Coffee-Table Notes

Ardler Community Centre, Dundee Four stars The BBC Scotland clock is ticking, the announcer is primed and the old-school microphones are switched very much on for the opening of Dundee Rep’s annual community tour. This year, in a spirit of familiarity as well as a neat twist on nostalgia, the ensemble company under the guidance of director Irene Macdougall renders Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic reimagining of John Buchan’s classic ripping yarn as a 1930s live radio play. So, while Joe Landry’s ingeniously annotated version of the story focuses on the potentially world-changing fallout of upper-crust hero Richard Hannay’s flight from his London des-res after a female spy is murdered in his bedroom, such a novelty opens out a multitude of narrative layers. The result in Macdougall’s meticulously observed production is what Hannay’s accidental nemesis turned love interest and saviour Pamela Stewart calls a “penny dreadful spy story” is a pukka romp that whisks the audience along

GOMA, Glasgow until October 8 th Three stars You can’t escape the elephant in the room in this parallel universe group show programmed by incumbent Glasgow International director Richard Parry, who has beamed down nine artists for a speculative-fiction inspired exploration of possible futures in a messed-up world. The elephant in question is captured in Telepath (2018), a cinema-scope sized close-up by John Russell set against a backdrop of a re-made and re-modelled version of the gallery interior, as if the beast had been captured in the wild and put on show a la King Kong. Frozen in monumental hi-res, the image could be a trophy of an endangered species poached from Ray Bradbury’s short story, A Sound of Thunder by way of The Veldt. Elsewhere, Mai-Thu Perret’s Les Gurrillerres XIII (2018) imagines a feminist miltia in the desert by way of a female mannequin in repose, reading on a rug with her machine gun nestled beside her. E Jane’s The Avatar (2015) tries on internet ide

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars “Be warned,” says the minister for trade and industry to the ship-workers whose livelihood is about to be capsized in Sting’s epic musical. “Don’t make the same mistake as the miners.” The true blue twin-set and hectoring tone the minister adopts are a giveaway in terms of where the attempted destruction of a local community stems from after government-backed management declares the yard to be unsustainable. The projected storm clouds that have been gathering behind the expanse of steel-girdered walkways that make up the remarkable multi-layered set by 59 Productions look like similar portents of doom in the latest piece of musical theatre to be a gloriously rabble-rousing antidote to hard times. First seen on Broadway in 2014, Sting’s song-cycle of blue-collar romance, ambition and defiance is given a new book by director Lorne Campbell, who weaves its cross-generational strands into a cohesive soap opera full of dramatic heart. At the

I t’s not every day there’s a queue outside Leith Dockers Club, On a crisp December afternoon last year, however, there’s a whiff of excitement among the gathered throng. Inside, the main bar is awash with afternoon drinkers indifferent to what’s going on elsewhere in terms of the celebrity in the house, preferring to play dominoes instead. The main function room, however, is packed out, with every row of seats filled by people eager to see a performance by a very special guest. That guest is Sting, the artist formerly known as Gordon Sumner, but whose original name has been all but forgotten now after more than forty years as a high profile musician still probably best remembered for his stint fronting The Police. Following the band’s days of chart-bound global success playing jaunty punky-reggae hits such as Roxanne, Message in a Bottle and Don’t Stand So Close to Me, Sting’s early solo back catalogue saw him experiment with glossy 1980s jazz, an album of Kurt Weill songs and la