War in a way that could be used by painter Thomas Barker, who they also commissioned. More than fifty of Fenton's studies are rounded up in Barker's The Allied Generals with the Officers of their Respective Staffs Before Sebastopol, a piece worth it for the title alone, which resembles that of a Howard Barker play. It was a commercial gig, with Fenton encouraged by friends in high places to deliver a more heroic counterpoint to the crit

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Between them, Rob Drummond and Nicholas Bone have successfully carved out separate careers in off-kilter contemporary theatre. While Drummond is a playwright and solo performer of semi auto-biographical shows, Bone is a director and founder of the Magnetic North company. Given their propensity for creating various shades of onstage ritual, it perhaps should come as no surprise to discover that they are both sons of clergymen. Bone grew up the child of an English bishop, while Drummond's father was a Church of Scotland minister. The sins of those fathers have clearly left their mark in this co-production between Magnetic North company and the Traverse, a seventy-five minute meditation on this pair of self-confessed atheists (or are they?) respective relationships with their dads. The starting point for this is a copy of Edmund Gosse's book, Father & Son, which charts Gosse's life growing up with his preacher father and his

Sandy Neilson – actor, director Born January 29 1943; died October 19 th 2017 If the narrative of Scottish theatre had taken a different turn, Sandy Neilson, who has died aged 74 after being hospitalised following a fall, might have ended up leading one or other of the country's major theatres. As it was, despite working extensively in pretty much every theatrical institution in the country, Neilson remained both inside and outside the mainstream, developing long-term working relationships with many key directors of his generation who were in charge of such buildings. Neilson featured in numerous productions by Michael Boyd, both during the latter's tenure running the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, and when Boyd took over the helm at the Royal Shakespeare Company. These included Boyd's epic staging of Shakespeare's History Cycle at the RSC. Prior to the latter, Neilson worked at Dundee Rep, where for three years he became a senior figure of the permanent ensemble co

The theatrically named Hurricane Ophelia may have blown in and out of Scotland like a banshee by the time these words appear, but in Pitlochry, the season's more regular winds have already taken root in the Perthshire town. Such a blustery climate has allowed Peter Arnott the opportunity to don what the Glasgow based playwright calls his Kenny Ireland Memorial Cap while taking regular constitutionals from rehearsals for his new stage version of Compton Mackenzie's novel, The Monarch of the Glen. Arnott has so named what looks like a traditional fisherman's cap in honour of the late director, actor and former artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. Ireland's outgoing Lyceum production in 2003 was of Arnott's piece of Victorian Edinburgh Gothic, The Breathing House. The pair later collaborated with designer Hayden Griffin on stagings of classic Scottish novels at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen. Arnott adapted both The Silver Darlings by Nei

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Everything happens after dark in James Ley's dramatic tribute to Edinburgh's radical gay scene of the 1980s. This is the case for Lewis and Glen, who rehearse their homage to the owners of Lavender Menace, the pioneering basement bookshop that sold gay literature long before chain-stores took it into the mainstream. It's also the painful truth for the married man in a suit who loiters outside at various points in the play, yearning to go inside. 1987, and Lavender Menace is moving from its basement premises to a swankier new place uptown. With a new name and a new identity, the move is a kind of symbolic coming out from the underground. Legendary Princes Street club Fire Island is about to be sold off to Waterstone's, and, only seven years after homosexuality was legalised in Scotland, it feels like the end of an era. Over one final night after hours, Lewis and Glen take drama queenery to the limit as they role-play how their relati

Dundee Rep Two sisters sit in glass cases either side of the stage at the start of Eve Jamieson's production of Jean Genet's nasty little study of warped aspiration and abuse of power. Bathed in red light, the women look like artefacts in some cheap thrill waxworks horror-show, or else exhibits in a human zoo. Either way, they are both trapped, immortalised in a freak-show possibly of their own making. Once the sisters come to life and drape themselves in the sumptuous bedroom of their absent mistress, they raid her bulging wardrobe to try on otherwise untouchable glad-rags and jewellery. As they do, the grotesque parody of the high-life they aspire to turns uglier by the second. When the Mistress returns, as played with daring abandon by Emily Winter as a glamour-chasing narcissist who gets her kicks from drooling over the criminal classes, you can't really blame the sisters for their fantasy of killing her. Slabs of sound slice the air to punctuate each scene

October 15, 2016. Onstage at the Wee Red Bar, ostensibly Edinburgh College of Art's student union but so much more besides, the living legend that is Vic Godard is baring his soul. The louche frontman of Subway Sect, whose support slot to The Clash on the Edinburgh Playhouse date of the iconic headliners' May 1977 White Riot tour effectively spawned what became known as the Sound of Young Scotland, has just sung backing vocals to his own song, Ambition, as performed by The Sexual Objects. The Sexual Objects, of course, are fronted by Davy Henderson, one of those in attendance at the Edinburgh Playhouse show. His incendiary band, Fire Engines, were key figures in Scotland's post-punk renaissance, before morphing into glossy New Pop pioneers Win. Henderson got back to basics with The Nectarine No 9, then embraced all that’s sublime about rock music with the Sexual Objects. And now here they are, playing Ambition while the song's visionary writer takes