Coffee-Table Notes

Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh Thu January 29th Five stars “This song is side 1, track 3 of our new album in case anybody's not heard it yet,” drawls Davy Henderson from behind Factory-issue shades introducing the wiggy wonders of his song, 'Kevin Ayers'.  The joke being, of course, that unless the mystery bidder who paid £4,213 in an eBay auction for the sole vinyl copy of the Sexual Objects' second long-player, Marshmallow, is in the room, none of the hundred or so mixture of the faithful, the curious and the recently converted squeezed into Sneaky Pete's bijou confines are likely to have heard a note of it. The punchline of this conceptual gag is made even better by Henderson's louche delivery and baroque phrasing. As with all his between-song asides, this  makes him sound like a charisma-blessed distant relation of 1970s TV gangster Charles Endell Esq doing a Lou Reed stand-up routine. Which, even without the songs, is sheer performative joy. This Thursday nig

Three stars D. Gwalia has cut a shadowy figure around the unsung sidelines of Edinburgh's myriad of low-key music scenes. Originally from Wales before taking a peripatetic path to Oxford, Gwalia's cracked folk and strung-out gothica was first heard on his 2010 debut, 'In Puget Sound.' This follow-up digital-only release charts even starker terrain in a bleak compendium of scratched-out song collages and apocalyptic portents which conjure up the strung-out ghosts of post Pink Floyd Syd Barrett at his most insular, all whimsy lost. This is most evident on the opening 'A Day Out', in which a sparse but insistent electric guitar pattern is eked out behind a Mogadon choir-boy vocal. 'Vamp', which follows, is Bauhaus' 'Dark Entries' rewritten for the troubadour age. A martial drum-beat adds to the mood of 'Annihilation Pair' before ushering in the muffled spoken-word narration of the album's title track, which sounds like free-as

When Creative Scotland announced their regular funding decisions towards the end of last year, it showed just how much Scotland’s arts funding quango hasn’t changed since the appointment of a new set of administrators following the departure of its previous incumbents at the end of 2012. While the decisions highlighted justified winners, including the likes of Vanishing Point and Grid Iron theatre companies, as well as contemporary music producers Arika, 28 organisations who received funding in 2014-15 were declined regular funding for 2015-18. Those who missed out included Scottish Youth Theatre and Untitled Productions, whose show Paul Bright’s Confessions of A Justified Sinner has been lauded at home and abroad. Untitled have announced that the company is being left dormant for the foreseeable future, while Scottish Youth Theatre is to receive funding directly from the Scottish Government for the next three years, in the run-up to Scotland’s Year of Young People

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars “A little illumination always brings more light.” So says the puppet-sized music hall ham who's just tunelessly regaled us in Autumn Portraits, Eric Bass' meditative compendium on mortality for the American Sandglass Theater. Bass' show was the quietly grand finale of Wednesday's programme for this year's Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival, in which illumination came in spades. The evening opened with a double bill of work by two very different companies. The first, Unchained, saw the aerialist duo Paper Doll Militia in a black and white world where one of them is encased in a tent-like cage which is raised ever higher as their boiler-suited other half cuts through the ribbon-like bars to rescue them. Set to a clanging industrial score, the pair become mirror images of each other in an exquisite physical display before the tables are truly turned. This was followed by an extended version of Tristissimo, a contemporary int

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars Whatever the facts behind this week's announcement that novelist Harper Lee is set to publish Go Set a Watchman, a novel presumed lost for fifty-five years and featuring a grown-up version of Scout Finch, the narrator of her much-loved debut, there is no better time to stage To Kill A Mockingbird. Especially when it is such a poignantly evocative take on Lee's story as it is here in Timothy Sheader's touring production, which visits Edinburgh and Aberdeen following this week's Glasgow run of a piece originally produced by the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre in London. It opens with twelve actors lining the stage wearing modern dress, reading the opening pages of Lee's novel in their own accents from the books held open before them. As each steps in and out of character, lining either side of Jon Bausor's wide-open set throughout as Luke Potter plays his live acoustic guitar score, this opens out Lee's treatise o

King's Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars Property developers take note. Be careful who you cut deals with, both in business and pleasure, or else you might end up like the hapless pair at the centre of Peter James' best-selling thriller, adapted here by Shaun McKenna and directed by Ian Talbot for a stage version co-produced by James himself. One minute Michael and Mark are making a cool five million, which they've carefully lodged in a Caymans Island account while shooting the breeze concerning Michael's impending nuptials to Tina Hobley's drop-dead gorgeous Ashley. The next, Michael finds himself six feet under in the local forest after an elaborate stag night prank goes tragically awry. Enter James' regular copper in chief Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who just made the headlines after putting faith in a doting but underwritten Medium rather than foraging for clues the old-fashioned way. With his sidekick DS Branson in tow, Gray O'Brien

When Bob Carlton first devised a late-night rock and roll show with the actors he was working with  in a tent run by a London fringe theatre company, he never thought that its mix of science-fiction, Shakespeare and a live band would have a life beyond its short run. As it is, Return to the Forbidden Planet  is about to embark on a twenty-fifth anniversary tour which touches down in Glasgow next week and Edinburgh shortly afterwards. The latest outing of this commercial smash-hit may be commemorating its Olivier Award winning West End run, but it already had a colourful life, first at the London Bubble Theatre, then later at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, when Carlton revived it in 1984. “I never thought it would go on so long,” says Carlton today of a show inspired by 1950s sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet, which was inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest. “I went to do a show at the Bubble, which was then being run by Glen Walford, and once we'd done the main show, we started