Coffee-Table Notes

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars An all-pervading slate-grey gloom hangs over Polly Teale's impressionistic biography of the three most famous female siblings in English literature. It's not just the spartan austerity of Ruth Sutcliffe's bare floorboarded set, on which sits little more than a wooden table and chairs for comfort. Nor is it the way Chahine Yavroyen's lighting blurs between starkness and shadows. It's something instead about how Nancy Meckler's bare-bones revival of her 2005 production for Shared Experience taps into the way Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte each seem to inhabit a space beyond the daily grind that no-one else can touch, and which liberates them even as it roots them to the spot. So when Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Cathy from Wuthering Heights burst onto the stage, it's as if all the women's desires have exploded into a vivid technicolour daydream that can't contain their inner lives anymor

Theatre Royal, Glasgow 3 stars What, one wonders, would the late Jeffrey Bernard have made of the internet age? The image of Fleet Street's original legend in his own somewhat extended lunchtime and old soak in residence of Soho hostelries blogging from the corner of his sainted Coach and Horses while necking several large vodkas is an appealing one. Whether this would mean Bernard would meet his deadlines at last instead of having his byline perennially appended with the immortal 'is unwell' is another thing entirely. In lieu of such a scenario, Keith Waterhouse's affectionate 1989 homage to this spectacular gambler, drunk, ladies man and scoundrel is probably the nearest we'll get to such dispatches. Traditionally a vehicle for well-preserved leading men of a certain age, Waterhouse's play here finds a twinkly-eyed Robert Powell stepping into our hero's crumpled suit and coming to in the now locked bar he calls home at 5am. Fuelled by enoug

Scottish Youth Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars By opting to tackle the holy trinity of Shakespeare's history plays, RSAMD's final year acting students, under the guidance of the annual Bard in the Botanics summer festival, have set themselves a huge task. Yet with three directors at the helm, the cast of twenty-one survived Saturday's seven hour marathon with aplomb, even if their characters didn't. Major parts are split throughout, with some canny cross-gender casting making Amy J Ludwigsen's Buckingham look part Brief Encounter, part Bond villainess. So where in the Marc Silberschatz directed first part Kevin Leask's Henry V1 is a precocious bible-clutching cherub, by Jennifer Dick's take on the second play Adam Donaldson's version is savvier if just as useless. Similarly, Rachel Handshaw's coquettish Queen Margaret matures into the voluminous orange wig sported by Amandine Vincent and, in Gordon Barr's final part, the even steelier P

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the wordiest of them all? So it goes with the re-ignition after a quarter of a century of the collaboration between Mayo Thompson’s The Red Krayola and Turner Prize short-listed conceptualists Art & Language. Both parties threatened this year to finally record and release long-standing operatic project, ‘Victorine’, the libretto of which was published by A&L in 1984. As it stands, with lyrics and texts by A&L scored by Thompson and impeccably played by some of Chicago’s finest, this new set is a far cry from the harsh social-realist music hall of their 1976 virgin outing, ‘Corrected Slogans’ and squat polemic on 1981’s ‘Kangaroo.’ Then as now though, Thompson’s dry drawl takes a back seat to his collaborators, though the plummy tones of A&L’s English enclave which gave way to Lora Logic have here sired new vocal foils in the shape of ‘Krayolettes’ Elisa Randazzo and Sandy Yang. Yang was drafted into RK on 1999’s ‘Fingerpainting’ wh

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the wordiest of them all? So it goes with the re-ignition after almost a quarter of a century of a collaboration between free-thinking Texas-born musician, theorist and teacher Mayo Thompson, who’s traded under The Red Krayola name for more than forty years, and Art & Language, the 1986 Turner Prize short-listed conceptualist art collective whose dense, persistent line of critical inquiry has proved equally rigorous. Both parties had threatened this year to finally record and release Victorine, a long standing operatic project, the libretto of which, concerning a French policeman who mistakes the nude figures in paintings by Courbet and Manet for a serial killer’s victims, was published more than 20 years ago in the collective’s ‘Art-Language’ journal. As it stands, this new set, with lyrics and texts by A&L veterans Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, scored by Thompson, and played impeccably by a Chicago super-group featuring Jim O’Rourke, Tom

Linder Sterling’s early collages were published in collaboration with journalist Jon Savage as The Secret Public, and she designed record sleeves for Buzzcocks, Magazine, and her own band, Ludus. She designed a menstrual egg-timer for Factory Records, and performed at the Hacienda covered in meat and wearing a strap-on dildo. In 1991 a book of photographs of Linder’s friend Morrissey was published as ‘Morrissey Shot.’ Early solo exhibitions include ‘What Did You Do In the Punk War, Mummy?’ at the Cleveland Gallery, London, and ‘The Return Of Linderland’ at Cornerhouse, Manchester. Performances include ‘The Working Class Goes To Paradise’ in Manchester and London. In 2006 a monograph edited by Lionel Bovier was published by JRP/Ringier. Linder has just shown her ‘Pretty Girls’ series at Baltic, Newcastle, shows new work at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, from November 16-December 21, and as part of Re-Make/Re-Model at Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, from December 8-January 21. Yo

Thanks in part to Resonance FM, the art/noise radio station run by London Musicians Collective, and thanks in part to cheap technology, sound art is less a samizdat activity and more obviously a community-minded experience, practiced in solitude but disseminated with ease. This exquisitely packaged release from Vienna’s Nonvisualobjects label, founded in 2005 by Heribert Friedl and Raphael Moser with the aim of focussing on ‘interpretations of minimalism in sound’ is a bumper compendium of hiss and fissures, environmental ambient, deep listening rhapsodies and deconstructed noises off. Presented in a numbered edition of just 500, the 22 pieces spread across two CDs alone are an attractive enough proposition. The 96 page hard-backed book which houses them inside its lavish but minimal design tells the black and white of it even more. By way of a grab-bag of interviews, testimonies, note-book jottings, drawings and photographs, each artist is afforded space to sketch out their practice