Coffee-Table Notes

Cryptic Nights, Glad Café, Glasgow Four stars Strange times require creative solutions, and with the Covid-19 pandemic causing live events to be scrapped, it’s time to get virtual. Such is the case for this latest Cryptic Nights concert, an initiative begun a decade ago by Glasgow-based international auteurs Cryptic with the aim of showcasing a multitude of composers who mix up artforms to ravish the senses. With the aim of presenting music designed to benefit both body and mind, having this triple bill of international artists perform work in an otherwise empty venue while being streamed online has set the template for getting art out to a self-isolated audience. So, as it ramps up each performer’s hi-tech futurism, while there is an extra distance between audience and artist, there is also an intimacy that comes from such a one-on-one experience.   This is certainly the case in Glasgow electronicist Alex Smoke’s opening set, a conceptual piece called Eirini, named afte

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars Prime Ministers telling very public lies in order to save their own skin isn’t a recent phenomenon. As this revival of Stuart Hepburn’s Second World War play first seen at Oran Mor’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre initiative in 2017 makes clear, when Winston Churchill announced the so-called ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ that saw 350,000 British troops evacuated to safety, he wasn’t quite telling the whole story. In fact, he had cut a deal that saw the men of the 51st Highland Division hung out to dry as collateral damage on the frontline, where 9,000 of them were forced to surrender after being ordered to fight to their last bullet. Hepburn illustrates this gross injustice through the eyes of Young Callum, who joins the regiment with his pals as something of a lark, with any prospect of war a far-off abstraction. The adventure he embarks on as he is thrown a lifeline in France by a young woman called Catriona following Churchill’s betrayal is

Michael Medwin – Actor, film and theatre producer Born July 18, 1923; died February 26, 2020 Michael Medwin, who has died aged 96, was an acclaimed stage and screen actor probably most familiar as local radio boss Don Satchley in Bristol-based 1970s private detective series, Shoestring (1979-1980). He also appeared alongside Sean Connery in the James Bond film, Never Say Never Again (1983), and as Scrooge’s nephew opposite Albert Finney in Scrooge (1970), Ronald Neame’s big-screen version of Leslie Bricusse’s musical take on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This was despite Medwin being twelve years older than Finney. Medwin had already forged an off-screen double act with Finney as one half of Memorial Enterprises, the company behind off-kilter vehicles for Finney, Charlie Bubbles (1968), which Finney also directed, and Gumshoe (1971, in which Finney played a down-at-heel Liverpool bingo caller turned private eye.  Memorial also produced both the stage and film ver