Coffee-Table Notes

Rebecca Ryan is pregnant again. At just twenty-one years old, the former star of council estate comedy drama Shameless has had more buns in the oven than most. The last time was during a two year stint on TV in Waterloo Road, in which Ryan's character, schoolgirl Vicky McDonald, became pregnant. Before that Ryan played a pregnant runaway in Laurence Wilson's stage play, Lost Monsters. Now it's the big one, as Ryan prepares to play Jo, the lippy Salford teenager in Shelagh Delaney's iconic 1958 play, A Taste of Honey, in the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh's new production of this iconic but somewhat neglected play. Ryan struts around the rehearsal room as Jo, tearing verbal chunks out of Lucy Black, who plays Jo's slatternly mother, Helen, her cardigan stretched by the pillow-like appendage stuffed under it. Watching Ryan, it could be an older version of Debbie Gallagher, the youngest of Shameless's tempestuous Gallagher clan brought vividly to life by write

“ The word that keeps coming back to me is connectivity,” says Hanna Tuulikki, the Glasgow-based sound artist and illustrator who puts her own voice at the centre of her practice. Tuulikki is talking about Air falbh leis na h-eòin, or Away With The Birds, an ambitious ongoing project based around Gaelic song and the vocal mimesis of the birds that circulate around the island of Canna, in the Inner Hebrides, where she has just returned from an intense development week working alongside the local community. At the new work’s heart is a new vocal composition which has already been performed by Tuulikki in a three-voice version shared with Nerea Bello and Lucy Duncombe at assorted work-in-progress events. With the long-term aim of performing Air falbh leis na h-eòin / Away with the birds in a nine-voice site-specific extravaganza on Canna itself, as well as Tuulikki, Bello and Duncombe, the piece already involves sound recordist Geoff Sample, film-maker Daniel Warren, choreographer Rosalin

It's taken a while for Stewart Laing to get Jean Genet's play, The Maids, onstage. Given that the director, Tony award winning designer and founder of Untitled Projects has made what might be dubbed the Penguin Modern Classics canon of French authors something of a specialism over the past few years, this comes as quite a surprise. At last, Laing's vision of Genet's power-play between two servants who act out their fantasy of killing their mistress is brought to the Citizens Theatre's main stage where Genet's work hasn't been seen since the 1980s. That was when Philip Prowse directed and designed Robert David Macdonald's translations of three Genet plays, The Balcony, The Blacks and The Screens. The Maids itself hasn't appeared in the Gorbals since Lindsay Kemp directed Tim Curry in the play back in 1971. Kemp was a long time admirer of Genet, and also produced Flowers, a seminal dance-theatre interpretation of Genet's novel, Our Lady of th

Theatrical agent, choreographer, dancer Born August 16 th 1945; died December 24 th 2012 Without Pat Lovett, who has died aged 67 after a long battle with emphysema, theatre, film and television in Scotland would be a much duller place. As the boss of Scotland's longest-standing acting agency, Lovett was a larger than life figure whose social flamboyance sat alongside a straight-talking steeliness when doing business. It was a skill she honed while working as a dancer on Ken Russell's 1971 feature film, The Boy Friend. As Equity rep, she was forced to square up to Russell after he'd perched his ensemble on a perilously high set of aeroplane wings. Lovett won the battle, as well as danger money for the company. It would hold her in good stead as the dynamic agent she became. Patricia Diane Lovett was born in Woolwich and grew up in Blackheath in South-East London, the youngest of three sisters to Fred and Irene, a seamstress. Fred, who flitted between stints a

Various venues 4 stars Fortune smiled on New Year’s Day events in Edinburgh this year, from an opening quasi-mystical invitational ritual that opened proceedings to the epic street theatre invocation of the dawn of time itself that closed it. Your Lucky Day was a smorgasbord of thirteen individual events that took place in assorted Old Town venues, but which was given a sense of cohesion by having the audience roll a dice to see where chance took them. Many of the events were drawn from twenty-first century renderings of folk and roots culture, with bite-size turns from Rachel Sermanni at the Tron Kirk, Shane Connolly and Alasdair Roberts’ take on eighteenth century mummers play, Galoshins, at the Scottish Storytelling Centre and country swing from Stretch Dawson and the Mending Hearts at the Roxy. Best of all was a sneak peek of Crows’ Bones, a luminous musical collaboration between Lau accordionist Martin Green, nykelharpist Niklas Roswall and the haunting voices of

Ross Bandstand, Edinburgh 4 stars Some bands really do have all the luck, as the line-up to see in 2013 in Edinburgh proved with an anthemic flourish this year. Local wannabes Bwani Junction kicked things off with a brand of intelligent and infectious African-tinged power-pop that was puppy-dog eager to please, but which in the end sounded more Big Country than Fela Kuti. The View too kept things straightforward, sounding somewhere between The Kinks if they'd sang about the Tay rather than the Thames, and 1960s novelty-jocks, Lord Rockingham's X1. It was left to a rejuvinated Simple Minds, though, to capture a full sense of triumphalism. Entering to their synthesiser dominated instrumental, Theme For Great Cities, original members Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill set the tone with a rapid-fire pre-bells triple whammy of Waterfront, Love Song and Celebrate. With Kerr basking in the shape-throwing beatific greatness of it all, it was a fabulous opening salvo for a widescreen

Golden jubilees don't come around often for artistic institutions, so it's somewhat edifying to see that Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre bursts into late middle age with little let-up in terms of developing new playwriting. Following new artistic director Orla O'Loughlin's inaugural season, the celebrations begin early in 2013 with 50 Plays For Edinburgh, an evening of 500-word long micro-plays inspired by the capital. The programme is the result of an open call for submissions from writers with no more than two professional stage productions to try and capture the essence of the city in as small a time as possible. Out of 630 entries, the fifty that were eventually chosen will receive a performance under the guidance of O'Loughlin and Traverse associate director Hamish Pirie, who initiated the idea and whose baby the project remains. Rather than simply providing a one-off showcase developed from a novel idea, however, 50 Plays For Edinburgh has more long-term