Coffee-Table Notes

Ivo van Hove initially resisted reading A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel. This despite the Belgian theatre director being gifted the book twice by friends, who declared Yanagihara’s 814-page epic was something definitely for him.   Van Hove was familiar with A Little Life’s success, and presumed Yanagihara’s story of four friends in New York to be a gay rites of passage.  Being given the book twice, however, piqued his curiosity. When he eventually opened it, he discovered the novel’s apparent premise to be a sucker punch that opened out onto an altogether more troubling world, in which one of the friends, Jude, a man emotionally and physically damaged to a self-destructive degree, becomes the book’s central focus.    “ I couldn't stop reading it,” van Hove says. “It's the book that you don't want to read but you cannot stop, and you know it's going to end terribly, but you still can’t stop.”    When Van Hove applied for the rights to stage Yanagihara’s stor

The Black Stuff   Storm clouds were already gathering over an increasingly broken looking Britain by the time Boys from the Blackstuff was first screened in October 1982. Alan Bleasdale’s five-part drama focusing on the everyday struggles of a gang of Liverpool labourers thrown on the dole seemed to chime with ongoing political dramas in the real world. The stakes had been raised considerably following the Conservative Party’s landslide victory in the 1979 general election, which put Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street for the next decade.   Bleasdale’s series was a spin-off from The Black Stuff, the one-off drama that first introduced the world to Chrissie, Loggo, Dixie Dean and his son Kevin, old George Malone, and of course Yosser Hughes. When first aired in 1980, Bleasdale had already written much of the five scripts it sired prior to Thatcher receiving the keys to number 10. Just as the revolutionary fantasia of Lindsay Anderson’s film, If…, captured the zeitgeist of the previous

Ripples of an island life by the sea coarse throughout this large-scale gathering of work created by Will Maclean over the last half century. Throughout that time, the Inverness born artist has drawn consistently if not exclusively from his own roots as both a midshipman and a fisherman.   This is evident from the earliest works on show across two floors of the City Art Centre in Edinburgh, as much as it is in the various suites of work that followed more recently. The tools of Maclean’s former trade too are there from the off, hung in cupboards like monuments to the intricate artistry of ancient everyday crafts.    Along the way there are memorials, commemorations and visual poems that brood with the mysteries of the lower depths. Maclean has brought these to the surface and arranged them to create something that at times invokes a perilous essence of the natural world. If the word ‘museum’ pops up in some of the evocative titles Maclean adorns his work with, rather than signalling so

The White House   Sandra George’s presence can be felt everywhere in Craigmillar just now. The legacy of the Edinburgh based photographer and community educationalist who died in 2013 aged 56 can primarily be seen at The White House, the B-listed Art Deco former pub on Craigmillar’s Niddrie Mains Road that is now an airy community cafe. Here, the walls are adorned with twenty photographs by George that form a new exhibition showcasing a handful of George’s works taken in Craigmillar between 1988 and 1994.   The White House is the perfect location for George’s black and white images, brim full as they are with the life of a community at work, rest and play. In one, kids eye up the local policewoman from the safety of the school gate. In another, women keep their heads down, intent on a win at the bingo. Mums with push chairs take a breather outside the Outreach Café. An instructor on a pigeon-keeping project gently places a bird into a young boy’s hands while two girls look on. The vibr