Coffee-Table Notes

When Cora Bissett’s piece of autobiographical gig theatre, What Girls Are Made Of, opens its international tour at Tramway in Glasgow tonight, it follows a Herald Angel winning smash hit success as part of the Traverse Theatre’s 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme. Bissett’s inspirational tale of how she went from being a small town girl from Fife to signing to a major record label with her band, Darlingheart, is a joyous rites of passage that travels across Scotland before visiting Northern Ireland, Brazil and the USA. Co-produced by the Traverse and directed by the new writing theatre’s then artistic director Orla O’Loughlin, What Girls Are Made Of is somewhat fittingly presented in association with Scotland’s premiere gig promoters, Regular Music. Once Bissett had the initial idea for the show, however, she turned to Gillian Garrity and Margaret-Anne O’Donnell, who she had worked with on her production of Glasgow Girls, and who had now formalised their working relationship

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars Don’t be fooled by the implied panoramas in the title of David Mamet’s 1983 play, revived by director Sam Yates for this recast touring version following its West End success. Like everything else in Mamet’s brutal dissection of everyday capitalism at its most hysteria-driven, the wide-open idyll the phrase conjures up is a con designed to lure in the gullible, for whom such aspirations are a lifestyle choice. By rights, Mamet’s portrait of toxic masculinity among the property-selling classes should be as old hat as the casual racism, big suits and even bigger talk sported by Mark Benton’s over the hill Shelley Levene and Nigel Harman’s relentless hustler Ricky Roma. Tethered to a fiercely competitive office environment and without a woman in sight or even referred to, they are hyped-up, testosterone-driven, status-chasing sharks who would trample each other into the crumbling foundations of everything they stand for to get ahead. Such h

Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh until May 4 Four stars Whatever state we’re in, the international language of art continues to break down international walls. This of-the-moment group show brings together twelve artists to map out a world of possibilities that go beyond delusions of empire to chart the means of production in motion as natural resources are colonised to keep the economy afloat. Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s Monument of Sugar (2007) is a striking sleight of hand which places blocks of sugar beneath a 67-minute film charting a journey that subverted trade barriers. Two other pieces by the duo, Monument to Another Man’s Fatherland (2008-2009) and Episode of the Sea (2014) focus respectively on Turkish migrants hoping to move to Germany and the Urk fishing community in the Netherlands. Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor’s Le monde et les choses (2014) is a map of commodities instead of countries, hung opposite Amelia Pica’s Joy in Paperwork (2016), 40