Coffee-Table Notes

Scottish Youth Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Ever been stung by a Jaggy Nettle? No? Then it’s probably time for part time punks of all ages to put on their leather jackets, spike up their hair and moonstomp their way down to see Martin Travers’ sharp as a safety pin new play for the Citizens Theatre’s newly formed WAC Ensemble. The WAC stands for We Are Citizens, and over the seventy minutes or so of Guy Hollands’ raucous production, the one-chord wonders who make up Scotland’s greatest contenders prove themselves more than worthy of such a proclamation. Its 1978, and like everyone their age, The Jaggy Nettles are making a racket. There’s Robin ‘Bonnie Ann’ Clyde on guitar, Mark ‘Kunti’ Conti on bass, Timothy ‘Timpani’ Abercrombie The Third on drums, plus Tammy ‘Baby’ Walker and manager Lori Logan on assorted shouting. Oh, and there’s wannabe superstar Kathleen ‘P.K.’ Kelly on lead vocals. The band’s fanzine freebie flexi-disc might have just been played by John Peel, but acri

Michael Begg went back to his punk roots when he started recruiting for Black Glass Ensemble, the East Lothian based composer’s fusion of data-sourced electronic experimentalism and contemporary classical music, which makes its live debut at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh tonight. “There seemed to be two different ways of doing it,” says Begg. “You either hire players and they play your scores, or you put the band together by drawing up a poster and putting it in a shop window saying drummer wanted, no mullets, no mods, must be into the Velvet Underground, Debussy and Arvo Part.” Such an approach dates back to when Begg almost played the Queen’s Hall as a school-boy, when his teenage punk band, The Dialected, were put forward by Currie High School to play a battle of the bands competition at the city’s southside venue. Given that one of The Dialected’s songs was called Bomb on Westminster, one suspects it would have made for quite a night. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. “I was the

Terry Hands – theatre director Born January 9, 1941; died February 4, 2020 Terry Hands, who has died aged 79, was a theatre director whose masterly interpretations of Shakespeare helped define their era. He also led three major theatrical institutions that changed the map of British theatre. From Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, which Hands co-founded, through to the Royal Shakespeare Company and Theatr Clwyd, Mold, Hands brought classics to life over half a century, investing a baroque richness into the material.   If Hands sometimes didn’t get as much high-profile attention as his contemporaries, his productions made waves nevertheless. This was the case directing Alan Howard as assorted monarchs in Shakespeare’s seven-hour history cycle, casting Anthony Sher in the title roles of Richard III and Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, and winning best director awards, both for the latter and his production of Cyrano de Bergerac starring Derek Jacobi as Cyrano and Sine