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Vanishing Point - The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler

The squall of feedback that pierces across the auditorium of Eden Court Theatre in Inverness may only last a few seconds, but, it’s enough to cause a brief commotion among anyone in the room. The cast and band are in the thick of rehearsals for The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler, Vanishing Point theatre company’s impressionistic music homage to the Glasgow-born poet, singer and stalwart of the late John Peel’s radio programme, which - quite literally - speaks volumes. Cutler was, after all, a member of the Noise Abatement Society, and claimed to loathe amplified music in all forms. The feedback is a consequence of a late-running sound-check caused by a piano’s exterior splintering in a way that rendered it unusable. A replacement piano found at short notice, a piano tuner was also required to before work could proceed. The band is led my musical director James Fortune, and includes multi-instrumentalist and recipient of a Herald Little Devil award Nick Pynn. Pynn, who

Chris Corsano - Edinburgh Man

Time was that if you lived in Edinburgh it felt like you could see drummer Chris Corsano play live pretty much any night of the week. During his time living in the capital in the mid to late noughties, the New England-sired drummer whose collaborators range from former Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore to free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker was a ubiquitous figure here. Having hooked up with the city's fecund Noise scene, shows ranged from teaming up with assorted affiliates of the Giant Tank disorganisation, to duos with pedal steel vixen Heather Leigh Murray or bass player Massimo Pupillo of Italian power trio, Zu, to taking part in Arika's Resonant Spaces project. All this while touring the world with Bjork, whose Volta album Corsano appeared on. One particularly busy couple of weeks in 2007 saw Corsano play Edinburgh with female Noise duo Hockyfrilla, another Edinburgh date in a duo with former Geraldine Fibbers and Evangelista vocalist Carla Bozulich, supportin

This May Hurt A Bit

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars It's a strange sensation, hearing an actor open Max Stafford-Clark's production of Stella Feehily's impassioned call to arms to save the NHS with Socialist firebrand Aneurin Bevan's speech that launched this most treasured of institutions in 1948. A politician with ideals and integrity is such a rarity these days that it can't help but sound heroic. This is the case too watching a piece of political agit-prop, a form which not that long ago was considered to be passe, but which now appears to have been reborn for the age of austerity with a vigorous sense of righteous urgency. This is with good cause, as Feelihy proves in the play's central tale of one family's travails after their 90 year old mother Iris has a stroke. A sadly familiar story of over-crowded and understaffed hospital wards is punctuated by a series of sketch-like interludes, as Bevan and Winston Churchill step out of the audience to form a d

Best of the Village Pub Theatre

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars For the last couple of years, an ever expanding group of writers, actors and directors have set up shop in a pub function room in Leith to showcase their work at a series of lo-fi monthly events. Every night last week, Edinburgh's original home of new writing has hosted a set of similar events presented by the team behind the Village Pub Theatre in a way that suggests VPT has quietly become a significant force on the theatre scene. As a grand finale to the week, Saturday night saw script in hand presentations of eight works previously seen at the company's regular home alongside a series of quick-fire Twitter plays, with each one using no more than 160 letters. There was an end of term feel to proceedings as VPT founders, writer James Ley and director Caitlin Skinner, introduced the evening, which began with Morna Pearson's Of The Green Kind, a look at the effect an invading alien has on three very different young women.

Sam Halmarack & The Miserablites

The Arches, Glasgow Four stars There must be few things more dispiriting for a band if no-one turns out to see them play. But what if the band themselves don't turn up, leaving just the possibly deluded singer to bare his soul? No, this isn't the latest exercise in social engineering by The Fall's Mark E Smith, but is the premise of Bristol-based performer Sam Halmarack's hour-long dissection of pop mythology in miniature. There is no rise or fall here, only the bitter-sweet taste of never making it to cling to for comfort. Somehow, however, by getting the audience to join in on rudimentary glockenspiel, drums and keyboards as instructed by a home-made rehearsal video, Halmarack snatches triumph from adversity in a way that gives the Arches chair-stripped studio theatre the power of a stadium. On one level, surrounded by an array of space-age silver instruments, Halmarack comes over like an electro-pop John Shuttleworth. Yet, in his gold track-suit top and

Stuart Paterson - Cars and Boys

Stuart Paterson never meant to write Cars and Boys, his new play which opens at Dundee Rep next week in a production by the Rep's artistic director, Philip Howard. The prolific playwright and screenwriter whose numerous Christmas plays are a staple of the festive theatre circuit had been working on another piece, which, by his own admission, “was going nowhere, and this one sort of crept up on me. I was going to the theatre a lot, and not really enjoying it. I saw plenty of ideas there, but what I wanted to do was something that was simple and human, and that wasn't just about words and dialogue, but was more about the sound of words as well.” Cars and Boys tells the story of Catherine Miller, the ageing matriarch of a big-time haulage company who has been calling the shots all of her life. Even after she suffers a stroke and is confined to a hospital bed, it seems, Catherine is determined to take charge of everyone and everything around her. “It's about the li

Stella Feehily - This May Hurt A Bit

When theatre director Max Stafford-Clark suffered a massive stroke in 2006, his artistic and personal partner, playwright Stella Feehily, became the theatrical firebrand and former artistic director of the Traverse Theatre's full-time carer. Eight years on, the accidental result of this is This May Hurt A Bit, an angry, funny and utterly humane dissection of the NHS in light of the Westminster coalition government's ongoing attempt to destroy one of the UK's greatest assets. “We used the NHS regularly,” says Feehily, whose play arrives at the Traverse next week in a production by a recovered Stafford-Clark for Out of Joint, the company he co-founded in 1998. “We had the patient experience, the near death experience and the chaos experience. We've seen the food, the bad, and not the ugly, but pretty close, but I would never have thought about writing a play about the NHS without that experience.” This May Hurt A Bit charts the experience of an elderly patient