Coffee-Table Notes

Imagine a ceilidh that could wake the dead. That’s exactly what Gaelic-language-based theatre company Theatre Gu Leor have done in Ceilidh, a new play by Catriona Lexy Campbell and Mairi Sine Chaimbeul, which the company take out on an extensive cross-country tour from this week as its biggest work to date. Despite the implications of the show’s premise, the dead are only stirred from their celestial slumber to reclaim a once spontaneous social gathering which has been hi-jacked by big business types. Such shameless profiteers are intent on shoving out the local villagers on Harris to make way for luxury bothies and an exclusive golf course to entertain the high-end tourist trade. Only flame-haired 17 th century poet Mairi Ruadh, it seems, can stop such cynical efforts to co-opt culture as a means of gentrification and social cleansing. “In the Gaelic landscape she’s pretty much an icon with legendary status,” says Ceilidh’s director Muireann Kelly of Ruadh Mairi Ruadh, or,

Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh Five stars Pull back the gold curtain and you’re in another world for what might be a never-ending screening of Spite Your Face, Rachel Maclean’s troublingly incisive thirty-seven-minute film-based fantasia, which comes home to Talbot Rice after first being seen in Venice last year. Drawn from The Adventures of Pinocchio, the Italian folk-tale charting the adventures of the little puppet-boy whose nose grows every time he tells a lie, Maclean’s dark reimagining is as shockingly un-Disney in its depiction of greed-induced brutality as the moment when Bambi’s mum got shot. Maclean focuses on the rise and fall of Pic, a shell-suited urchin who buys his way into a blinged-up wonderland of glam-tastic delights, only to discover his celebrity lifestyle is on credit, and has been built on the flakiest of falsehoods. All of Maclean’s pop-cultural tropes are intact, from its candy-coloured kids’ TV animated back-drops, to its ugly excursions into S

Last week’s unprecedented snowmaggedon may have caused Edinburgh to resemble a ghost town in what was pretty much a locked-down country, with shops and schools closing early, and public transport at a minimum. Anyone frequenting Meadowbank retail park, however, will be aware that at least one institution remained open for business. That was the local bingo hall, whose regular patrons can be found day and night taking a breather in-between games, usually shrouded in a fug of cigarette smoke. The image of such a gaggle of frozen gamers is a pointer as well to some of the thinking behind Bingo!, a new musical comedy which sees Grid Iron and Stellar Quines theatre companies team up to present what promises to be a riot of extremes penned by Johnny McKnight and Anita Vettesse, This is clear from early rehearsals in a church hall on the fringes of Edinburgh’s New Town, where director Jemima Levick and composer Alan Penman oversee the ensuing mayhem of what happens when a group of women

Jo Beddoe  -  Theatre and arts producer Born August 7 1944; died February 20 2018 Without Jo Beddoe, who has died aged 73 following a long battle with cancer, there are several now thriving artistic institutions that would probably be closed. Beddoe’s straight-talking, no-nonsense approach to getting things done and tenacious and visionary way of managing organisations which others might have ran a mile from has left its mark, both on the organisations she helped transform, and on everyone she worked with. This was the case whether navigating 7:84 Scotland through troubled waters, establishing the Centre for Contemporary Arts as a major force, or else bringing Liverpool’s Playhouse and the Everyman theatres back to life. In an expansive and nomadic career, Beddoe was a pioneer of female-led artistic management. Beyond high profile ventures on the West End and Broadway, she was steeped in a grassroots sensibility that those she worked with found inspirational. This was no doub

Sam Knee was thinking about his two young daughters when he decided to put together the book that became Untypical Girls. Subtitled Styles and Sounds of the Transatlantic Indie Revolution, Knee’s compendium of images combines coffee-table gloss and a DIY sensibility to create a vital document charting the irresistible rise of female-centred bands from punk to riot grrrl. Inbetween, umpteen shades of post-punk, indie, no wave, hardcore, shoegaze and grunge show off an emancipated underground of women seizing the means of production. As they do so, they remain charity-shop groovy enough to set a street-smart example for future generations.   “My daughters are too young yet to be into music,” says Knee. “One’s nine, and the other’s still a toddler, but I wanted something for them to have when they’re a little bit older that says they don’t have to be synthetic, but that they can dress like this if they want to. They’re not ready for that yet, but I thought it would be nice to have a

Stephen Adly Guirgis was in a bar when one of the seeds for his play, The Motherfucker with the Hat, first started to take hold. The New York born playwright, director, actor and screen-writer was out with a group of male friends, and they got talking, as men do, about women who weren’t their wives or partners, but who they’d been intimate with, or as intimate as you can get without touching. “I was noticing people being unfaithful in their relationships pretty often,” Guirgis says about the roots of his 2011 Broadway hit on the eve of its revival at the Tron Theatre in co-production with the Cardiff-based Sherman Theatre. “One guy said that he had all these things going on with other women, but that it was okay, because they didn’t have sex or touch, they just got naked and masturbated. And everyone was going, yeah, yeah, not touching, like it was fine. I said, wait a minute, if your girlfriend went home with a guy, took her clothes off, and didn’t have sex, but they both mastur

Eddie Amoo Singer, song-writer with The Real Thing Born May 4 1944; died February 23 2018 By rights, Eddie Amoo, who has died suddenly in Australia aged 73, should have had as high a profile as a singer and song-writer of socially conscious soul as his heroes Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes and Marvin Gaye. If Amoo had come from frontline Harlem or Watts, both crucibles of the 1960s civil rights movement, it might have happened. Coming from the rough-house streets of Liverpool 8, or Toxteth as the city’s multi-racial inner-city neighbourhood built on the back of slavery became better known following the summer riots of 1981, things worked out differently. This was despite Amoo and The Real Thing, the band formed by Amoo’s younger brother Chris, writing Children of the Ghetto, the centre-piece of the twelve-minute Liverpool 8 Medley. This three-part suite formed the climax of the band’s 1977 album, 4 from 8, and attempted to give voice to some of the conflicting tensions that