Coffee-Table Notes

There's a sense of wonder about Orla O'Loughlin when she talks. As the newly appointed artistic director of Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre winds her way deep into the bowels of Scotland's new writing theatre in search of a dressing room, it's as if she's applying the same geographical unfamiliarity to her brand new role in arguably the best theatre job in town. Everything, it seems, is an adventure. As well it might be. Unlike most of her predecessors, O'Loughlin has no track record working in Scotland's theatre scene, and, since her appointment in August 2011, has kept out of public view as she surveys the lay of the land before her.  “It did feel like I was being kept under wraps,” she says almost five months on after picking up the mantle left behind by the departure of Dominic Hill after four years to take over the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, “and I was allowed to walk freely in the streets, which was great.” Since then, while O'Lo

Tramway, Glasgow 3 stars  Four wooden structures occupy each corner of Tramway 5’s bijou space. Each box-like structure forms the skeletal frame of some half-built des-res that might change every day on a gap-site turned building-site and soon-come housing estate. While an installation by day, by night each one finds people curled up in the dark, living together or alone in a room of their own while the traffic roars and the birds sing outside.  This is the landscape mapped out in Theatre Arts Group’s devised exploration of a place that’s sometimes called home, a life in the day of a community isolated from each other both physically and existentially. As an audience of twenty navigate their way around, the seven performers drag their respective homes behind them, connecting them up as they greet the day, only occasionally engaging with each other.  A great deal of thought has clearly gone into Rachel Clive and Kirsty Stansfield’s production, which attempts the sort

How other people live is fascinating, and there are few better insights into what makes them tick than getting a look inside their homes. Where some might live in a four-walled fortress, others might prefer an open-plan outlook on the big bad world outside. Such notions of personal space formed one of the starting points for Moving in Houses, a new cross-artform piece of work devised and created by the experimentally inclined Theatre Arts Group, which plays for three nights in Tramway this week alongside an installation. Using sound, light, movement and above all else a sculptural form of architecture, Moving in Houses aims to explore the very notion of how we both define and interact with the immediate space around us. “We're working with four structures,” Theatre Arts Group writer/director Rachel Clive explains, “and the performers are relating to each of these structures, which represent different types of housing. One represents a terraced house, another a semi-d

There's a strange kind of magic happening at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. While not directly related to The Infamous Brothers Davenport, the biggest show to date from Jamie Harrison and Candice Edmunds' visually inventive Vox Motus company, the two incidents of unintentional jiggery-pokery are by-products worthy of Derren Brown. First of all, an old-school dictaphone resolutely refuses to record an interview with Harrison and Edmunds. Even when when fresh batteries are hastily located, the admittedly ancient micro-cassettes fail to whirr into action. The moment the interview, recorded ad hoc on a mobile phone, is over, the dictaphone starts working again, original batteries and all. This is apparently the second such incident to happen over the previous week as the company pull together a technically audacious concoction of old-time Victorian hokum and sibling rivalry scripted by Peter Arnott. Earlier at rehearsals, something infinitely less spooky but

When Martin McCardie visited Sanna Bay in Ardnamurchan, sex, drugs and rock roll weren't on the agenda. That unholy trinity were the subject matters requested after McCardie asked a young group of film makers what they wanted their work to be about. McCardie's experience of the most westerly point in mainland Britain made what became The Corkscrew Road something very different for Shooters, the community-based film-making wing of Spirit Aid, the humanitarian charity set up by actor/director David Hayman a decade ago. McCardie had come on board to advise on the nuts and bolts of film-making alongside Raindog director Stuart Davids, and what Shooters got instead was a poetic evocation of a lost childhood. With a soundtrack currently being scored by Edwyn Collins and former Superstar frontman Joe McAlinden (an old school-friend of the McCardies), and chip-off-the-old-block Davie Hayman Junior directing, The Corkscrew Road is the first of three McCardie-scripted coll

If the future of theatre in the cash-strapped times we’re living through is to find imaginative ways of working that won’t bust the bank, such an attitude needn’t stifle ambition. This should be evident in 2012 care of the two most anticipated home-grown Shakespeare productions for some time. As announced exclusively on these pages several weeks ago, Dominic Hill’s first season at the Citizens Theatre looks set to raise the bar high. As well as main-stage productions of Harold Pinter’s mid-period knee-trembler, Betrayal and a double bill of Beckett miniatures, Hill lets rip with a production of King Lear. The sheer scale of Shakespeare’s epic is a gift to Hill, whose facility with big stages is presumably what got him the gig. Throw in the casting of David Hayman in the title role, and you have a fully-fledged event. Hayman, of course, was the mercurial break-out star the 1970s golden era Citz, courting controversy as a career-defining Hamlet and Lady Macbeth before e

Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh 4 stars There was a sense of past meeting present at Edinburgh’s 2011/12 Concert in the Gardens. If local band competition winners Mike Norris and the Moon play around with the sort of polite folksy stylings that are oddly de rigeur just now, the abrasive urgency and sparring male/female vocals of Sons and Daughters could easily be mistaken for early 1980s post-punk provocateurs The Au Pairs. Bombay Bicycle Club vocalist Jack Steadman, meanwhile, has the pitch of the late New York ambient classicist Arthur Russell if he’d formed an indie band. It’s left to Primal Scream to really kick-start proceedings, with scarlet-shirted frontman Bobby Gillespie launching into the southern soul of Movin’ On Up, the opening track of Primal Scream’s era-defining 1991 album, Screamadelica, with the mad-eyed self-possession of a Glasgow street brawler by way of a punk/rave John The Baptist. While they don’t play the full album as advertised, the selected