Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars The sound of birdsong floats about the auditorium as Karine Polwart comes on stage to perform her meditation on the land, sea and air that surrounds her in Fala, the village just outside Edinburgh she calls home. It's a sound that soothes, possibly because, as Polwart talks of the 2,400 pink-footed geese that fly from Greenland to Fala every winter, it's clear it is the voices of the many. Skyborne socialism, Polwart calls it. The geese become a leaping off point for a show that fuses songs and stories to create a beautiful evocation of the need for community in an increasingly fractured world. This is the case whether Polwart talks us through her complicated pregnancy a decade ago and the heroic support she received, or an unlikely but apt evocation of football manager Alex Ferguson's philosophy of teamwork. There are too the everyday tragedies of those whose lives were cruelly cut short, like real life couple Roberta and

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars When successful classical violinist Stephanie is struck down in her prime by multiple sclerosis, her entire creative lifeblood is ripped asunder as she is left wheelchair-bound. This leads to a set of reluctant sessions with stoic psychiatrist Dr Feldmann, whose gnomic line of inquiry is a knowing counterpoint to Stephanie's more mercurial tendencies. As her moods swing between defensiveness, rage and self-loathing, Stephanie is forced to face up to a new life, literally playing second fiddle to both her less talented students and her increasingly experimental composer husband. Tom Kempinski's 1980 study of enforced artistic debilitation was a huge hit when it first appeared in 1980. This was possibly because of the play's reported inspiration, iconic cellist Jacqueline du Pre, who, like Stephanie, also had her musical career cut short by MS. This is a connection Kempinski now denies in a pithy programme note for this touri

When Anders Lustgarten wrote the first draft of his play, Lampedusa, in late 2014, it seemed no-one was really talking about what was a then largely un-noticed international migrant crisis. The week before the play opened in London a few months later, Lustgarten notes, over 400 migrants were killed when a boat capsized off the coast of Libya. A few days later, over 700 people were drowned trying to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa, which the play is named after, and which has become a primary European entry point for mainly African migrants. “The journey of the play is an interesting one,” says Lustgarten, as a new production of Lampedusa prepares to open in the intimate confines of the Citizens Theatre's Circle Studio in association with the young Wonder Fools company, overseen by director Jack Nurse. “I'd been doing a lot of work on development banks, and one of the things they do is displace people, and through organisations like the IMF (International Monetary Fund)

To whom it may concern I was surprised to read in The Art Newspaper how internationally renowned Edinburgh artspace Inverleith House had apparently been 'saved' from closure. Simon Milne, the publicly accountable Regius Keeper of Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, where Inverleith House is situated, claimed that “There was a rumour that we are not going to do art anymore...that was never the case.” Milne repeated his claims in the Herald newspaper on September 15 th 2017. Milne's claims directly contradict the statement RBGE were forced to make in October 2016 when details of the closure were leaked to the press. The statement said that “Inverleith House will no longer be dedicated to the display of contemporary art, and RBGE is looking at options for the alternative use of the building.” In an interview in the Herald on October 19 th 2016, Milne was quoted as saying that Inverleith House was unable to “wash its face” financially. Milne also said that “These are

In a dimly lit rehearsal room, a troupe of performers are slow-walking their way into the performance area as mournful music plays. Led by actresses Pauline Goldsmith and Cath Whitefield, the other twelve people seem to be clawing their way onstage,cutting loose as they go in some undefined quasi religious ritual. At moments the choreographed stage shapes they throw look somewhere between the video for Michael Jackson's song, Thriller, and a line dance. While some of it can't help but look silly, it is the sight of a company cutting loose in order to explore what their performance, in its early stages and still largely formless, is about. This may be standard for a theatre company such as Vanishing Point, whose artistic director and creative visionary Matthew Lenton is sitting in the dark, shouting words from a text at the performers as they go. With the musical accompaniment, it's a hypnotic and oddly moving spectacle. The best thing of all about is when you remember t

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars Enough tartan tat to line Pitlochry high street carpets the stage like a badly furnished highland hotel at the opening of Peter Arnott's swish new stage adaptation of Compton Mackenzie's 1941 comic novel. A pantomime style stag looms on the horizon before a troupe of socialist hikers march onto land marked by 'No Trespassing' signs later used for firewood. Welcome to Glenbogle, the crumbling pile overseen by Donald MacDonald of MacDonald, aka Ben Nevis, whose territorial claims on the land don't seem to apply when he and his partner in crime Kilwhillie are flogging it off to big-talking American developer, Chester Royde. Chester's trophy bride Carrie has her own vested interest, while her sister-in-law Myrtle is more inclined to colonise hunky nationalist poet, Alan, than nice-but-dim Hector. Tellingly, Alan sides with the tartan Tories to repel English boarders. The symbolism is laid on with a Saltire-patterned

In 1967, the world was being turned upside down. With the counter culture in full psychedelic swing, the so-called Summer of Love was about to break, even as protests against the Vietnam War were building to a peak while race riots flared up across America. In the UK, homosexuality was decriminalised, while abortion was legalised. Closer to home, Celtic won the European Cup and championship, the first Northern European club to do so. Meanwhile, the global village Marshall McLuhan had predicted was brought into our living rooms when the first ever live international satellite broadcast saw 400 million viewers watch the Beatles fanfare in All You Need is Love. It may have been the Fab Four's kaleidoscopic masterpiece, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and later their Magical Mystery Tour record and film that sound-tracked the year, but things were happening underground as well. Beyond the tripped-out whimsy of Pink Floyd's debut record, the Doors, Love's F

When Mercury Music Prize winning band Young Fathers were commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to make a short film, the Edinburgh based trio of Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham 'G' Hastings relished the proposition. The context was a UK tour of Van Dyck's seventeenth century painting, Self-portrait. Having been purchased by the NPG in 2014, Van Dyck's work formed a key part of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery's Summer 2017 exhibition, Looking Good: The Male Gaze from Van Dyck to Lucien Freud, which explored male image, identity and appearance. Young Fathers' film was one of six commissions. Other artists who made films were Marcus Coates, John Stezaker, Mark Wallinger, Karrie Fransman and Jason Turner. It was Young Fathers' film, however, that garnered much of the attention. Over a low electronic hum, the film, shot in SNPG, features a text co-written by Bankole with Young Fathers former manager Tim Brinkhurst. The words ar

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow until January 21 st 2018 2017 has been a busy year for Stephen Sutcliffe, the Glasgow-based pop cultural obsessive who re-imagines a pick-and-mix of late twentieth century iconography culled from his personal archive in his own fractured image. GOMA's showing of three video collages, photographs and wall drawings follows the Anthony Burgess inspired No End to Enderby in Manchester and the Lindsay Anderson based Sex Symbols in Sandwich Signs in Edinburgh. It marks the first public showing of five of the works together since being bought by Glasgow Museums in 2013. Two others loaned by Sutcliffe complete the show. The walls may be painted bright yellow, but the crossed-out cartoon clouds are anything but bright in Untitled Wall Drawing (Selected Errors) (2011), which, inspired by New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg, sets out its store as a monument to failure. Such expressions of self-doubt and ennui were part and parcel for serious young men of

Queen's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh until November 26 th The image of nineteenth century war photographer Roger Fenton dressed as an Algerian soldier at the start of this major showing of the Rochdale-born snapper's extensive frontline dispatches from the Crimean War says much about the sense of derring-do that pervades early on. With Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia at war with the Russian Empire since 1853, Fenton was hired by Manchester publishers Thomas Agnew and Son to document the War in a way that could be used by painter Thomas Barker, who they also commissioned. More than fifty of Fenton's studies are rounded up in Barker's The Allied Generals with the Officers of their Respective Staffs Before Sebastopol, a piece worth it for the title alone, which resembles that of a Howard Barker play. It was a commercial gig, with Fenton encouraged by friends in high places to deliver a more heroic counterpoint to the crit

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Between them, Rob Drummond and Nicholas Bone have successfully carved out separate careers in off-kilter contemporary theatre. While Drummond is a playwright and solo performer of semi auto-biographical shows, Bone is a director and founder of the Magnetic North company. Given their propensity for creating various shades of onstage ritual, it perhaps should come as no surprise to discover that they are both sons of clergymen. Bone grew up the child of an English bishop, while Drummond's father was a Church of Scotland minister. The sins of those fathers have clearly left their mark in this co-production between Magnetic North company and the Traverse, a seventy-five minute meditation on this pair of self-confessed atheists (or are they?) respective relationships with their dads. The starting point for this is a copy of Edmund Gosse's book, Father & Son, which charts Gosse's life growing up with his preacher father and his

Sandy Neilson – actor, director Born January 29 1943; died October 19 th 2017 If the narrative of Scottish theatre had taken a different turn, Sandy Neilson, who has died aged 74 after being hospitalised following a fall, might have ended up leading one or other of the country's major theatres. As it was, despite working extensively in pretty much every theatrical institution in the country, Neilson remained both inside and outside the mainstream, developing long-term working relationships with many key directors of his generation who were in charge of such buildings. Neilson featured in numerous productions by Michael Boyd, both during the latter's tenure running the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, and when Boyd took over the helm at the Royal Shakespeare Company. These included Boyd's epic staging of Shakespeare's History Cycle at the RSC. Prior to the latter, Neilson worked at Dundee Rep, where for three years he became a senior figure of the permanent ensemble co

The theatrically named Hurricane Ophelia may have blown in and out of Scotland like a banshee by the time these words appear, but in Pitlochry, the season's more regular winds have already taken root in the Perthshire town. Such a blustery climate has allowed Peter Arnott the opportunity to don what the Glasgow based playwright calls his Kenny Ireland Memorial Cap while taking regular constitutionals from rehearsals for his new stage version of Compton Mackenzie's novel, The Monarch of the Glen. Arnott has so named what looks like a traditional fisherman's cap in honour of the late director, actor and former artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. Ireland's outgoing Lyceum production in 2003 was of Arnott's piece of Victorian Edinburgh Gothic, The Breathing House. The pair later collaborated with designer Hayden Griffin on stagings of classic Scottish novels at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen. Arnott adapted both The Silver Darlings by Nei

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Everything happens after dark in James Ley's dramatic tribute to Edinburgh's radical gay scene of the 1980s. This is the case for Lewis and Glen, who rehearse their homage to the owners of Lavender Menace, the pioneering basement bookshop that sold gay literature long before chain-stores took it into the mainstream. It's also the painful truth for the married man in a suit who loiters outside at various points in the play, yearning to go inside. 1987, and Lavender Menace is moving from its basement premises to a swankier new place uptown. With a new name and a new identity, the move is a kind of symbolic coming out from the underground. Legendary Princes Street club Fire Island is about to be sold off to Waterstone's, and, only seven years after homosexuality was legalised in Scotland, it feels like the end of an era. Over one final night after hours, Lewis and Glen take drama queenery to the limit as they role-play how their relati

Dundee Rep Two sisters sit in glass cases either side of the stage at the start of Eve Jamieson's production of Jean Genet's nasty little study of warped aspiration and abuse of power. Bathed in red light, the women look like artefacts in some cheap thrill waxworks horror-show, or else exhibits in a human zoo. Either way, they are both trapped, immortalised in a freak-show possibly of their own making. Once the sisters come to life and drape themselves in the sumptuous bedroom of their absent mistress, they raid her bulging wardrobe to try on otherwise untouchable glad-rags and jewellery. As they do, the grotesque parody of the high-life they aspire to turns uglier by the second. When the Mistress returns, as played with daring abandon by Emily Winter as a glamour-chasing narcissist who gets her kicks from drooling over the criminal classes, you can't really blame the sisters for their fantasy of killing her. Slabs of sound slice the air to punctuate each scene

October 15, 2016. Onstage at the Wee Red Bar, ostensibly Edinburgh College of Art's student union but so much more besides, the living legend that is Vic Godard is baring his soul. The louche frontman of Subway Sect, whose support slot to The Clash on the Edinburgh Playhouse date of the iconic headliners' May 1977 White Riot tour effectively spawned what became known as the Sound of Young Scotland, has just sung backing vocals to his own song, Ambition, as performed by The Sexual Objects. The Sexual Objects, of course, are fronted by Davy Henderson, one of those in attendance at the Edinburgh Playhouse show. His incendiary band, Fire Engines, were key figures in Scotland's post-punk renaissance, before morphing into glossy New Pop pioneers Win. Henderson got back to basics with The Nectarine No 9, then embraced all that’s sublime about rock music with the Sexual Objects. And now here they are, playing Ambition while the song's visionary writer takes

When Eve Jamieson was invited to direct Jean Genet's play, The Maids, at Dundee Rep, it wasn't the regular experience for an incoming director. While Jamieson has more than thirty years theatrical experience behind her, the Rep's ensemble company are a tight-knit group, and Irene Macdougall, Ann Louise Ross and Emily Winter, who appear in Jamieson's production, which opens tonight, have been working together cheek by jowl for eighteen years. Given that power structures lie at the heart of Genet's play about two put-upon sisters who fantasise about killing their mistress, such existing intimacy might well have thrown up some accidental but hopefully not fatal parallels. As it is, Jamieson has used the close relationship between her three female leads to the show's advantage. “There's a fearlessness there,” says Jamieson, mid-way through talking about her production the day after the show's first preview. “Normally, the director is the one who brings

The Modern Institute Airds Lane, Glasgow until November 4 th 2017 Four stars Anyone who has ever witnessed a performance by Sue Tompkins will be familiar with her dynamic delivery of fragmented texts, be it solo in gallery spaces or as vocalist with seminal turn of the century Glasgow-based quartet, Life Without Buildings. Luke Fowler's films have adopted a similar cut and paste approach to transforming more straightforward documentary footage into something more poetic. This second collaboration between the pair sees Fowler filming Tompkins in the recording studio as she lays down a version of Country Grammar, one of her earliest performance pieces, which dates from 2003. Rather than adopt a make-believe verite approach, Fowler disrupts the process in various ways, from having sound and vision exist independently from each other to making the camera appear to be jumping up and down. This echoes the playful physicality of Tompkins' performance, which here uses two diff