Coffee-Table Notes

Three Stars Woody and Mabel are awaiting the return of their prodigal sons, Noble and Bad Brad. Woody is a gambling man, and neither he nor anyone else can remember the name of the only woman on stage, as homecomings take an absurd turn in this wild pastiche of that once much sought after beast, The Great American Play.  Where such epic endeavours once upon a time swaggered into view like a wounded bear, the Los Angeles based sketch comic quartet behind Big Tobacco theatre company are having none of it. Like an extended improv game, the show ticks every cliché-laden box of its inspirations’ terminally dysfunctional family affairs before demolishing them with absurdist abandon.  The spirit of Mad magazine and Saturday Night Live abound throughout, with Brian Fitzgerald, Lyndsey Kempf, Eli Lutsky and Brad Beiderman hamming it up like billy-o. Clocking in at fifty-five minutes, it’s mercifully shorter than any of its overbearing inspirations. If only Jack Nicholson had showed up as billed

Royal Lyceum Theatre Five stars “We are waiting for a signal,” actor Matthieu Sampeur says to the audience as he and the rest of the cast wander the stage on the Sunday night performance of Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy’s Edinburgh International Festival run of her remarkable reimagining of Lars von Trier’s 2003 film, Dogville. Given that film’s inherent theatricality, as von Trier’s cast played out the story of one woman’s unannounced arrival in a small American town on a bare stage with only chalk floor markings indicating the setting, such a nod to the artifice of life onstage is perhaps unsurprising.     As Sampeur and the rest of the ten-strong ensemble eye up the cheap seats waiting for things to begin, however, here, at least, he might just mean what he says. Then again, Sampeur introduces himself as Tom, who, as anyone who has seen Dogville will know, is the story’s male lead.   Whatever, nothing is hidden in anything that follows, as Tom and co set out their store by ex

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Wrestling of one form or another has always been a handy metaphor to dramatise the thorny issues of identity politics, be they based on class, race, sex or gender. This seems true of women’s wrestling, in particular. See Claire Luckham’s 1978 feminist fable best known as Trafford Tanzi, all the way up to Netflix hit, G.L.O.W.     As Nat McCleary’s debut play makes clear from the start, however, this potent dissection of five women’s lives has nothing to do with the showbiz glitz of the professional ring. Rather, the bonding that comes between the women is done by way of Backhold Wrestling, an infinitely grittier fixture of the Highland Games circuit. Here, driven team leader Pamela trains up Imogen, Helen, Jo and Chantelle to take on all comers. The biggest confrontations, however, come between themselves, as they spar with each other emotionally while wrestling with private demons.     While middle aged Helen searches for a new life, the bond b

Inspace, Edinburgh until August 28 Four stars Finding one’s voice isn’t easy in the AI age. As the title of this state of art show implies, however, all that glisters is not necessarily authentic. Everest Pipkin’s ‘Shell Song’ is a push-button recorded monologue that takes in face blindness, talking books and a personal history of the recorded voice.   The Unit Test collective’s Samuel Beckett referencing ‘Not I’is a   film based show and tell of Speech2Face, a new fangled construction that attempts to generate an image of a speaker’s face based on their recorded voice.   ‘Whose voice is it?’ finds Holly Herndon, Never Before Heard Sounds and Rachel MacLean compiling a   jukebox of machine age bangers generated by Holly+ creation, which puts voice cloning at its mechanical heart.   Best of all is ‘All the boys ate fish’, Theodore Koterwas’ interactive installation that records and cuts up the voices of those speaking in front of it before playing back what it hears through underfloor s

  Three stars Young hearts run free in Rabindranath X Bhose’s new installation, the latest contribution to Collective’s Satellites programme of work by emerging practitioners. Drawing from the ‘Hanged Man’ tarot card and the spiritual preserves of bogland, Bhose has created an environment of vinyl bogs fringed with dams of peat to protect them. Coloured scarves and other totems of illicit after hours liaisons are tied onto branches, as if marking their territory.   On the windows are etched four images of the ‘Hanged Man’ himself, dangling in the limbo land between heaven and earth as the noose tightens before the final death rattle dance begins. With a recording of poetry by Bhose and writers and artists Sammy Paloma and Oren Shoesmith soundtracking the scene like some Derek Jarman fantasia, Bhose’s construction is a temple of sorts that falls somewhere between the sacred and the profane, finding liberation as it goes. (Neil Cooper)     Collective Gallery, Edinburgh until 24 September

The eternal renaissance of Michael Head has been a wonderful thing to witness. Over a wayward forty-odd year anti career, the Liverpool born song-writer has moved from the under achieving felicities of The Pale Fountains to the urban fantasias of Shack, alighting a decade ago in his current tenure helming the ever changing Red Elastic Band. Judging by 2022 album, Dear Scott, and its predecessor, Adios Senor Pussycat, released in 2017, Head seems to have finally found his time. The Red Elastic Band’s line-up currently features a superb ensemble bringing Head’s scallydelic kitchen-sink narratives to life with guitar led grit laced with baroque flourishes. This should translate in Head and co’s forthcoming Edinburgh Festival Fringe outing into a virtuoso showcase of more recent material interspersed with a pick and mix of favourites from Head’s colourful back pages.     Recently, this has seen Head rewind all the way back to some of the Pale Fountains and Shack’s finest moments, which sit

Devon Projects, Huntly The fish is on the fire in the outdoor clay oven built by Kawther Luay and Fionn Duffy for the final part of their yearlong exploration of food, foraging and hospitality as collective ritual and shared artistic act. It’s a blowy but sunny Sunday afternoon at Greenmyres, a sixty-three acre site run by Huntly Development Trust ten minutes outside Huntly in Aberdeenshire. More than twenty diner participants are seated at a long table in a covered outdoor shed, having already helped prepare the food the are about to share under Luay and Duffy’s guidance, be it as chef or ceramicist.   Recognising the performative nature of the experience, Luay has cast both herself and Duffy as well as assorted ingredients as characters in their mini epic, from the milk of Act 1 and the grain of Act 2, both presented earlier in the summer, to the third and final act, fired by clay.   With the foodstuffs sourced within a fifty-mile radius, the pots they are contained in have been made