Coffee-Table Notes

When Cora Bissett approached three very different writers with the idea of taking a look at how technology might affect day to day lives, as with the best near-future yarns, she couldn’t have predicted the outcome. As it is, the trilogy of brave new works gathered together under the umbrella heading of Interference, and performed in Bissett’s National Theatre of Scotland production in a once futuristic-looking Glasgow office block, have plugged into worlds which might not be that far away from reality. Where Hannah Khalil’s play, Metaverse, finds a woman waiting to do homework with her daughter by way of virtual reality, Darklands, by Morna Pearson, focuses on a young couple attempting to have a child in a world divided by an un-named catastrophe. Finally, Vlad Butucea’s play, Glowstick, is set in a care home overseen by androids. Despite their futuristic trappings, all three plays in Interference come from places close to home. “Technology can be great,” says Khalil, wh

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars When Arthur met Jane, it was love at first calculatedly clumsy wine spillage. What happens next in Matthew Seager’s heartfelt two-hander depends on who is doing the remembering. Or rather, who is capable of remembering, as love’s first excited flush gradually turns to plague brought on by the onset of Arthur’s all-encroaching Alzheimer’s disease, which makes the couple’s once blissful domestic life so agonising. The only thing that can get them through, it seems, is the Frank Sinatra song that accidentally became the soundtrack of their lives. With Seager himself playing Arthur and Angela Hardie as Jane, Paul Brotherston’s production for the Leeds-based Off the Middle company starts chattily enough, with the pair draping themselves across fancy chairs like a rat pack amour in waiting. As the pair flit between past, present and inevitable futures, however, each bar-room anecdote becomes increasingly less rose-tinted. There is something odd

1979 was a seismic year, both musically and politically. Punk’s first burst three years before had been a youthquake waiting to happen. The fatal overdose of former Sex Pistol Sid Vicious in February ’79, however, put a symbolic full-stop on the unruly non-movement’s nihilistic intent.   For a generation set adrift against a landscape of industrial unrest, large-scale unemployment, three-day weeks and power cuts, it was now time to create rather than just destroy. The strikes and strife of the so-called winter of discontent that saw in the year were accompanied by freezing weather conditions that gave things an even more dystopian air. The murder of Airey Neave in an IRA bomb blast, and the death of Australian teacher Blair Peach after being ‘struck unlawfully’ by a member of the Metropolitan Police Force’s Special Patrol Group while at an Anti-Nazi League demonstration against the National Front, compounded an over-riding feeling of dread. The Conservative Party’s landslide