Coffee-Table Notes

Shaun Tan didn’t have to look far from home when he was creating The Arrival, his wordless graphic novel about to be staged by Glasgow-based Solar Bear theatre company. The Australian artist, writer and filmmaker’s story about a man forced to leave his home to find work in an imaginary country in order to support his family is a tale that could apply to the hardships of thousands of migrant workers across several centuries. While such scenarios are particularly pertinent in the current political climate, and although The Arrival is in no way auto-biographical, Tan’s story has a more personal root. “My father was from Malaysia, and came to Australia in 1960,” he says. “Perth where we lived was pretty backwards then. It wasn’t necessarily racist exactly, but although there was a strong aspect of other cultures, the community there was pretty British. I started off with questions about what we call home, and I arrived at lots more questions about history, which I found pretty boring

Chahine Yavroyan – Lighting Designer, musician, performer, artist Born February 17 1950; died September 3 2018 Chahine Yavroyan, who has died aged 68 following a short battle with cancer, helped revolutionise what a lighting designer could achieve onstage, both for text-based work and the more playful abstractions that the dance world opened up. Beyond a stream of collaborations with world class artists as a lighting designer, Yavroyan was a polymath and renaissance man. As a musician, sound designer and performer with People Show, the pioneering live art troupe he joined at the end of the 1970s, he was an artist in every way. As everyone who ever came into contact with Yavroyan observed, he was the epitome of cool. This wasn’t just about his immaculate approach to dress, which saw him perennially clad in a white shirt and waistcoat combination alongside an array of hats that was the everyday attire of the Egyptian men about town Yavroyan grew up beside in Cairo. It was a

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It looks like the cast of Hair have fallen in with a bad crowd and ended up gate-crashing an acid-fuelled orgy in a crumbling Ladbroke Grove pile circa 1969 at the start of Wils Wilson’s hippy-dippy take on what is arguably Shakespeare’s most gender-bending rom-com. Serenaded back to life by a passing rock star played by composer Meilyr Jones, the high-as-kites in-crowd discover a dressing-up box and a dog-eared copy of the bard’s yarn to entertain themselves lest they’re dragged back into the real world. Such is the audacious backdrop for Wilson’s tripped-out gender-fluid production, which runs riot on designer Ana Ines Jabares-Pita’s psychedelic play-pen of sexual revolution, soundtracked by Jones’ mix of Carnaby Street baroque and hippy trail exotica. Joanne Thomson’s Sebastian and Jade Ogugua’s Viola are anything but washed up as they fall in with assorted movers and shakers led by Colette Dalal Tchantcho’s flamboyant Orsino. Ch