Coffee-Table Notes

Ukrainian Cultural Centre, Manchester Five stars When a hip-swivelling, pelvis-thrusting, heart-breaking Elvis Presley entered the building, the recording studio and the conscience of every teenage rebel in the world to become the bone fide king of rock and roll, its seismic effect spanned several generations. As choreographer, director and performer Claire Cunningham shows in her astonishing new creation, it’s easy to be all shook up by Elvis’ youthful pre-Vegas image on TV, even when you might be trapped in your own sense of quietly rebellious self. This becomes the starting point for the ninety poignantly transcendent minutes of Cunningham’s co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland and Manchester International Festival, where it premieres this week prior to autumn dates in Glasgow. Throughout, Cunningham and her three cohorts explore what it means to take a leap, strike a pose and learn to love the spotlight for who they are, even as the image they project

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow until January 12 2020 Five stars “My photography is me,” the artist formerly known as Linda Eastman once said about her work. This shines through this remarkable era-defining exhibition, put together with love by her husband Paul and two daughters Stella and Mary two decades after McCartney’s death. Like Yoko Ono, McCartney is too often disgracefully derided as being some kind of Beatles hanger-on. The expansive range of both public and private moments gathered here together for the first time, however, reveal a major artist in her own right.   There is an easy intimacy to everything McCartney shot, from her swinging sixties portraits of the rock and roll jet-set at play, to more personal images of her family in the Scottish countryside on their Campbeltown farm. Both are here, with early assignments including a gnomic Neil Young and a yawning Jimi Hendrix. A smiling fab four are captured in their psychedelic pomp at the Sgt Pepp

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two) until October 27 Four stars Everything connects in this major overview of the ultimate DIY artform, which brings together more than 180 works dating as far back as the sixteenth century. Back then, anatomical woodcuts with flaps to reveal bodily interiors were used as educational novelties, even as they predated the sort of paper dolls appropriated by the ultimate dressing-up-box mistress of reinvention Cindy Sherman for her short film, Doll Clothes (1975). Sherman was one of a wave of women artists using collage in a way that opened the door for the feminist photo-montages of Linder or Penny Slinger. Along the way, an array of Dadaists, cubists, futurists and punk provocateurs mix and match words and pictures to disrupt, satirise and explode old ideas out of existence. Much of this is explicitly oppositionist, with John Hartfield’s anti-Nazi photomontages predating the likes of Peter Kennard’s Haywain with Cruise Missile

National Theatre, London Four stars “I pity anyone without their own adjective” declaims the golf-club owning, gun-running, newspaper owning uber-capitalist and ego-stroking narcissist David Hare’s version of Ibsen’s self-aggrandising runaway boy becomes in Jonathan Kent’s production. A collaboration between the National Theatre of Great Britain and Edinburgh International Festival, where it arrives next month, Hare and Kent’s reimagining is a mind-expanding dream of a show, in which the doors and stairways of Richard Hudson’s set appear from thin air like a surrealist painting. James McArdle’s Peter, meanwhile, is an initially wide-eyed patter merchant returning to Dunoon from the war with stories as wide as the picture house screens from which he stole them. Over the next three and a half hours, Peter moves mountains in his gradual getting of wisdom. At first he’s an unreconstructed roaring boy with ideas above his station, only to end the play a haunted bar-room philosop

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars  When Judge Danforth talks about getting to the bottom of the swamp in the third act courtroom scene of Arthur Miller’s McCarthy era masterpiece, it’s hard not to pick up on the accidental contemporary resonance of such populist rhetoric. This is one of many things that stand out in Elizabeth Newman’s production, which sees Salem inhabited by the spirit of Pitlochry itself, embodied here by designer Adrian Rees’ sturdy reproduction of the shoogly suspension bridge that crosses the River Tummel. Like any small town after dark from Pitlochry to Twin Peaks, Salem holds its secrets. Here, it comes in the shape of a girl gang raving it up in the woods as any bored teenagers might. The hysteria that results from such hormonally charged wig-outs to what’s perceived to be the Devil’s music - personified here by freeform bursts of electric guitar and drums – has consequences beyond the mere letting off of adolescent steam. Much of this is d