Coffee-Table Notes

The first time Philip Differ met Jim McLean, the man behind football-based comedy sketch show Only an Excuse remembers the legendary former manager of Dundee United as being angry. “Not at me,” Differ hastens to add, though his description of McLean is one familiar to many football fans, as the passions and tensions of the beautiful game sometimes got the better of their hero. Despite McLean’s grim-faced image, it was a second meeting that lingered with Differ more. This followed an appearance on Offside, the comic football chat show presented by Tam Cowan which Differ co-produced. “He was a completely different person,” Differ remembers. “We were in the green room after the show, and he was totally relaxed and open. We had a conversation about theatre, and through that I realised there was much more depth to the guy than I thought.” The result of this is Smile, Differ’s brand new play about McLean for Dundee Rep ensemble, which opens on home turf this month. As Differ’s f

It’s hard to keep up with Jah Wobble, the artist formerly known as John Wardle, who revolutionised bass playing on the first two albums by Public Image Limited. Since then, apart from a stint working on London Underground in the mid-1980s, Wobble pretty much hasn’t stopped, releasing a phenomenally prolific array of albums that take in a dazzlingly diverse set of styles. On the back of Wobble’s current tour with the latest edition of his Invaders from the Heart ensemble, who play dates in Edinburgh and Glasgow this weekend, the now 61-year-old east Londoner is about to release two very different albums. The first, Acid Punk Dub Apocalypse, is a collaboration with Killing Joke bassist turned producer, Youth. The second, Ocean Blue Waves, was recorded with the Invaders from the Heart. Wobble has also just released the tellingly named single, A Very British Coup, with a post-punk supergroup featuring his former comrades in PiL, guitarist Keith Levene and drummer Richard Dudanski,

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Four stars Hamlet holds a gun to her own head from the start in Peter Collins’ austere and icily atmospheric reimagining of Shakespeare’s gloomiest and arguably most existential tragedy. Performed by second year BA Acting students in a production that gives a knowing nod to the contemporary wave of Scandic and Nordic noir, Neila Stephens’ troubled Dane is an angry princess in mourning. In a sustained and startlingly mature turn, Stephens lets loose as a black-clad misanthrope who’s used to being the centre of attention, but who has to watch her merry widow mother Gertrude steal her thunder while her father’s grave is barely cold. The mood-swings that follow see Hamlet go from melancholy to manic and back again as she becomes the original rebel without a cause, with the weight of the world on her shoulders and high anxiety to the max. Of the boys she hangs out with, while Oat Jenner’s Horatio remains devoted, Rosencrantz and Guildenste