Coffee-Table Notes

Light on the Shore @ Leith Theatre Five stars “No,” says Anna Meredith pointing at her keyboard console as she quickly stymies an impromptu chorus of Happy Birthday from a section of the audience after making a dedication to a twelve-year-old called Isaac. “This tune.” Meredith’s friendly but firm admonishment sums up an irrepressible effervescence that saw her   2016 album, Varmints, scoop that year’s Scottish Album of the Year. Meredith has already graced the magnificent Leith Theatre stage as part of the 2017 grassroots-based Hidden Door Festival. This made her a logical choice for Edinburgh International Festival’s contemporary music season, Light on the Shore, which opened at the same venue last week with headline sets by King Creosote and Django Django. With Meredith h aving scored EIF’s epic opening event, Five Telegrams, hearing Varmints played in full with her four-piece band accompanied by t he full orchestra of the Southbank Sinfonia is equally as thrilling. Mere

Things would have been a whole lot different without The People Show. As the UK’s oldest live art company, the original absurdist troupe are arguably the epitome of the original idea of the Fringe. Having come together to perform in the basement of London underground hangout Better Books in 1966 with People Show 1, over the next half century, and with alumni including film-maker Mike Figgis and poet and counter-cultural guru, the late Jeff Nuttall, the company have paved the way for a million others created in a similar image. Fusing multi-media Happenings and experimental theatre, the company’s shape-shifting approach has seen them move with the times while retaining an old-school arts lab approach. While veteran members Mark Long, George Khan and Chahine Yavroyan remain at the company’s artistic core, this latest show – People Show 130 if you’re counting – is a two-hander performed by Gareth Brierley and Fiona Creese that takes on the fake news age. With a man and a woman confined

CanadaHub @ King’s Hall Four stars A woman steps on the stage looking like a heroine on the run from a film noir. On the screens behind her she’s just been revealed in an actual movie, walking in the park after dark. Now, in the flesh, the scene is so familiar you think you know what’s coming next. As it turns out, the woman, followed around with two others filming her for a live video feed, makes the equivalent of a jump cut and a quick-fire costume change, and we’re onto the next thing. Over the next hour in Chase Scenes , the trio, led by the show’s creator Ming Hon, take turns to act out sixty bite-size scenarios that move between madcap and mayhem. Hon, Alexandra Elliot and Hilary Anne Crist simulate running upstairs, downstairs, up on the roof and late for the train, all the while being chased by a series of nightmares that simply won’t let up. It’s an exhausting (for them) and at times cartoon-like subversion of male gaze clichés that drag the audience along for the

CanadaHub @ King’s Hall Four stars The fallout of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum has yet to fully make its mark. This is evident from this Scots-Quebecois collaboration between the National Theatre of Scotland and two Montreal-based companies, Theatre Pap and Productions Hotel-Motel. Four years in the making, and with Scottish writers Davey Anderson and Linda McLean working with Québécois writer Philippe Ducros and director Patrice Dubois, the play looks both to 2014 and to the similarly emotive Québécois vote of 1995 as its starting points. The result is an extended meditation on the personal and the political, and how one impacts on the other. The scene is a domestic one, where powerful matriarch Isabelle is overseeing a gathering of her extended family, made up of her daughters and the migrant boyfriend of one, her adopted son and lifelong friends both dependent and estranged. What follows in Dubois’ wide-open production of a play that never loses sight of its o