Coffee-Table Notes

Time was when anyone walking through the Clyde Tunnel was a potentially dangerous journey. Anyone who ever used the Glasgow walk-way as a means of getting between the north and south sides of the city or vice versa late at night in the 1980s and lived to tell the tale will shudder at the memory of such fool-hardy and possibly alcohol-fuelled behaviour. These days, however, things are different in what is now a brighter, cleaner and infinitely less scary promenade along the 762 metre concrete underpass which opened alongside the more widely used road tunnel in 1963. This should be made apparent when Glasgow-based international arts producers Cryptic unveil Portal, an audio-visual walk through the tunnel that forms one of a trio of events as part of the company’s latest events under the Sonica banner. Normally a bi-annual festival of audio-visual art, Portal and its accompanying spectacles of sound and vision across the city effectively amounts to a Sonica summer special. This has l

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh Three stars Judging by the level of activity at Assembly Roxy just now, one could be forgiven for presuming Edinburgh Festival Fringe season had come even earlier than usual. In actual fact the seventeen shows crammed in across three spaces in the Venue over the next few days make up the second Formation festival. Founded by the Edinburgh-based Annexe Repertory Theatre earlier this year, Formation is designed to provide a platform for some of the city’s younger theatre companies. It also fills the void left by the demise of Discover 21, the bijou basement space formerly housed in St Margaret’s House. While much of the programme focuses on new work, including spoken-word and script-in-hand scratch performances, this time out Formation is also looking at the edgier end of the classical canon. In this way, Jean Genet’s three-handed look at power, class and below-stairs frustration lends itself naturally to such intimate productions as the one director Ko

Tom Stoppard hadn’t planned to write Travesties, his audacious 1974 dramatic musing on art and revolution that put novelist James Joyce, Dadaist Tristan Tzara and Russian iconoclast V.I. Lenin in the same room in 1917 Zurich. As Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s revival of the play runs on apace as the wild card of the Perthshire-based theatre’s summer season of five shows after opening last week, more than forty years on it is clear that Travesties hasn’t lost its multi-faceted mojo. The roots of the play stem partly from Stoppard’s friendship with actor John Wood, and a promise to write him a new play, and partly from reading a biography of Joyce. “I’d written my play Jumpers for the National Theatre a couple of years before, but John was working for the RSC, so I said to him, never mind, I’ll write you another play,” says Stoppard, who turned a stately 81-years-old this week. “I was reading Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce, and when I came across the fact that Joyce, Tzara