Coffee-Table Notes

Things seem to come in threes for Charlotte Prodger, whose new film, SaF05, is currently representing Scotland at this year’s Venice Biennale. This was the case even before the Glasgow-based artist’s film became the final part of an accidental trilogy that began in 2015 with Stoneymollan Trail, followed a year later by BRIDGIT. The first film had come about after Prodger won the Margaret Tait Award, and saw her set about making her first single channel film following more multi-faceted works using a mixture of forms. The second, even more personal work, was shot solely on Prodger’s mobile phone. BRIDGIT went on to win her the 2018 Turner Prize, although by the time she did so, Prodger was already in the thick of putting together SaF05. Commissioned for Scotland + Venice by curator Linsey Young and Alexia Holt of Argyll-based artists residential centre, Cove Park, where Prodger first visited as a young artist, SaF05 is filmed using various formats, from her mobile phone to a dr

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars Something is stirring in Dr Lazarus' lab in this hi-tech teenage love story for a digitally enhanced social media age that helps make Take Me Somewhere’s festival of live art and performance a family affair. The far from good doctor has learnt how to play god by extending life through means of a bionic heart transplanted into guinea-pigs like Kid_X, the body-popping, flex-tastic wonder-teen she controls with the over-bearing hand of a scientific genius who’s gone rogue. Kid_X, however, has other plans, as he stumbles on the acrobat excursions of social media starlet and selfie queen Gabriella, whose dances across the rooftops captures Kid_X’s mechanical heart. What happens next is a purely physical affair in this pumping fusion of sound, vision and bodies in motion, all set to a dancehall dub reggae score created by Mungo’s HiFi sound system alongside rising soul diva Eva Lazarus. At the flesh and blood centre of this multi-media collabora

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars The stage-spanning image of an Elizabeth Yule Pitlochry bus parked outside Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s front door speaks volumes about the new broom approach of PFT’s incoming artistic director Elizabeth Newman at the start of her inaugural production. Shopping local, it seems to suggest, is just as important as the tourist trade which traditionally provides the most picturesque emporium in Scotland with much of its bread and butter. In this sense, Newman and co-director Ben Occhipinti’s suitably frothy revival of Michael Gyngell and Mark Haddigan’s stage version of this classic piece of 1960s big-screen pop bubblegum is making a statement of sorts. As too are the show’s all-singing, all-dancing quartet of likely lad mechanics led by David Rankine’s toothsome himbo Don, who are looking to up sticks from small town Perthshire and see the world. This they do, not just by wielding a miniature bus around the auditorium as one might lead a C