Coffee-Table Notes

One of art’s great mysteries is on the way to being solved following the initial finding of a four-year research project focusing on one of Glasgow Museums’ most famous paintings. Lady in a Fur Wrap is renowned as one of the finest portraits to be produced in Europe during the late 16 th century, but remains unsigned. Up until now the painting of a young woman gazing at the viewer while wrapped in a fur robe, which has hung in Pollok House in Glasgow since 1967, has been attributed to Spanish Renaissance master, El Greco (1514-1561). After more than 100 years of debate, however, historians and scientists have applied state-of-art techniques to declare the painting to be the work of another Spanish artist, Alonso Sánchez Coello (1531-1588). This conclusion is the result of extensive scientific detective work carried out by experts at the Museo del Prado, Madrid, and later at the University of Glasgow in partnership with Glasgow Museums. Investigations began while the painting was

When Christmas Day was finally made a public holiday in Scotland in 1958, it opened the floodgates for what some might argue are the commercial excesses of today. As two very different stage versions of Charles Dickens’ celebrated novella, A Christmas Carol, prepare to open in Edinburgh and Pitlochry, however, whatever else might be going on in the world, the possibilities of personal transformation which Dickens’ story lays bare are there for the taking, on stage at least. In Edinburgh, for his new adaptation staged at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Tony Cownie has even gone as far as relocating A Christmas Carol to Scotland’s capital, where Greyfriars Bobby makes a guest appearance. At Pitlochry Festival Theatre, meanwhile, Isobel McArthur’s new version puts music at the show’s centre, with the story being told by a group of carol singers who frame the action. “I’m always moved by buskers on the street,” says McArthur, “especially at this time of year, when there’s such an amazin

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Meeting your granny for the first time in years can be full of surprises. So it goes for the young man in Umar Butt’s play whose life working in the family corner shop on Sauchiehall Street is leavened both by the banter with his fly Jamaican customer Alex and his excursions into amateur dramatic musicals. With his family away, it is left to him to granny-sit Eliza, who has flown in for what turns out to be a night of surprises and revelations of life and death adventures that took her to the place she learnt to call home. Umar Butt plays a version of himself in his beautifully realised true story. From his own doorstep, it travels the world in its evocation of the traumas of migration following the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Here, the multiple forms of identity that resulted for a young girl who crossed personal and global borders makes her a liberated symbol of a world without walls. At the heart of this is the love stor