Coffee-Table Notes

Palestine Museum Scotland is hard to miss in its new home in the heart of Edinburgh’s commercial gallery district. The two artworks that fill the Museum’s windows looking out on to Dundas Street are a striking introduction to this holistic initiative set up by Palestinian American Faisal Saleh as the first such venture in Europe.   Inside, the gallery floor is dominated by a map of Palestine in 1948 that features the names of 500 villages destroyed by Israel that year during the Nakba, in which more than 800,000 Palestinians were driven from their homeland. These names have been reinstated into the landscape by historian Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, who, aged ten, was himself forced from his home during the Nakba to seek refuge elsewhere.   The map is flanked on one side by a painting by veteran Palestinian artist, Samia Halaby, which shows idyllic looking fields spread out across the canvas. “It’s a typical Palestinian landscape before it was cut up,” Saleh explains. “It’s the sort ...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Three Stars    Art, money and murder are at the heart of this latest adaptation of thriller writer Peter James’ Detective Roy Grace novels. Here, James, adaptor Shaun McKenna and director Jonathan O’Boyle here fling our hero into the cut and thrust world of art forgery, where greedy collectors salivate over reproductions of old masters that even con galleries into thinking they’re showing originals.   Roy and his sidekick Bella are investigating a murder that leads them to master forger Dave Hegarty, who Roy got banged up back in the day. Dave may have given up knocking out counterfeit Lowrys, but he can still turn his hand to doing a classic or two when required. Meanwhile, Harry and Freya Kipling might just have got more than they bargained for down at the car boot sale, and we’re not talking the 1970s swivel chair they picked up as well as a work in oils that was going for a song.   Cue predatory collector Stuart Piper and the gloriously nam...

Oran Mor, Glasgow Three stars   When Beyoncé came to Murrayfield in 2023 as part of her Renaissance tour, the bootylicious diva caused a sensation. Beyond the show itself, there was likely plenty of drama for her fan base who worship at her feet, and not just among the single ladies neither.    Take Jordan and Russell. The neon pink boudoir that passes for the living room of these gay best friends in JD Stewart’s new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s lunchtime theatre season may be a shrine to their queen, but it also requires an overload of Febreze to clear the body odours that hang around.    Partly responsible for these is the bit of rough trade Jordan who has just beaten a hasty retreat with two stolen tickets in hand. When Russell gets home, the pair’s despair at their loss sees them embark on a quest for replacements that takes them from their friend Sooz’s cafe to the local cop shop that seems to be run by a refugee from the Village People. Finally, the...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Five stars    Shakespeare’s Lear is a man at war in Ramesh Meyyappan’s radical reworking of one of the bard’s mightiest plays. Standing shell-shocked in a mini arena circled by sandbags, Meyyappan’s Lear is cast adrift from both his faculties and family, in conflict with himself as much as the three daughters who tend to him. Possessed with the overbearing anger of a parent whose children have learnt to stand up to him, Lear’s own increasingly infantile nature comes to the fore as his psychic wounds get the better of him.   All this is brought to life, not with soliloquies and verse, but with barely a word spoken over the show’s hour-long duration. As Lear shelters from the blast, Orla O’Loughlin’s exquisite production wraps an already moving depiction of a family at war inside David Paul Jones’ score. This moves between propulsive piano patterns and string based brooding to give the performance its emotional pulse. Derek Anderson’s lighting de...

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh  Five stars    The heavens sound like they’re splitting in two at the opening of Katori Hall’s Olivier award winning play, which imagines Martin Luther King’s last night on earth in fantastical fashion. It is April 1968, and Dr King is checking into his regular room in the Memphis hotel room where he’ll meet his maker having just given the speech of his life. As he pretty much crawls through the door exhausted and clearly in pain, all he wants is to have some rest and a cup of coffee from room service.    When a precocious maid called Camae delivers Dr. King’s beverage on what she says is her first day, what appears to be an after hours flirtation takes a startling turn to the celestial as Camae reveals she knows things about King that only his closest intimates are aware of. By the end, King’s status as a reluctant prophet is guaranteed.    Rikki Henry’s revival of Hall’s 2009 play is a sensation. Taking an already rema...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   The quiet renaissance of Nan Shepherd had been a wonder over the last few years. Once neglected to the point of being erased from the twentieth century canon of Scottish letters, the belated publication of Aberdeenshire born Shepherd’s masterpiece, The Living Mountain, a personal memoir of the great outdoors that had lain unread in a draw for thirty years, tapped into a readership who similarly felt the transcendent nature of being alive with the hills. These days, Shepherd is rightly held up as great a writer as her peers, and her image can be found in the back of a Scottish five-pound note.   Richard Baron and Ellie Zeegen’s studio sized play rifles through Shepherd’s back pages for this dramatic homage that attempts to get to the heart of Shepherd while acting as something of a primer to those perhaps unaware of her life and work.    Flitting back and forth through assorted time zones between 1901 and 1981, Baron’s recast re...