Coffee-Table Notes

# 34 Cathie Boyd / Cryptic Cathie Boyd’s international artistic ambitions have continued to expand since founding Theatre Cryptic in Glasgow in 1994 with a mission to ravish the senses. Now known as Cryptic, the company these days focuses on Sonica, a bi-annual festival of sonic arts and year-round global touring programme where sound, vision and big-time sensuality abound. # 52 Rabiya Choudhry With her first solo exhibition, COCO!NUTS! at Transmission in Glasgow, Choudhry unleashed a body of work that explores the contradictions of her Scots-Pakistani heritage with wit, confessional candour and colourful largesse in paintings that burst forth with a vivid cartoon-style mix of the personal and the political. (NC) # 67   Victoria Crowe A new painting of Prince Charles was a major draw at Victoria Crowe: Beyond Likeness, a major retrospective of the veteran portrait painter at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Sitting alongside studies of the likes of R.D. Lain

Without Aneurin Bevan and Jennie Lee, life in Britain during the post Second World War years would have been a lot different. This is something playwright Meredydd Barker realised when he was asked by the Neath, West Glamorgan-based Theatr Na Nog company’s artistic director Geinor Styles to write a play about the Welsh firebrand Labour minister and the Lochgelly-born miner’s daughter who was elected into Westminster as the UK parliament’s then youngest sitting MP. Between them, Bevan and Lee changed the landscape of Britain into a seemingly more benevolent and enlightened society than what existed before. As the youngest member of Prime Minister Clement Atlee’s cabinet following the 1945 Labour landslide, Bevan was appointed Minister of Health, and was instrumental in the setting up of the National Health Service, set up to provide free medical care for all.     Almost twenty years later, Lee’s brief as Minister for the Arts in Harold Wilson’s Labour government of 1964 saw her

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three Stars A tale of two cities is at the heart of Peter Arnott’s Edinburgh-set Victorian gothic, revived here by Mark Thomson in his production performed by the RCS’s final year BA Acting students. Like Twin Peaks scripted by Robert Louis Stevenson, Arnott recognises Auld Reekie as a Jekyll and Hyde city, with the Old Town’s lower depths shielding a dark underbelly from those occupying its seemingly respectable facade. It is the seamier side that appeals to Gilbert, who farms his servant mistress Agnes out to a place of ill repute to protect his reputation while seeking cheap thrills wherever he can. Cloon is a more liberal-minded fetishist, taking pictures of working women living in the gutter and falling for his own servant Hannah, who has secrets of her own. From this erupts a plague of false piety and hypocrisy in the face of class division, sexual abuse and self-destructive pleasure-seeking. Parallels with modern day Edinburgh an