Coffee-Table Notes

This time last year, the Perthshire hills were alive with the sounds and songs of A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens’ ultimate festive fable of how bad times can be turned to good was Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s 2019 Christmas show. This year’s enforced closure of all theatres and places of entertainment due to safety measures enforced due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, has sadly left such institutions empty.   That hasn’t prevented creativity. The last nine months has seen a welter of online performances designed to provide a lifeline for audiences and artists alike. These have ranged from the National Theatre of Scotland’s thrice weekly Scenes for Survival series of 55 bite size works created in lockdown, to Rapture Theatre’s similarly styled Rapture Mini Bites being made available each Friday. Pitlochry Festival Theatre itself has seen some two and a half million viewers engaging with its online Shades of Tay initiative, which has seen more than twenty premieres of new work for

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Online Four stars Pitlochry’s usual Christmas extravaganza may have been kicked into touch along with pretty much every other piece of seasonal entertainment, but that hasn’t stopped the potential for festive fun. In the very magical Tinsel and Tartan shop in Stirling, shopkeepers Clare Grogan and Colin McCredie open the door on a festive yarn by PFT artistic director Elizabeth Newman and filmmaker Russell Beard, in which cheeky elves Lari and Hari go in search of the North Star after losing it in a sci-fi styled Black Hole.    Our dynamic duo’s journey begins with an advent styled take on The Twelve Days of Christmas, before they seek advice from Grogan’s Mrs Claus, who sings Jingle Bells in her Garden of Art, where stories grow, music blossoms, and the power of the imagination holds sway. Only a trip to outer space where McCredie’s Santa is already in flight can bring Christmas home.    Filmed after dark and recorded in Covid-safe conditions in PFT’s entici

    Alberta Whittle is announced today as Scotland’s official representation at the 2022 La Biennale di Venezia. Whittle’s Glasgow International curated exhibition is set to take place at the Arsenale Docks, S. Pietro di Castello as part of the 59 th  Venice Biennale.   The announcement by Creative Scotland on behalf of the National Lottery and Scottish Government backed Scotland + Venice partnership comes at the end of a remarkable year for the Glasgow based artist. During 2020, Whittle was one of ten artists to be awarded a Turner Bursary. The Glasgow School of Art graduate also received this year’s Frieze Artist Award and a Henry Moore Artist Foundation Award.   Born in Barbados in 1980, Whittle’s work in film, sculpture, print, performance and installation is often made in response to current events, and frequently draws on her research into the African diaspora and the decolonisation of Western histories.   Whittle’s work has been shown in group and solo shows around the world. In

Diane di Prima – Poet, writer, artist   Born August 6, 1934; died October 25, 2020      Diane di Prima, who has died aged 86, was a poet who was at the centre of the Beat Generation, who roared their way into the post-war American literary world with freeform libertine abandon. Di Prima may not have received as much attention as male contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, but her presence was vital, both as an enabler of other writers and for her own candid and fearlessly provocative work. The latter appeared in more than forty volumes of poetry and prose, beginning with This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards (1958), published when she was in her early twenties.    Di Prima decided to devote herself to being a poet aged fourteen, after she starting writing aged six. Dropping out of college to chase her muse, Di Prima landed in Greenwich Village in the midst of a jazz-soundracked cultural revolution. It was an era documented in a fantastical manner in the knowingly titled Me

John Fraser – actor, writer Born March 18, 1931; died November 7, 2020     John Fraser, who has died aged 89, was an actor who transcended his working class Glasgow roots to become a matinee idol, before taking a sidestep out of the limelight. In a colourful career, he showed star quality in a stream of top-flight films following his breakout role in The Dam Busters (1955), and rubbed shoulders with the showbiz cognoscenti of his day.    At his most famous, Fraser was dubbed the most handsome man in Britain. In truth, he was something of a renaissance man. As well as receiving a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor in The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), Fraser published several books, and a brief brush with pop stardom ran parallel with his early acting career.   Fraser laid bare the ups and downs of his life with flamboyant abandon in his hugely entertaining memoir, Close Up (2004). It was ‘A Supa-candid-gossip-expo-valid-dose-worth of Dirk, Sophia, Bette and Rudy in the sixties’ according t

The launch this week of a major new grassroots arts initiative in Edinburgh comes at a very interesting moment. Craigmillar Now has announced a programme of local-based international arts that aims to rekindle the spirit of the old Craigmillar Festival Society. This has been brought to fruition as a labour of love by people living locally.   Entirely separately to this, the event once dubbed the ‘Festival of Brexit’ last week announced a shortlist of teams bidding to take part in the high profile multi-million pound initiative in 2022. With the event now branded Festival UK* 2022, teams feature several major institutions from Scotland. The announcement comes at a time when theatres and music venues are closed due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. With many freelance workers struggling to survive, Festival UK* 2022 has been criticised by some, with questions asked over whether it should go ahead at all.     Craigmillar Now and Then   Away from all that, Craigmillar Now has begun