Coffee-Table Notes

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars A storm is brewing from the off in Oliver Emanuel’s searing new play, which reunites a mother and daughter for one last showdown before they’re blown apart forever. Mag is holed up in an isolated wooden shack in the Canadian outback, and has been hibernating there for some time, giving gunned-down wildlife a kind of immortality as a taxidermist. Hence the dead grizzly bear on her kitchen table. Mags’ daughter Beth has just blown in like she’s escaped from a maximum security zoo, full of fire and thunder for some perceived hand-me-down sins neither can truly escape from. At first Mag is a cowering mouse under siege from Beth’s no-holds-barred assault. By the end, the animal mentality of both women both blazes into self-destructive life, as the law of the jungle decrees the survival of the fittest. Emanuel’s writing is seriously off the leash here in a furious seventy-five minutes, as it attempts to dissect the old nature versus nurtu

Paisley Arts Centre Four stars The snow is falling at the start of Frances Poet’s new play, which addresses the ongoing industrial scandal of asbestos poisoning in the workplace. The disease caused the deaths of thousands due to their failure of big businesses to provide adequate on-site protection from a deadly substance which moved into the home by way of dirty overalls, also killing the women who washed them. The play focuses on Jack, a would-be comedian who survived the workers’ occupation of the Glasgow shipyards, only to be sentenced, as he puts it, to another decade exposed to asbestos. His wife Beanie gave up here ambitions to wash up after Jack, only for all her dreams to be left hung out to dry by her labours. Their daughter, Lucy, meanwhile, has dirty laundry of her own to deal with, as well her boss in the fibre optics company she works for. Through these four criss-crossing lives is woven a thread of everyday tragedy that spans the generations in its sad leg

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, November 15 th -May 30th, 2020 Hal Fischer didn’t realise he was making history when he took the pictures that appear in Gay Semiotics and Other Works, which opens at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow next month. He was too busy living through it. As a gay man in his twenties, who breezed into a post-hippy but still sexually liberated San Francisco in 1975 to study photography, he embraced the scene he landed in with relish. This comes across in the twenty-four photographs that make up Gay Semiotics, which, on one level, capture an array of cock-sure young men who look like they’ve stepped straight from the pages of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City stories then being serialised in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. Taking things further, as the title of the series hints at, each image is accompanied by a text that explains its pictorial iconography with deadpan pseudo-seriousness. The effect is of an in-crowd pastiche of some soci