Coffee-Table Notes

Three stars   Sam and Noel were lovers who thought they would be together forever, before everyday tragedy rips them apart. As Tom Ratcliffe’s play for Harlow Playhouse makes clear, however, lost love is more than purely a physical thing. Opening on the fateful day when everything changed, Ratcliffe’s play flits between past, present and future, as we see the mutual devotion between the couple, rewinding on how they met before lurching to the pain that follows as ghosts linger while life goes on.    Director Rikki Beadle Blair puts Ratcliffe, who plays Sam, and Michael Walters as Noel through a series of emotional hoops in a narrative whirligig that would be easy to lose control of if not paced as carefully as it is. Ratcliffe and Walters, on stage throughout, are to be admired for their restraint.   As a series of photographs projected onto the back wall illustrate key moments, the scenario is familiar from the likes of Truly Madly Deeply and Ghost. Despite its dramatic invention, the

Edinburgh International Festival Lyceum Theatre Four stars   A baptism of fire awaits Siddhartha, the symbolically named Sri Lankan boy in  S. Shakthidharan’s acclaimed multi-lingual state of the nations epic, presented by Eamon Flack’s Belvoir company.  Raised in Australia after his mother Radha fled her homeland with her new-born son following the violent uprisings of 1983, twenty-one year old Siddhartha is a cultural mongrel with a head full of secondhand theories to expound to his girlfriend Lily with the confidence only youth brings.    Siddhartha also has a baggage load of hidden history to seek out in a play that  moves across decades and countries that don’t feel any closer just because they’re a phone call away.  Now 2004, and with Sidd’s father Thirru long presumed killed during the turmoil of two decades earlier, when that call comes, Siddhartha and Radha’s world is turned upside down once more. As things rewind to almost half a century earlier, when Radha and Thirru first m

The contradictions inherent in the system are everywhere at the Calton Hill home of Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery just now. As gentrification encroaches the landscape, the gallery’s three Edinburgh Art Festival shows turn received historical narratives on their head to reveal more ambiguous readings of the past.   Outside, visitors are greeted by ‘Silent Agitator’ (2019), a giant clock made by Ruth Ewan bearing the words ‘TIME TO ORGANISE’. This monumental call to arms is based on an illustration by American writer and activist Ralph Chaplin for the Industrial Workers of the World labour union, and is a companion piece to ‘The Beast’ (2022), a newly commissioned twelve-minute animated film penned by Ewan with socialist magician Ian Saville.   Animated by Regina Ohak with Duncan Marquiss, and with music and sound design by Ross Downes, the film depicts nineteenth century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, forced to engage in dialectical discourse with  Diplodocus carnegi

A bare-chested man poses with a football tied on his head with the sort of scarf that might have been sported by the daughters in Lorca’s play, The House of Bernarda Alba, on one of their sunnier days. This is ‘Immigrante’ (2022),  in which El Salvador born Jose Campos, in his guise of Studio Lenca, strikes a pose.   In ‘El Historiante Blanco’ (2019), Campos stares defiantly at the camera from the next wall, a sword-wielding warrior clad in armour made, not of metal and mesh, but flowers and lace, in a fancy dress subversion of machismo.     These are two of  Los Historiantes (2019), in which Campos dons the dressing-up-box apparel of characters depicted by his country’s folkloric storytelling dancers, who hand down tales of colonialism and subjugation of their Indigenous people. As an émigré fleeing his war-torn country, first to America, now to the UK, where he is officially classed as ‘Other’, Campos reimagines these various identities in flamboyantly theatrical fashion.    The two

When Adrienne Truscott read in 2017 how playwright David Mamet had imposed a ban on post-show discussions of his work, she wondered why the writer of such acclaimed plays as Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna wasn’t keen on meeting his public. The result is Masterclass,   a  parody of the sort of exchanges that might occur if the grand old men of American playwriting were put in the spotlight alongside a fawning interviewer. Out of this comes a seriously funny discourse on privilege and power in a world where tough guys still appear to rule the roost.   “ There are some writers that are esteemed and given the name genius,” says Truscott of her  collaboration with the Dublin based Brokentalkers company , “and they're shit. I guess I felt there was some lazy mythologizing going on, and if you actually look at the work, there is some really bad writing, which shaped how people my age thought about what is good playwriting.”   As well as Mamet, Truscott, fellow performer Feidlim Cannon an

A funny thing happened on the way to Edinburgh this year. No, really. After a pandemic induced absence, and with all those small-is-beautiful type promises of a more bijou August festival season seemingly forgotten, the class-based inequalities of festival city are more gapingly obvious than ever.   The exposure of dodgy working practices by some Fringe venues, and the fact that it is increasingly difficult to work at the festivals at all unless you are from a wealthy background mirror the chaos of late capitalist society beyond. As too do extortionate accommodation costs, while ticket prices in some places look increasingly out of reach for the average punter in search of a good night out.   The result, in the Fringe, at least, saw the Fringe Society initially announce a Working Class Producers Mentorship. This was subsequently ‘paused’ due to a poor response, with successful applicants absorbed into the already existing Emerging Producers Development Programme.    Meanwhile, in April

Joyce Laing – Art therapist   Born April 1939; died July 17 2022     Joyce Laing, who has died aged around 83, was a pioneer of art therapy, whose work with psychiatric patients and long term prisoners helped unlock means of creative expression that transcended lives. In the 1970s, she played a key role at Barlinnie Special Unit, the experimental Glasgow prison wing where violent hardmen were liberated by Laing’s techniques. The best known of these was Jimmy Boyle, the convicted murderer who went on to became a successful sculptor.   “He was suspicious,” Laing told the Glasgow Times in 2017 of Boyle’s initial response to her. “He thought this was too good, it couldn’t be happening. He thought ‘this woman must be a spy’.”   Laing was speaking prior to an exhibition at Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow of work from the Special Unit drawn from her own collection of sketchbooks, newspaper cuttings and photographs, as well as paintings and sculptures by inmates.   prior to Laing