Coffee-Table Notes

It was fifty years ago this year that the so-called summer of love burst forth with a wave of hippy idealism played out to a psychedelic soundtrack. In the UK, much of the activity sprang from the coming together of counter-cultural forces two years earlier at the International Poetry Incarnation. Held at the Royal Albert Hall, this iconic event put American beat poet Allen Ginsberg at the top of the bill of some of the finest (male) minds of his generation. Immortalised on film by Peter Whitehead's short documentary film, released the same year, the IPA subsequently spawned numerous Happenings, where psych-rock bands, triptastic light shows and freaky dancing set the template for high times to come. Barry Miles, who worked at Better Books, where the idea for the IPA was hatched, saw the possibility for a magazine to help disseminate all the alternative ideas that were brewing around sex, drugs and rock and roll. The result of this was International Times, or IT, a playful and

When Jonathan Lloyd decided to direct a production of Caryl Churchill's play, Love and Information, with final year students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's unique three year BA Performance in British Sign Language and English degree, he knew it wasn't an obvious choice. On the one hand, the recently installed director of Solar Bear theatre company had a group of performers who all define themselves as deaf or D/deaf (more of the latter definition later), who would be embarking on their first ever tour of professional venues. This would showcase the company's talents with maximum exposure beyond the relatively safe confines of the academic environment. On the other, Lloyd had selected a play looking at the information age, but which, over its fifty short scenes, is seriously open to interpretation. With no stage directions or any indication of setting or character names, the result of this is a tantalising production performed by a cast of ten in a mix of Br

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars When the editorial team behind a mould-breaking satirical magazine go over the top at the end of the first act of Ian Hislop and Nick Newman's play, as heroic gestures go, it's no joke. This is World War One, after all, and the merry pranksters from an ad hoc zine called The Wipers Times are on the frontline of battle in the Belgian town no-one can pronounce. Given that the men are genuinely going over the top and into battle, casualties are considerably higher than the occasional suit for libel. Led by rebellious officers Fred Roberts and Jack Pearson, the magazine allows a rare voice for good-natured if at times scurrilous dissent on the trenches, and acts as an inadvertent morale booster. The bad guys, of course, are the office-bound pen-pushers and top brass bureaucrats, represented here by Sam Ducane’s cartoon toff, Lieutenant Colonel Howfield. While it never totally transcends its TV roots, the play's sit-com style scenes ar

The Mash House, Edinburgh Monday November 6th There’s nothing remotely flabby about Wire, the wilfully singular accidental veterans of the so-called punk wars, who recently insisted on Marc Riley’s BBC 6Music A-Z of Punk that they categorically weren’t punk at all. Given that the metal machine music of this year’s Silver/Lead album sounds as driven and as purposeful as any of their initial trilogy of 1977-79 albums, you can see their point. Live, the band's original core trio of Colin Newman, bassist Graham Lewis and drummer Robert Grey, plus guitarist Matthew Simms, take no prisoners, and never play to type. This is the case from the curiously rock star-like head-wear of Lewis and chief vocalist and guitarist Newman - a flat cap and a trucker’s cap respectively - to the stoic refusal to play almost anything resembling ‘the hits’. As the ipad perched on Newman's mic stand, from which he reads his lyrics suggests, Wire are as twenty-first century as it gets. This doesn&#

Ian Hislop and Nick Newman are used to being in the frontline. As editor and cartoonist respectively of satirical bible Private Eye, they have spent many a year dodging metaphorical bullets from an outraged political establishment. As script-writers too, ever since they worked on revues together while at Ardingly College public school in West Sussex (also the alma mater of four Conservative MPs – so far), they have consistently bitten the hand that feeds them. While Hislop is best known as long-standing team captain on satirical TV quiz show, Have I Got News For You, Newman's career as writer and cartoonist has seen his work appear in high-end publications such as Punch and The Spectator. Together as writers, they created the character of gormless toff and old Ardinglyian, Tim Nice-But-Dim, for The Harry Enfield Show on TV, and, among numerous radio works, in 1994 penned Gush, a satire based on the Gulf War and written in the style of Jeffrey Archer. Despite such a collective

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars The sound of birdsong floats about the auditorium as Karine Polwart comes on stage to perform her meditation on the land, sea and air that surrounds her in Fala, the village just outside Edinburgh she calls home. It's a sound that soothes, possibly because, as Polwart talks of the 2,400 pink-footed geese that fly from Greenland to Fala every winter, it's clear it is the voices of the many. Skyborne socialism, Polwart calls it. The geese become a leaping off point for a show that fuses songs and stories to create a beautiful evocation of the need for community in an increasingly fractured world. This is the case whether Polwart talks us through her complicated pregnancy a decade ago and the heroic support she received, or an unlikely but apt evocation of football manager Alex Ferguson's philosophy of teamwork. There are too the everyday tragedies of those whose lives were cruelly cut short, like real life couple Roberta and

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars When successful classical violinist Stephanie is struck down in her prime by multiple sclerosis, her entire creative lifeblood is ripped asunder as she is left wheelchair-bound. This leads to a set of reluctant sessions with stoic psychiatrist Dr Feldmann, whose gnomic line of inquiry is a knowing counterpoint to Stephanie's more mercurial tendencies. As her moods swing between defensiveness, rage and self-loathing, Stephanie is forced to face up to a new life, literally playing second fiddle to both her less talented students and her increasingly experimental composer husband. Tom Kempinski's 1980 study of enforced artistic debilitation was a huge hit when it first appeared in 1980. This was possibly because of the play's reported inspiration, iconic cellist Jacqueline du Pre, who, like Stephanie, also had her musical career cut short by MS. This is a connection Kempinski now denies in a pithy programme note for this touri