Coffee-Table Notes

David Martin is sitting outside Leith Theatre to talk about the programme of this year’s Hidden Door, the grassroots festival he co-founded, and which will take up residence for a third time in the theatre they helped revitalise after it lay empty and unused for thirty years. Over the road is the site of the State Cinema, a similarly unused space, which Hidden Door expanded operations into last year prior to it becoming a building site where new residential properties will soon be built. As a metaphor for how things tend to go in Edinburgh, the image speaks for itself. “It’s quite poignant,” says Martin, watching the scene of demolition on a break from his job teaching at Leith School of Art. While this was always going to be the way with the State, its loss means that the expansive programme of theatre and dance that featured in both venues in 2018 alongside the audience-catching array of main-stage gigs can’t happen again. A financial short-fall following last year’s festiva

Out of the Blue is buzzing. It’s a bright Tuesday lunch-time in the former army drill hall turned nouveau arts lab just off Leith Walk in Edinburgh. While the main hall is alive with the chatter of an informal gathering of the city’s various festival organisations, upstairs in the balcony offices and studios, meetings and other day to day business of more grassroots arts organisations are in full swing. In the busy café area, venue manager Rob Hoon is reflecting on Out of the Blue’s twenty-five-year existence, which began as a shop-front gallery space on Blackfriars Street before it gave rise to the Bongo Club in an old bus shelter on New Street. While the Bongo provided a focal point for the city’s thriving underground music scene, the artists’ studios within the building made for a healthy cross-fertilisation of practitioners and forms. This was the case until the developers moved in, and the two wings of the Out of the Blue organisation were forced to relocate in separate p

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars “Men will come with open faces and say anything to get inside your knickers,” says a jealous Ferdinand to the lady in red who just found her voice at the microphone in Zinnie Harris’ reimagining of John Webster’s seventeenth century revenge tragedy. The fact that the woman is the angry little man-let’s sister gives his voice an edge that lays bare a desperate attempt to stamp out her autonomy and a terror of the lust for life she’s embraced. All of Webster’s original plot is pretty much present and correct here, with Kirsty Stuart’s Duchess caught up in a man’s world, where, beyond her damaged siblings, her new beau Antonio has imposter syndrome, while Adam Best’s killer Bosola has serious guilt issues. Harris’ own production for the Lyceum and Citizens theatres gives the play’s tale of a liberated woman being brutalised out of existence an extra contemporary kick. This is done in part through a use of language which undercuts i