Coffee-Table Notes

Sound Festival @ The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen Saturday November 11 th Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stands in peri-wigged triumph. Towards the end of what's billed as 'an electronic essay collage opera', the shades-sporting eighteenth century composer looks every inch the glam-tastic pop star he was, living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful body of work. For the last hour or so, Mozart has been squaring up to Raymond Scott, one of the great-grand-daddies of twentieth century electronic music, whose experiments with gadgets and gizmos saw him invent what he called the Electronium, which was arguably the world's first self-composing synthesiser. The future would have sounded a lot different without Scott's pioneering work, and Bob Moog,who worked with him prior to inventing the epoch-changing Moog synthesiser, cited his former employer as a major influence. Here, Scott's inventions open up a wormhole in time that sees Mozart take a leap into a future that allo

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow Four stars It could be anywhere, the sparse expanse of beach littered with washed-up detritus that covers the stage throughout Jack Nurse's revival of Anders Lustgarten's quietly impassioned plea for humanity. As the title of Lustgarten's play makes clear, it is actually the Italian island that is the gateway to Europe for migrants attempting to flee Syria and other places. It is also where Andy Clark's grim-faced fisherman Stefano is employed to scoop up the drowned bodies of those who didn't make it. Closer to home, in a northern English town on the other side of the world, Anglo-Chinese student Denise attempts to make ends meet as a debt collector for a payday loan company. Louise Mai Newberry's Denise is smart enough to understand how poverty and prejudice work, but is herself trapped by her mother's incapacity. As Lustgarten's twin monologues weave across each other, the connections between the two become painf

Glasgow Film Theatre, November 6th Five stars The London East End laid bare in Italian film-maker Lorenza Mazetti’s fascinating 52 minute piece of post World War Two poetic realism looks a far cry from the gentrified hipster’s paradise it would become half a century later. Dating from 1956, the novelty of seeing the film now as part of a UK tour promoted by the Bo'ness-based Hippodrome Film Festival, who commissioned a new live score by contemporary improvisers Raymond MacDonald and Christian Ferlaino, is the presence of the then unknown Leith-born artist Eduardo Paolozzi. In his only acting role, the then thirty-two year old Paolozzi appears alongside painter Michael Andrews as a pair of deaf dockers navigating their way through the blitz-battered streets. Here, gangs of children mock the men's silence with delighted cruelty, while the pair remain oblivious to the everyday noises of the pub, market and fun fair. As a double act, where Andrews lean-ness reflects his outgoing d

It was fifty years ago this year that the so-called summer of love burst forth with a wave of hippy idealism played out to a psychedelic soundtrack. In the UK, much of the activity sprang from the coming together of counter-cultural forces two years earlier at the International Poetry Incarnation. Held at the Royal Albert Hall, this iconic event put American beat poet Allen Ginsberg at the top of the bill of some of the finest (male) minds of his generation. Immortalised on film by Peter Whitehead's short documentary film, released the same year, the IPA subsequently spawned numerous Happenings, where psych-rock bands, triptastic light shows and freaky dancing set the template for high times to come. Barry Miles, who worked at Better Books, where the idea for the IPA was hatched, saw the possibility for a magazine to help disseminate all the alternative ideas that were brewing around sex, drugs and rock and roll. The result of this was International Times, or IT, a playful and

When Jonathan Lloyd decided to direct a production of Caryl Churchill's play, Love and Information, with final year students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's unique three year BA Performance in British Sign Language and English degree, he knew it wasn't an obvious choice. On the one hand, the recently installed director of Solar Bear theatre company had a group of performers who all define themselves as deaf or D/deaf (more of the latter definition later), who would be embarking on their first ever tour of professional venues. This would showcase the company's talents with maximum exposure beyond the relatively safe confines of the academic environment. On the other, Lloyd had selected a play looking at the information age, but which, over its fifty short scenes, is seriously open to interpretation. With no stage directions or any indication of setting or character names, the result of this is a tantalising production performed by a cast of ten in a mix of Br

Theatre Royal, Glasgow Four stars When the editorial team behind a mould-breaking satirical magazine go over the top at the end of the first act of Ian Hislop and Nick Newman's play, as heroic gestures go, it's no joke. This is World War One, after all, and the merry pranksters from an ad hoc zine called The Wipers Times are on the frontline of battle in the Belgian town no-one can pronounce. Given that the men are genuinely going over the top and into battle, casualties are considerably higher than the occasional suit for libel. Led by rebellious officers Fred Roberts and Jack Pearson, the magazine allows a rare voice for good-natured if at times scurrilous dissent on the trenches, and acts as an inadvertent morale booster. The bad guys, of course, are the office-bound pen-pushers and top brass bureaucrats, represented here by Sam Ducane’s cartoon toff, Lieutenant Colonel Howfield. While it never totally transcends its TV roots, the play's sit-com style scenes ar

The Mash House, Edinburgh Monday November 6th There’s nothing remotely flabby about Wire, the wilfully singular accidental veterans of the so-called punk wars, who recently insisted on Marc Riley’s BBC 6Music A-Z of Punk that they categorically weren’t punk at all. Given that the metal machine music of this year’s Silver/Lead album sounds as driven and as purposeful as any of their initial trilogy of 1977-79 albums, you can see their point. Live, the band's original core trio of Colin Newman, bassist Graham Lewis and drummer Robert Grey, plus guitarist Matthew Simms, take no prisoners, and never play to type. This is the case from the curiously rock star-like head-wear of Lewis and chief vocalist and guitarist Newman - a flat cap and a trucker’s cap respectively - to the stoic refusal to play almost anything resembling ‘the hits’. As the ipad perched on Newman's mic stand, from which he reads his lyrics suggests, Wire are as twenty-first century as it gets. This doesn&#