It was a good week on my favourite jazz programme last week.  Each of the five Open Jazz broadcasts was entirely given over to recordings that Duke Ellington made for Columbia Records between 1951 and 1961. I particularly enjoyed the hour in which his Shakespeare inspired compositions featured.

The music played was from the umpteen LPs Ellington produced which are now available on two CD box sets.  The obvious tunes are there, some in various versions, as well as lesser known pieces.

All these programmes as well as many more are available on the Open Jazz website.  In contrast to the BBC which gives you 30 days to listen to a broadcast after it has gone out Radio France gives you nearly three years so there's no rush.

As well as presenting a well attended and well appreciated Christmas concert this year the Dunedin Wind Band had another and arguably more exciting gig.

We were invited to be part of the general frenzy accompanying the opening of the new Star Wars movie.  Six bands around the UK turned up at their local Vue cinema and played while audiences poured in to see the film.  Naturally we played Stars Wars music and I assume the other bands did the same but we played other film music as well to fill out our hour.  Nonetheless the Star Wars stuff was repeated several times and I'm pleased to report that my fingers got progressively more nimble while never quite mastering it all.

Apparently all the bands were being videoed and a composite video is to be produced, to what end I'm not terribly sure.  To appear on screens throughout the country?  Perhaps national fame awaits but my immediate reward was a free cinema ticket and a bucket of popcorn.

I bought an Evening News the following day to see if our fame had at least reached Holyrood Road but there was no mention.  However the Daily Record and the Scottish Sun had a better nose for such an important news story and this picture is nicked from one of them.  My tiny head is positioned just where the tips of the conductor's baton and the cinema manager's pointy thing meet.

The absence of posts to this blog over the last few weeks is not due to my having been floating around in space but I just happened to catch the arrival of three new astronauts at the international space station this evening and here they are gathered together in the Russian kitchen for a welcoming photo session with the three others who were already on board.

It is unfortunately a little bit out of focus ( I've got one that's even worse) but they were goodness knows how many thousands of miles away and I took the picture from Earth thanks to an excellent event organised by the Edinburgh Science Festival at the museum.

Here's the crowd in the big hall watching the big screen.  We were treated to a video of this morning's launch and amazing shots from inside the Soyuz and then some of the tricky docking procedure, made trickier on this occasion because the automatic system didn't work so they had to guide it into place manually.  An astronaut who had already spent time in the station, Samantha Cristoforetti, was on hand in the museum for an interview and two ladies from the European Space Agency answered lots of  questions as we watched the live broadcast from the station waiting for all the multitude of techie things that needed to be sorted out before the hatch separating the Soyuz from the station was opened and the three new crew members swam weightlessly into view.  It was brilliant.

Much of the audience left at this point but those who stayed on, of whom I was one, then saw a film called The Martian about an astronaut being marooned on Mars, his struggle for survival and eventual rescue.  It wasn't a bad film but I'd have enjoyed it more if the acoustics in the grand hall had not distorted most of the dialogue.

At least it was not as grim a story as Sunset Song which I saw in the afternoon.   It's decades since I read the book but I don't remember the story being as relentlessly dreich as this was.  The book is still on my shelves so maybe I should revisit it to check.

So if I haven't been out in space or spaced out what explains the lack of posts.  Lack of dedication.  I resolve to do better. 

Is this taking protection from sports injuries too far?

When I went to see King Charles III the other day there were small screens on either side of the stage informing me that this would be a captioned performance and explaining that "Captioning makes the performance accessible to people who are deaf, deafened or hard of hearing."

Well I've no quarrel with that provision but the inclusion of the word "deafened" rather puzzled me.  Were they drawing a distinction between those born deaf and those who had become or been made deaf later in life?  Or did it mean that there would be loud bangs during the show that would deafen us momentarily?  There were no such noises so it wasn't that.

I remain to be enlightened.  Don't all shout at once, just in case. 

There was an item on the radio this morning about the success that the play King Charles III is currently having on Broadway.  This was attributed not only to the Americans' interest in (or even fascination about) our Royals but to the resonance the play has with the American foundation story.

According to the radio some factions would have not have fought against Britain had the King overruled the parliament's taxation of the colonies as they requested and the veto powers of the US president are a reflection of that.  That's what the play is about.  The King and Parliament at odds and I just happened to see it last night.

I knew nothing about it before I went apart from what the five stars puffs on the publicity told me and those I always regard as undoubtedly partial.  It's a fine production in many ways.  I particularly enjoyed the very theatrical opening when the cast come on dressed in black, carrying candles and start singing the Agnus Dei in Latin.  We are at the obsequies for the late Queen.

When they started to speak English I was a bit puzzled until I realised it was blank verse.  So it's mock Shakespeare then?  Well no, I'm sure the writer had no intention of mocking the Bard.  Like mock Tudor it's admiration and of course Shakespeare's history plays are all about Kingship and the relationships within royal ranks and power and whatnot.  This play is billed as a future history and it's very much done in a Shakespearean style and staging.

The language didn't always sit easily in my ear.  The Kate Middleton character for instance frequently addresses William as "husband".  To me that just sounded foolishly archaic.  Nor would I call any of 
the soliloquies poetic but it's an interesting listen.

The stalls were half empty, perhaps reflecting a lack of much interest in the monarchy amongst younger theatregoers because the audience had a greyish tinge. Whatever the reason it didn't help the atmosphere and a few guffaws broke out at one or two more melodramatic moments that do well in Macbeth or Hamlet but here required more suspension of disbelief than this audience was willing or able to summon up.

The final scene is a coronation and like the opening it's very theatrical and brings a sense of power and majesty to the climax of the play.

Seats in the Festival theatre are not very comfortable. That doesn't bother me when I'm fully engaged with a show but last night I had more than a touch of numb bum.

But the critics' bums are not in tune with mine as you'll see from this review and many others. Maybe the original cast would have done it for me but they're wowing audiences on Broadway.

It always seems to rain when I go to Glasgow but since it was raining here on Saturday I was no worse off.  I went over to attend the concert celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and an afternoon concert by the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra.

Here they are in the beautifully appointed but somewhat unimaginatively named New Auditorium of the Royal Concert Hall.

It was an excellent hour and a bit.  These people are amazing players showing, as Tommy said, that the future is bright.

I had rather too many hours to spare before going to the City Halls and since wandering around in the rain didn't sound like fun I lingered in a music shop for a while, visited three branches of WH Smith, bought a book and used it to space out a very tasty meal of tiger prawns in a yummy sauce followed by sea-bass on spicy lentils.

That still left a little time on my hands but as crossed town I came across this disintegrating queue of disconsolate punters who had been too late to profit from the free food distribution that had emptied the white lorry.

Now the food being given away was boxes of doughnuts so I suspect this was a publicity stunt rather than famine relief or a food bank.  It could have been modern art I suppose given what I've recently seen at Tramway and what I came across next as I passed the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, known as GOMA to its friends (of whom I count myself one).

These neon signs are part of Real Life Scotland which is extensively and persuasively explained here.  Someone could usefully write up the Turner entries in the same comprehensible manner.    

The concert when I got to it was brilliant, one of the best SNJO gigs I've been to.  It was wholly dedicated to the Glenn Miller catalogue.  The band all looked as though they had been dressed by the same tailor as Miller, handkerchiefs peeking out of breast pockets and sleeked down hair.  They didn't throw their instruments in the air as you can see the originals do in this Youtube clip but they did pop up and down and perform synchronised moves in the manner of the time. They had also recruited some young singers from the Conservatoire to play the part of the Modernaires which they did with aplomb.

The music and the playing was wonderful.

I have to say the same about the SCO concert I went to this afternoon.  It was totally different music of course and a totally different set up.  This was chamber music; a string sextet and some clarinet and piano trios.  All music that was new to me and which I really enjoyed.  Here's one of the beautiful trios courtesy of Youtube. 

A well deserved four star review for the Grads production of Wildest Dreams by the prolific and perceptive Alan Ayckbourn which I saw last night and enjoyed very much.

The four short-listed contenders for the Turner prize are to be seen at Tramway in Glasgow. Andrew and I were there yesterday and after fortifying ourselves with some so-called Scottish tapas and half a litre of red cantered round. This is the corner of a room containing several similar groups of fur-coated chairs.  

We didn't immediately grasp the meaning of this work. Indeed Andrew dismissed it as "all fur coat and no knickers" so we sought enlightenment in the descriptive poster. 

Going with the spirit of its wobbly word order I suspect that many vintage women, and vintage men too, will consider this to be vintage art-speak that sheds little light. Perhaps it is as clear as day to the non-vintage social media generation.

It was nice to get back over the rainswept M8 to some recognisably worthwhile art, albeit musical art, with the SCO's joyous romp through Sibelius's Third Symphony.   

I've been too idle to keep things up to date and don't have the time or energy to write reviews in extenso but I like to keep a record so here's a list with mini comments.

Hidden was the Young Lyceum's party piece and although I didn't always know what they were on about it provided a fascinating tour of the theatre building from under the stage to the gods.

Pictures at an Exhibition is one of my favourite pieces of music but I don't reckon much to the pictures that inspired it.

An afternoon spent helping to sort out the Grads costume store was as exciting as it sounds.  Only marginally more exciting has been persuading audiences leaving the Lyceum and the Traverse to take a flyer advertising our production of Ayckbourn's Wildest Dreams that opened tonight.

I was caught out by the clock change and arrived at the Assembly Rooms an hour too early to hear Mary Beard promoting SPQR, her history of the Roman Republic.  I whiled away the time with a glass and a snack so it wasn't too much of a pain and Ms Beard was worth the wait though I didn't buy the book.

The last A Play, a pie and a pint offering was an excellent little comedy in which we saw how Dr Johnson despite his avowed aversion to Scotland needed five Scottish assistants to put his dictionary together.

Red Army is an absolutely brilliant documentary about a soviet ice hockey team.  Don't miss it. It's about much more than the game.

Sicario is typical Hollywood action movie fare.  There's lot of blood and explosions and shoot outs and I really don't think anyone should bother to see it.  What was I thinking of?

Tipping the Velvet at the Lyceum has been showered with five star reviews and it's very well done although the story didn't float my boat very high.  It was nice to see the theatre set up for music hall, quite reminded me of Kitwe.

You'd think that advertising a world premiere would draw the crowds but concert audiences tend to like what they know so The Queen's Hall was half empty for an SCO evening that featured not only 12 minutes of brand new Finnish stuff but a 38 minute UK premiere of some obscure Sibelius.  Maybe they knew and disliked the third work which was a violin concerto by Nielson but they missed a notably interesting evening.

The poster for Scottish Opera's Carmen featured her in a blood red outfit but that was nowhere to be seen on stage.  Not much could be seen because they played the whole thing in semi darkness. I was disappointed.

I'm not sure what drew me to the launch of Alice Thompon's latest novel but I got a glass of wine out of it and a wee chat with my German teacher and her husband who happened to be there.  I've never read any of her stuff and had only a vague memory of what I'd read about her work so I asked which book she'd recommend for starters and have since bought The Existential Detective.  It's set in Portobello so I'm almost bound to enjoy it.

There's a French film festival in town and I saw three films at the weekend. SK1 is a not very wonderful police procedural based on real life events redeemed for me by an excellent performance by Adama Niane as the baddie.  The Silence of the Sea probably deserves respect as a precursor of the Nouvelle Vague and for its various technical innovations but it wasn't very entertaining.  The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun on the other hand was super entertainment.  The lady in question borrows her boss's car without permission and sets off to spend the weekend on the Riviera.  We follow her progress into a weird chain of events that gets quite creepy at times.  I loved it and was delighted to learn that the leading lady is not only an Edinburgh girl but James Bridie's great granddaughter.

In between films I enjoyed a non bonfire night party featuring food, drink and chat. 

The first of the current  A Play, a Pie and a Pint shows that I saw was the story of a young African trainee teacher in Glasgow preparing a display about Mary's Meals.  It seemed to me more of a straight plug for the charity than a story.  The second character was a school handyman whose part in the action was to feed her lines that enabled her to lay forth about some wonderful aspect of  the charity.  There was a tiny sub-plot about her going in for some DJ competition but it was all a bit didactic.  I expected a plea for funds or a leaving collection but strangely there was no such thing although the Traverse was plastered with posters and leaflets about Mary's Meals. It does seem to be a very worthwhile charity and of course has a connection with blogging given the wee stooshie about the school dinners blog so I have to at the very least contribute by directing you to its website.

This week's offering was I suppose didactic in its way, in that we were taught something.  But the teaching was more skilfully embedded in a work of art. We saw a man develop dementia, its effect on him and on his wife and daughter.  We learnt something about the disease and about the human spirit. Descent by Linda Duncan McLaughlin was an excellent piece, very well performed and very moving.

I found Martyr, in which a young man spouts fundamentalist religious views by quoting from a holy book, rather irritating.  But who would not be irritated by a constant stream of biblical quotations, for it's that holy book not the other one.

But it's a modern play from Germany and we don't see many of them so I tried hard to appreciate it.  Unfortunately, and unlike the majority of critics I didn't.

It's about an hour's walk from my flat to the Modern Art Gallery via the Water of Leith but it's a pleasant way of stretching your legs provided it's not raining so that's the route I took to the Roy Lichtenstein exhibition the other day.

As I usually do when passing through Stockbridge I checked that my bell pull of fifty years ago had not been interfered with.

It's still resisting the winds of change as are those of the neighbours but a little tarnished looking. I'll have to take a tin of Brasso with me next time.

That would surprise the current occupiers.

There were a number of Lichtenstein works that were not the comic book images that I associate with him.  They were stylistically similar though and I liked them.  So much so that I lashed out three quid on some postcards which I have framed and added to my own little corridor gallery.

On the comic book image front there was something very interesting.  The gallery owns a piece called “In the Car” that they paid £100,000 for in 1980.  In a case in the room in which it was being displayed they had a copy of the image he used as a source. In the case there was also a quote from Lichtenstein – “ My work is actually different from the comic strips in that every mark is really in a different place, however slight the difference seems to some.  The difference is often not great, but it is crucial.”

I’m one of those to whom the differences seem slight and don’t seem to add £99,999.50 to what was probably the price of the comic. But there you are, that’s the mystery of art.
 

This Wikipedia article has pictures of both the comic and the painting so judge for yourself.  It also has the interesting information that another copy of the painting (a smaller one) was sold for $16.2 million ten years ago so it looks like our hundred grand was a good investment.

Septimo was the third of the Spanish film festival offerings that I saw.  A father sets off to take his children to school.  He takes the lift down from the seventh floor of their apartment building.  The kids run down the stairs.  Who will be first to the bottom?  It's their regular game but this time when daddy arrives at street level no children are to be seen.  The film is a kidnapping drama with its fair share of blind alleys and hopeful leads.  There's a little twist but it's a pretty conventional piece, entertaining enough and with nice shots of Buenos Aires.

Irrational Man was unconventional in as much as it was a Woody Allen movie in which he didn't appear as an anguished out of luck pursuer of the fair sex.  But he had a proxy.  I largely shared the critics' verdict of underwhelming but it was a decent journeyman product and the baddie got his comeuppance.

The wrongdoing of the protagonist in 99 Homes is overturned by the end of the film although in his case it's more a question of his innate goodness rising from the depths to which he has sunk.  This was an excellent, gripping tale of how a young man, evicted from his home thanks to nasty bankers wanting their money aided and abetted by a hardboiled estate agent/property speculator and desperate to get his home back, becomes an evictor himself.  Natch he loses the love and respect of his family in the process, suffers inner turmoil etc.  Eventually he sees the light and makes a heroic return to save a fellow suburbanite from homelessness.  Sounds banal, but a very good film.

And then a very good play performed well nigh to perfection by Bill Paterson and Brian Cox celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Lyceum Company with Becket's Waiting for Godot.  I saw several productions in the first couple of years after Tom Fleming took on the Lyceum in 1965 but can't say any have sprung to mind so far but I've ordered a copy of the book they've produced about those fifty years and look forward to having my memory prompted.

I've seen Waiting for Godot several times, not least a Kitwe production, though the one that sticks in my memory as being excellent was a previous Lyceum production.  This one seemed to bring out more comedy at the expense of its pessimism about existence.

There was nothing pessimistic about a wine and munchies get-together at the weekend where as well as being drunk the wines were scored by the participants and the person whose wine got the highest marks was rewarded with the accumulated differences between the price paid for each wine and the upper price limit of ten quid.  I didn't win but my wine was the best all the same.

The RSNO started off their new season with a big powerful work, Mahler's 2nd Symphony, known as the Resurrection.  When in the finale orchestra, chorus and soloists are all giving it laldy it raises the rafters and the spirits.

There are no rafters in the Usher Hall but there do seem to be new seats in the stalls.  They are pretty much carbon copies of the previous seats with one user friendly difference.  You used to see punters trying to find their seats bending down and peering at the underside seat numbers though even from that attitude they were almost unreadable.  The cognoscenti meanwhile would stroll along the row and place their ticket in front of the little golden plate and by some miracle of physics the number could be read effortlessly from a standing position.  Now bold black digits can be picked out instantly by anyone.

I'm not a great fan of the organ but amongst the works that I do like is Poulenc's Organ Concerto which I first heard at Snape Maltings while I was working in Norwich over twenty-five years ago.  I've seldom heard it live since so when I saw it was being played at Greyfriars I went along and enjoyed it very much.  I also enjoyed another piece that I've added to the small group of organ works that thrill me.  This was a very powerful and intense concerto by Kenneth Leighton. 

The beautiful organ of Greyfriars church

There's a Spanish film festival on in Edinburgh at the moment.  There are about a dozen films of which I have now seen two and will unfortunately see only one more. 

Everyone has heard of Federico Lorca, Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel and a number of other men known collectively as the generation of '27 but that generation also contained a number of female intellectuals whose names are hardly known to the Spanish never mind the rest of us.  Las Sinsombrero is a documentary designed to open our eyes to eight of those women writers and artists.  It was an extremely interesting and enlightening film and is part of a larger project to bring those women and others back into the place they properly should occupy in Spanish cultural history.

Magical Girl could hardly be a greater contrast.  This feature film is the story of how the father of a young girl who is dying of leukemia sets out to satisfy his daughter's fascination with a Japanese manga character by buying her a dress and wand like the one illustrated below.

You sit back and relax thinking this will be a warm-hearted, moving little film that will bring a lump to your throat and may even require recourse to a tissue or two.  No such thing.  It turns out to be a much darker movie altogether involving blackmail, sadism and other nasty stuff.  I thought it was a great film but don't want to give too much away so keep a look out for it.

The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil took Scotland by storm in 1973 and played all over the country.  I didn't see it.  There was a TV version.  There was a radio version.  I didn't see them.  The show was revived to great acclaim in a tent on the Meadows in the 90s.  I didn't see that.  Nor did I see any of the occasional amateur productions that have taken place.  Well, I didn't know about them.

So when I opened the i in the train on my way to Oban and read that Dundee Rep were about to put it on I was delighted.  Here at last was a opportunity that I was not going to let pass to see what had become a legend of Scottish theatre.  I checked seat availability from the Mull ferry and was so busy emailing potential companions for a trip to Dundee that I didn't notice we had docked at Craignure and had to fight my way at speed through a swarm of boarding passengers for fear of missing the bus to Tobermory.

Emailing disappointingly resulted in a party of only three to attend the final matinee and indeed we were three but not the original three.  The play is performed within the setting of a ceilidh and to heighten that illusion a number of tables were set up on the stage and occupied by audience members who also had the opportunity to buy a wee dram from an on-stage bar.  Now this was very jolly and atmospheric and what not and I deliberately chose to sit there but really I'd have had a much better view from the auditorium.

It began with singing and dancing as a ceilidh would and then in a mixture of pantomime, satirical cabaret and morality tale it worked its agitprop way through the clearances (nasty landowners), the sporting estates (those nasty landowners again) and the oil boom (nasty foreign capitalists and local speculators).  Jeremy would have loved it.  The PM and his pig was too good a joke not to find a place as one of the few updatings and I suppose it fitted in with the general idea of the moneyed classes enjoying high jinks, though in that case no teuchters appear to have suffered.

While the show is extremely entertaining its hard message is that over centuries the land and its resources have been alienated from the people. By coincidence I had just finished reading The Poor had no Lawyers which is an excellent book about land ownership in Scotland from the Middle Ages to the present day.  The author, Andy Wightman, puts forward a number of legal and social changes that he argues are needed to reduce the concentration of land ownership in a small number of hands that continues to prevail in Scotland despite some transfers to community trusts and the like.

I imagine that when John MacGrath wrote The Cheviot he wanted to change things in favour of the common man rather than just illustrate his plight.  I fear that despite its succès d'estime it has failed in that respect. No matter, I enjoyed it.

I enjoyed also an open air meal after the show at the DCA in these unusually balmy Autumn days.

Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour was one of the big hits on the Fringe that I missed.  It's now on tour and I caught up with it in Kirkcaldy.

It's a simple tale of a group of convent schoolgirls down from Oban to the big smoke of Auld Reekie to take part in a choir competition.  In the time they have free before the gig they cast off such inhibitions as they may have had (though it doesn't seem they had many) along with their school uniforms and go on a bender.

I recently read an article about the teenage brain that says amongst other things "What is clear, however, is that it is absolutely essential to al1ow adolescents to make mistakes, and to allow them to do so in a safe environment which enables them to get things wrong and learn." 

Drink, drugs and dangerous liaisons; these girls make mistakes all right.  Nobody dies so I suppose the environment of bars, nightclubs and dodgy flats in which the action takes place might just qualify as safe.  But have they learnt anything by the end?  I'm not sure, but it didn't seem to me that they were now set on a life of hard work and ladylike speech.  (The language is astonishingly filthy throughout.)

It's a high octane production whose cast of six perform with great energy and commitment.  They are superb in their ability to switch character in a trice with a change of voice, of posture or manner.  We are never in any doubt as to who they are at any point and there are many switches.  It's not a cast of thousands but the six actors do have to play quite a few parts.  And they have to sing.  They are a choir after all.  They sing a capella in serious choir mode but there is an excellent little band of three for the letting down of hair moments and the pop music soundtrack.

I admired every aspect of the production: staging, lighting, music, performance and pyrotechnics but I think I'm too old or too insensitive to find an adolescent coming of age story quite as thrilling as the critics did.

As well as being the first British man to win Wimbledon for however many decades, Andy Murray has now secured GB a place in the Davis Cup final in which we have not featured since 1978 and haven't won since 1936.  He had help from his brother in the doubles against Australia but it's essentially a one man team. 

This has made tennis fans here very happy but Belgian fans are surely delirious.  Their team won the other semi-final getting them their first final place since 1904 when they were beaten by GB.  The match will take place in Belgium and if the ticket prices are similar to the semi (most expensive 38 euros, about 30 quid) then a Ryanair flight plus a tennis ticket will probably come in at not much more than the £65 I paid in Glasgow for the cheapest seat.

I missed seeing the doubles either in the flesh or on the tele because I was at Pitlochry Festival Theatre with a group of chums to see A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim.  I'm not much of a Sondheim fan and was there primarily to be sociable but I liked the production if not the product.

Sunday night saw me back in Glasgow for a SNJO gig featuring saxophonist and composer Benny Golson.  At 85 he's still a powerful player and the orchestra did full and immaculate justice to his compositions.  He's also a great story teller and every tune was introduced with an entertaining anecdote.  He talked so much in fact that I caught the 11pm train home when I'd anticipated catching the 10 o'clock.  But it was an excellent evening well worth the late finish.

The weather forecasts suggested that the relatively pleasant and dry conditions would vanish after the music course finished but in fact Sunday dawned in a most acceptable manner and improved as the day went on.  I had booked to go whale watching but they hadn't got enough customers to make it worthwhile so I had to do something else.

I chose another boat trip and set off in a minibus for Ulva Ferry from where the boat to Staffa and the Treshnish Islands sails.  It's not a very long journey but was sufficiently choppy to make you feel you'd ventured quite far into the Atlantic.

Staffa with Fingal's Cave on the right

On top of the island - very flat

After a wander around we moved off to head for the Treshnish Islands to look for Atlantic Grey Seals and more particularly seal pups who should be appearing at this time of year.

Boat coming to collect us from Staffa for next stage

En route we saw lots of shags like the group below.

Bird Rock

There are a lot of little rocky lumps making up the Treshnish Islands and we pottered in and out of them in search of the elusive pups until the boatman declared that here was one.  As is usual with my wildlife pics the creature is not much more than a dot.

In this case it's the light brown slug to the right of the gull at the left hand side of the picture.  According to the boatman it was only a few hours old given its size and the fact that the gull and one of its chums were pecking at a bloody snack that he reckoned was the afterbirth.

Treshnish Seals

Tasty snack

The following day I went on a landbased wildlife hunt and the first thing we saw was more seals, but these were a different sort - common seals. The way to tell the difference between Atlantic and Common is said to be that one has the face of a dog and the other of a cat. Which is which? Search me

More seals

 Apart from those seals I saw otters, red deer, dolphins, golden eagles, two other sorts of eagle and lots of different birds but I have no pictures because mostly I was looking through binoculars or telescopes.  Just as well because otherwise I'd have seen nothing.

But I did see lots of scenery with the naked eye and took some pictures of it.

I'm just back from having a nightcap or three after an excellent dinner in the Mishnish restaurant in the company of the sax players assembled in Tobermory for a few days of making music and having fun.

I'm doing a bit of wildlife tourism at the end of the week, of which more later but in the meantime here's a shot of beautiful Tobermory from where I walked this morning.

I've managed to find a photo of the fireman dressed to attack our wasps' nest in Barbansais.

Something of a quiet time culturally since the festivals packed up and the town lost much of its colour.  To compensate somewhat the weather has perked up, sufficiently indeed for me to sit on my balcony sipping a Campari and soda before lunch.

While there I noticed wasps buzzing in and out of a little space where my roof meets the wall so I guess there's a nest in my loft.  It's probably been there at least a year because I remember thinking last autumn that there were an awful lot of wasps flying about.  They don't seem to be as interested in my window boxes this year.  They are flying higher so I didn't feel threatened as I sipped.

When we had a wasps' nest in the roof at Barbansais the fireman who came to clear it donned what looked like a chemical warfare suit before he climbed into the loft so I'm in no hurry to get close to the nest.  I'll look for a professional when I come back from my saxy week on Mull.

I set out to see the Picasso/Lee Miller exhibition which has been running in the Portrait Gallery since April.  (It's my habit to get around to these things in their final days.)  When I got to the gallery I discovered that the two fire engines that had lumbered past me on Leith Walk lights a flashing and bells a ringing had been heading to the same exhibition.

The building had been cleared pending the blaze being doused or the false alarm being declared so I couldn't get in.  I went off to catch the Liotard (excellent pretty pictures) and the Kantor/Demarco (six hours of weird videos that I had time only to glance at) leaving the Picasso to another day.  But that day never came so I've missed it.

To ensure that I did not miss the NT Live screening of The Beaux Stratagem, scheduled for a date on which a DORA committee meeting was planned, I booked for the encore showing in Kirkcaldy.  Annoyingly the committee meeting was cancelled due to the report to be discussed not being ready.   I suppose I could have taken a punt on that happening but anyway off I went to Kirkcaldy a few days later where there was a miserably small audience for the event.  I'd be surprised if they covered the cost of keeping the lights on with the receipts.

The good burgers of the lang toun missed a treat.   The Telegraph reviewed it in May and said it needed more zing and last night there seemed to me to be plenty of zing.

17 sounded interesting and it was.  A verbatim theatre piece using the recollections of people in later life of how life was when they were seventeen.

I had thought to hear from my contemporaries but most were that bit older, having been seventeen during the war or not long after.  Those who were from my era were socially or geographically distant so although I enjoyed hearing them it was not quite as immersive as I would have liked.

The young cast were enthusiastic and inventive but sometimes the desire to present a picture distracted from the words.  A piece made for radio really.

Murmel, murmel! was a skilfully executed and beautifully presented example of the silly walks and falling over school of comedy.

If your taste is anything like mine you should avoid it at all costs.  I wish I had.

If you've ever wondered Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner wonder no more.  Katrine Marçal tells us it was his mother.  Her book is not actually about the man himself but about economics, specifically economics from a feminist viewpoint and she wonders where the self-interest (a basic tenet of Smith's economics) lies in his mother's actions, albeit with tongue in cheek.

She suggests that while Christine Lagarde's remark "If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters there would have been no crash" is too simplistic it contains a kernel of truth.  She's interested in both the differences and the similarities in the economic behaviour of men and women and in the value that society places on their work, paid and unpaid.  Sounds very worthy but she speaks, and I'm sure writes, with a light touch.

Darryl Cunningham says that he regards himself as a cartoonist and his book Supercrash is a comic book with a serious purpose.  Designed he says to explain the 2008 financial crash to people who have very little understanding of finance and economics.  Amongst whom he counted himself before doing the mountain of reading and learning needed to write the book.

Both books are something of an attack on capitalism as it currently exists but both authors think it can get better and maybe reading their books would enable us all to give a hand in that endeavour.

Promise and Promiscuity is a one woman musical parody of a Jane Austen novel.  All the essential characters are there; a poor widow with daughters to be married, a noble minded heroine and her slightly silly sister, a rich but unattractive male cousin with designs on our heroine, a wealthy and attractive young neighbour down from town, his disapproving mamma, his austere and somewhat arrogant friend and his pretty but vacuous childhood friend destined in the eyes of their families to be his wife.

The actress inhabits each of these characters superbly switching voice and bearing in a trice to move effortlessly between them -- pursed lips and fingers gripped across the waist for mama's snobbish drawl, tummy stuck out as cousin who lumbers about, his speech punctuated by little snorts.

She takes us briskly with abundant humour and jolly songs through the typical Austen tale of misunderstandings, unwanted declarations of love, antipathy that morphs into admiration and so forth to the ultimate happy ending.

No Austen novel is complete without a ball and for that I was chosen as dancing partner - the perils of sitting in the front row.  So I appeared on the Fringe this year after all.

Oran Mor is well known for its Play, Pie and Pint series of short plays.  It also produces a summer panto apparently so I went to see their 2015 offering The Pie Eyed Piper of Hamilton.

No cast of thousands with lavish sets and costumes here but a cast of four and some simple painted flats.   It's mildly satirical and not quite so mildly rude and one hundred percent cheerfully energetic.

City State is suffering a plague of rats.  The flaxen locked mayor and his side kick drive north to Hamilton and engage the eponymous piper who in return for a promise of Buckie for life comes south to clear the rats with his magic pipe, actually bagpipes are needed.  Unfortunately clearing the rats has made possible an invasion of jocks and we are treated to a speech from a blonde haired wee Glaswegian lassie sporting what look suspiciously like an SNP badge on her lapel.

All ends merrily with the unrolling of a blind bearing the words of the pantomime song that we are all then obliged to sing.  I can remember only the opening lines - "Pit some heather up yer kilt/stick some bracken doon yer breeks".

It was not awful but I won't be going to their next one.

That may have been crude but for some real filth, filth with literary merit you couldn't do better that Irvine Welsh at the Book Festival.  In the course of an entertaining hour long interview/chat he read a hilarious passage describing a funeral from his latest novel A Decent Ride.  I know his work only from films but after that feel encouraged to tackle a novel or two.

Lanark.  At one point in the play the cast come out of character and one girl is asked "Have you read the book?"

"The first two chapters" she replies, or maybe it was pages.

I'm sure that's many people's experience and may even have been mine when I tackled it in the 80s since my recollection of it is vague.  Maybe I just read the reviews.  But David Greig who adapted it for the stage obviously has read it intently.  He, director Graham Eatough and a wonderful technical and acting team have made a terrific piece of theatre that demands no knowledge of the novel on which it is based but succeeds, as was their stated intent, in conveying every bit of its spirit.

From the opening shimmering sea through which our eponymous hero descends to his patient wait for death on the mountaintop at the end the staging is endlessly inventive and effective.   Exploding salamanders, adolescent in love, obsessive artist, night club patrons, conference delegates, talking lift, nappy clad baby.  These are only a sample of the roles that the cast undertake with aplomb.

It's a great show, destined perhaps to be the Black Watch de nos jours.

Giving Richter's Four Seasons a second chance was just the ticket.  I enjoyed it so much more at Zurich Ballet.  Don't know why but I did.  That was the music for the first piece, Kairos, which started with the dancers buzzing away behind a gauze marked out in staves like moths on speed as the light strobed violently.

I enjoyed Kairos in a relaxed sort of way but was absolutely thrilled by Sonett in which to the menacing and insistent pulse of music by Glass a dwarf Shakespeare and a richly clad Dark Lady play out a tale of tragic love amidst a swirling horde of  vigorous dancers.

Contrast Claire's view (entertaining but...) with The Guardian's assessment (not so amusing but....). 

"New Country, New Life" was the heading for a session dealing with two books on immigrant experience.  Sunjeev Sahota's novel The Year of the Runaways is about young Indian men in Sheffield.  I've already read a large chunk and am finding the tales of their struggles in India and what so far are not substantially lesser struggles in the UK engrossing.

I haven't yet got Monica Canitieri's novel The Encyclopedia of Good Reasons but the description of how it treats the experience of coming to a new country, in this case Switzerland, from the viewpoint of a five year old girl and her attempts to understand and classify all the long words that the adults around her throw about was intriguing.  I look forward to reading it.

Liz Lochhead appeared in conversation with Ruth Wishart and had lots of interest to say about the Scots language, her own work and Scottish theatre.  The event was marked by the light-hearted banter between the pair of them but we were left in no doubt of how seriously Lochhead takes her work and the cultural scene in Scotland.

She ended by reciting what she called her theatrical credo.  It started and finished with the instruction "Tell the story".  That's my main complaint against En Avant, Marche! in the EIF.  There was no story.

The blurb says "...an amateur brass band in Flanders.  As the ties that hold local communities together begin to loosen, these amateur ensembles offer a civic and collective nucleus, teaching people of all ages and from different walks of life to play together and march in the same direction."

This led me to think that here we would have a warm human tale of how adversity had struck a town, say a factory closure, or of how youth were rejecting their parents' values and of how the fellowship of the band helped the community hold together etc etc.

No such thing.  We were treated, if that is the right word, to a series of clownish vignettes that would have been better placed in a circus or a Victorian music-hall and some sexually explicit badinage that would have been out of place even on a premium phone line.

I have no fault to find with the music produced by the cast and by the Dalkeith and Monktonhall brass band who took part in the show and it was with the band that there was one little nod in the direction implied by the blurb when the main man went round the band asking what the players did for a living.  Their jobs ranged from procurator fiscal to cafe counter assistant illustrating to a degree a community fellowship.

For the professional critics view you can choose between The Guardian's four stars or The Telegraph's two.

We've all got our limits when it comes to accepting that language is a living thing that we can no more prevent from changing than Canute could control the tides.  I have got used to "loan" having overtaken "lend" although I don't like it, but I doubt I will ever accept "loan" in place of "borrow" as in "Lingo also looks at the words English has loaned from across the continent....".

The Lingo in question is a fascinating and enjoyable little book that takes a look at the features, quirks and oddities of  a multitude of European languages and fully lives up to its subtitle, A language spotter's guide to Europe.

It was paired at the Book Festival with Reading The World in which the author recounts her project to read a book from every country in the world.  Deciding what was a country and which to include was her first problem.  She finally settled on a UN list of 196 but added one more in the course of the project.  Getting hold of the books and more especially English versions of them was no picnic and in the case of Sao Tome she resorted to recruiting volunteer translators over the internet who willingly lent a hand, or for speakers of current English, loaned one.

As I write this I am listening via Youtube to Memoryhouse by Max Richter, a super piece of orchestral music that incorporates poetry, voice and electronics to great effect.  I much preferred it to his recomposed Four Seasons that was played on the same programme in the Playhouse a couple of days ago.  I'm giving the latter a second chance to convince me though since it's the soundtrack to part of a ballet programme I'm going to tonight.

Anyone who has an interest in English is almost bound to have come across David Crystal.  He's an academic linguist but a great populariser and indeed having now seen him in the flesh I'd say he's a great showman.  It's not a surprise to learn that his son is an actor.

They were both there introducing two books; I Say Potato, a book about accents written in collaboration and The Disappearing Dictionary by David alone listing various dialect words that may no longer be in use but that he quite simply likes.

The talk was engaging and informative and the banter between the two lively and funny.  They demonstrated the reconstructed pronunciation of a Shakespeare sonnet and finished off with an impromptu bit of rap to illustrate changing patterns in the rhythm of English pronunciation.

On the way David dealt roundly with a question about the fears of parents at an unnamed Edinburgh nursery that their darlings were being soiled by the rough accents of their carers.

The Animotion Show is not dissimilar to the Harlequin Project that opened the EIF in which images were projected onto a building while music played.  The critical difference is that the images are being created as the music is being played.

The artist, Maria Rud, painted on what looked like a glass panel and the results were being projected as she worked so you not only saw the painting but the moving hand of the painter.  Meanwhile Evelyn Glennie was banging away on her various percussive instruments.

As I understand the idea it is that the painter is reacting to the music and vice versa.  Quite entertaining though relatively pricey and there was no way to get away from the coolish wind that swept into every corner of George Heriot's quadrangle.

Maria at work with Evelyn drumming in the background

Here are some examples of the results of the collaboration. 

Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work, by David Lodge are comic novels that I thoroughly enjoyed though at thirty years distance I couldn't tell you much about them, nor could I name a single other novel by him.

Now he's written an autobiography so I thought it would be interesting to hear him and it was.  The event was in the form of an interview although he did read from the book, or as he explained an edited composite covering his relationship with Malcolm Bradbury and his fascination with America, these being two topics suggested by his interviewer.

It was a very enjoyable session and I'm now encouraged to add some of his other work to the big pile of books to be read that is building up on my shelves and in my head.

It was also a great relief after the well nigh unbearable session I went to yesterday.  I didn't bear it in fact, see later.

This was about The Wake, a novel set in the Fens in the years following the Battle of Hastings.  The author filled in historical detail in a jokey 1066 and All That manner - "William was a little put out so he had them boiled in oil and then went home for his tea" sort of thing, interspersed with readings from the book by the now renowned actor Mark Rylance and a related folky story told to the beat of his bodrum by a chap called Martin Shaw.

Rylance dressed in combat trousers and a funny hat intoned the cod Anglo-Saxon ( sorry the publicity calls it contemporary Anglo-Saxon whatever that means) tale of  guerrilla warfare against the Normans.  Shaw in another funny hat tells a story about a child, later man, with golden hair who is clearly Hereward The Wake.  The publicity tells us the story has not been told aloud for a thousand years and I can believe it.

The session was scheduled to last an hour and a half but as time wore on I thought how long that was and more and more about escape. Being in the middle of a row I was reluctant to make a move.  At the ninety minute mark there was no sign of our being near a conclusion and I grew even more restive.  Happily the lady next to me had also had enough, or maybe she just had to get somewhere, so I slipped or in fact clattered (the wooden stairs!) out under her cover.

But The Guardian, and no doubt others, loved the book, "A Literary Triumph".  Maybe it just suffered from its presentation and I should give it a try.  Maybe.

I thought Antigone, which I went to after that, also suffered from its presentation.  Not the staging and so forth.  That was fine although the upper level should have been higher or raked towards the back to minimise the masking that occurred.

No, it's the acting style that I didn't much care for.  Now this is not a wee domestic drama.  It's all about obedience to the law, the rights of rulers, loyalty to the state, a greater power than the king etc. etc. so a serious not to say grim approach to the representation of the characters caught up in the  situation is not surprising.  But at the same time these are people and it is their feelings as much as their ideas that should come over to the audience and for me at least that didn't happen.

In 1914 over 80% of the world was or had been under the control of European powers (many territories had subsequently wrestled free) despite the fact that a thousand years earlier China, Japan, and the Middle East were streets ahead of Europe by any measure of development or civilization.

How come?  Well says Philip T Hoffman, although the Chinese invented gunpowder the Europeans developed and improved the weapons that it fed and practiced using them by fighting amongst themselves, paying for their wars by levying large taxes on their populations.  As a result he says they were well equipped to set out to conquer the world while those other civilizations remained inward looking and left the citizenry with more of their own money.  Tory regimes surely.

The Telegraph's reviewer is not wholly convinced but gives Hoffman's book, Why Did Europe Conquer the World, four stars.  I enjoyed his talk but I doubt I'll ever get round to reading his book.

The packed Playhouse gave a rapturous reception to Seven last night but I found it an unsatisfactory watch and listen.  My fault I'm sure.  I should perhaps, as recommended in this review , have let it all wash over me instead of trying to fathom what it might have been telling me.

My sympathies were with the lady I overheard at the Book Festival this morning telling her friend that she would rather have heard the RSNO playing Mahler in the Usher Hall and complaining about low lighting and black costumes on a black set.

It was all bright colours at the talk about translating children's books into English from Farsi and Arabic.  One of the contributors spoke mostly in Farsi and as seems often to be the case said rather more than the poor chap interpreting had managed to retain when she paused for breath.

But the languages were not very important really.  It was a discussion that could have applied to any language pair and they talked about dealing with cultural differences and maintaining the essence of a story while expressing it in words far removed from a literal translation.

The chat strayed from time to time into the realms of adult literature, Fitzgerald and the Rubaiyat being an obvious reference.  I could have piped up then about my Scots version but instead asked about the availability of western children's literature in Iran.

There is quite a lot of it apparently but it's all bootleg translations because Iran doesn't observe international rules on copyright.  So thing haven't improved since I picked up a pirate cassette of Glen Campbell in Tehran in 1978 just a year before the revolution. 

Ferdinand Mount, one-time policy chief in Mrs Thatcher's Downing St., like many a posh sounding Eton and Oxford Englishman turns out to have some good Scotch blood running through his veins and has written a book about the people who put it there.

His great-great-grandfather (whom he shares with David Cameron) was John Low of Clatto in Fife who at the age of 16 went off to join the East India Company and retired after a lifetime of service to the Empire as General Sir John Low, earning in his later years the privilege of going round the Old Course on the back of a pony. The earliest golf buggy known I imagine.

The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905 tells the fascinating story of the Low family's lives both personal and political over that century.  It's a story that is both romantic and brutal and Mount's talk had me gripped from start to finish.

There were stacks of copies of the book in Charlotte Square at £25 a pop but happily it's also available on-line in a substantially cheaper paperback edition provided you don't mind waiting till February.  I don't.

The novel Nora Webster that Colm Toibin was in Edinburgh to talk about is already out in paperback and most of the people in the audience had probably read it.  Those who asked questions certainly had.  According to The Guardian "This personal portrait of grief and politics in 1960s County Wexford does everything a great novel should".  I expect that is something along the Reithian lines of inform, educate, entertain.  I bought a copy so I'll let you know in due course.

Macbeth opens with the line "When shall we three meet again".  Youth Music Theatre UK keep the line but multiply the number of witches by three and not content with that have the whole company  of around fifty rush on-stage in the opening scene from behind the fences from where they have stared at us as we entered.

This is a very physical, fast-paced and inventive production.  The witches are wonderful, all nine of them, like rag dolls with jerky movements of heads and limbs.  They wield entangling ropes that suck in other characters.  There's a beautiful scene when Macbeth is trying to make up his mind to murder Duncan.  The witches swarm around him carrying shards of glass and shining torches on his face as he paces back and forth and as the scene ends he is left alone on-stage a shard having magically appeared in each hand.  Super stuff.

Every scene is well handled.  Inevitably with a large company of youngsters like this there are some weaker players but the overall achievement is high.  I found some of the music irritatingly over amplified for the strength of the actors' voices and the flute being played acoustically in one scene had no chance of being heard.  But that's to cavil.  

 At the end of the show they retreat to behind the fences and take up their initial positions.  We've just seen Malcolm make his final speech to the audience with Hecate at his shoulder as she was at Macbeth's when his tragic history started leaving us with the impression that history is about to repeat itself.

Arkle's  Much Ado About Nothing is a gender reversed production, except, confusingly, for the part of one member of the town watch.

The women are much more successful in playing men than the men are in playing women and nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of Beatrice and Benedict.  If you were to design the perfect principal boy you'd come up with Bronagh Finlay and she has no trouble playing the military man.  Paul Beeson on the other hand is a perfectly decent actor but he's a big strapping chap and despite headscarf, long skirt and false boobs and excellent delivery of the lines he just fails to convince.

Maybe he's not meant to.  Maybe that's the point.  Maybe it's not some subtle comment on gender stereotyping.  Maybe it's just a joke at the expense of the lads that isn't quite as funny as Charley's Aunt.

Their other show, Bakersfield Mist, is much more straightforward.  An art expert, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has been called in to assess whether a painting owned by a loud talking, hard drinking, trailer living, country music loving, husband free all American woman is or is not by Jackson Pollock.

She's convinced it is.  He says it's not. The stage is set for some entertaining and humorous conflict with here and there bouts of poignant mutual revelation.  It's not Shakespeare but it's fun. 

I was in a very clever sketch once that was a take off of the American series Dynasty about the affairs, business and personal and many of them nasty, of an oil rich family.  Tom Holland uses the same title for a book about the line of rulers of Rome founded by Julius Caesar's adopted son Octavius, all of whom earned a reputation for extreme nastiness and more than a touch of depravity far in excess of the peccadillos of the Americans.

He seeks to separate fact from rumour and to uncover what may be the kernel of truth at the bottom of some of the stories that have come down to us.  He sees these often as resulting from power struggles of one sort or another.

For instance the famous story of how Caligula wanted to make his horse a consul is generally seen to be a sign that he was not all there.  Holland argues that it was an elaborate joke at the expense of the senators illustrating just how much more power Caligula had than they did.

I'm sure the book is worth reading but at £25 a copy I shall wait till the library has a copy.

The Jennifer Tremblay Trilogy is a set of three monologues which although linked in the person of the narrator are each sufficiently self-contained to be enjoyed as separate plays. 

They tell the story of a woman, her family, her friends, her experience of life in the remoteness of small town Quebec province.  There is very little joy in the episodes of this story.  There is rather an intensity, a truthfulness, an insight that moves and bonds audience and actress.  Maureen Beattie as The Woman is magnificent and the supporting technical skills of set design, light and sound could hardly be bettered.

All three plays are wonderful but if you have time for only one go see The Deliverance.

My second visit to the Book Festival was even more fun that the first.  Irving Finkel with his long white beard and his unruly hair tied back in a pigtail of sorts looks every bit the curator of cunieform tablets at the British Museum that he is.  Apparently he made that career choice at the age of eight.

So he knows a lot about the subject and gave a very interesting and amusing talk.  So engaging was he that I not only bought the book he was promoting but a previous one he wrote about deciphering tablets describing The Flood.

I held back from buying the newly republished translation of Cyrano de Bergerac by Edwin Morgan which provided excellent entertainment in a rehearsed reading but I may relapse because it's very good.  This Book Festival event was my second encounter with his version of the play which I saw on the stage in my one and only visit to Cumbernauld Theatre way back in 1992.  I had to go there because I couldn't get in in Edinburgh.

It was a super show and it was lovely just to hear the words again.

The Book Festival started yesterday and was absolutely overrun with punters queuing up for the event I was going to at 2pm.  Who knew so many people were interested in mathematics?  Or was it rather the dandyish figure of Cédric Villani with his long hair, fob watch, large floppy necktie and charming French accent that had drawn them?

Whatever it was they got a treat. He was an engaging and brilliant speaker whose purpose in writing Birth of a Theorem was not to explain mathematics, nor even his own work, but to give the layman a glimpse into the process of mathematical invention.  Indeed in answer to a question he said that only a very few people would understand the maths in the book and this is borne out by the review that I've linked to above.  But everyone should understand the joys and despairs that accompanied the process.

There was barely a trace of despair in Nell Gwyn: An Epilogue but plenty of joy. It's a one woman romp in the round around Nell and her relationships with King Charles II, the actor Charles Hart and others, told vividly by an excellent actress in a room that holds hardly more than a score.  She engages a number of the men in the audience in the tale, somewhat to their embarrassment but it's all great fun. 

The venue in which Future Honey was played could have held several score but only half a dozen people turned up and gallantly they all stayed till the end.  Not that it was bad.  Indeed the opening video sequence extolling the virtues of a "mood repair" software product was a superb parody of  advertising videos.

But the rest of the show was, to me at least, barely comprehensible.  Three girls dressed in Startrek like outfits did various things.  For instance mimed what I took to be their daily routines and while teeth cleaning and door opening were easy to spot I'm afraid 90% of it passed my understanding even although it was repeated ad infinitum or at least until the power in the golden armbands they wore went wonky and there was a lot of thrashing about followed by some sort of gameshow compered by an offstage amplified voice.

Two of the girls were eliminated somehow from the game leaving one alone but they came back in dark glasses gibbering somewhat and held a picnic and tried to get the third girl to choose between the foods (represented by squares of paper) that they held out to her.  She resisted and tore some bits of paper to shreds.

Well this sort of thing went on for close to an hour and then it stopped.  We were invited to join the cast off-stage for a discussion on the piece but I scarpered and suspect that the rest of the small audience did likewise.  Need I add that it was devised?  Nuff said.

Willie and Sebastian had a sell out audience who were sensibly not allowed to drift in and choose their seats at random but were herded by stern young shepherdesses filling each row in turn. And there were a lot of rows.  I got quite an advantageous end seat so could stretch my legs rather than crush them against the row in front.

Why such a large and tightly packed crowd?  The play was written by Rab C. Nesbitt's creator Ian Pattison and stars two widely regarded comic actors Andy Gray and Grant Stott.

Willie (Andy Gray) spends the early moments with his figure hugging Y-fronts inches away from the front row punters, leaning on the shoulders of one as he recovers a gobstopper sized lump of drug from somewhere deep in the rear recesses of those Y-fronts.

That rather sets the tone and provided you don't mind full frontal effing and blinding it's very funny as the rivalry of the two men over the affections of the one woman ( Michelle Gallagher) leads to comic confrontations.  There are some very clever lines but I can't for the moment remember a single one.

At the end of the show Thom Dibdin was ushered onstage and presented Andy Gray, to his obvious surprise and pleasure, with The Stage's award for acting excellence.  

I was at one of the Queen's Hall morning concerts yesterday and very much enjoyed the chamber pieces by Prokoviev, Poulenc, Brahms and Bartok (especially the Bartok Piano Quintet) provided by soloists from the Budapest Festival Orchestra. This was originally intended to be another clarinet class outing but organisational difficulties intervened and in the end it was only me.

From the sublime to the ridiculous I went on to see The Hideout which is a great  little show.  To save myself the effort of trying to describe it let me reprint here a review by Sara Jackson from the website The Public Reviews which captures it beautifully.  I agree with every word.

"If you had to answer the question “What is ‘fringe’ theatre?”, you could do a lot of worse than simply pointing to this wonderful hour and replying “that”. We join Haste Theatre – a collective of half-a-dozen women – in one of C’s endless tiny rooms, as the gods Aphrodite, Dionysus, and Hades welcome us to a skewed re-telling of the tale of Theseus (sorry, “Thetheus” as his lisp would have it) and the Minotaur.
How to describe this? The show contains, in no particular order, live music, singing, dance, physical theatre, shadow puppetry, cabaret-style repartee, and a host of other skills that this hugely talented group fling themselves into with ceaseless energy and charm. Characters are slipped into and out of at a moment’s notice, audience members are shamelessly put-upon to universal good humour, and bickering gods toy with mortals’ lives and our expectations. Perhaps it could be said that the company is a little too eager to show off all their abilities, at the cost of narrative focus, but then this is as much variety as storytelling.
In truth, this is a show which defies easy explanation – shall we pinpoint the tap-dance Minotaur battle, the nightshirt-clad Hades welcoming us and asking our preferred manner of dying, or the (frankly jarringly) downbeat ending out of nowhere? No, because this is fringe theatre at its finest – hugely talented actors pouring heart and soul into a show, not because it’s expected or because the figures suggest it’ll make money, but because they love what they have made. Their joy is infectious, their abilities undeniable. This is exactly why I love the Fringe. If you want to see real theatre – intimate, original, vital – this is a show not to be missed.
 The Hideout runs at C Nova until August 31th (not 18^th)"

Full marks as usual to The Grads for tackling difficult and challenging plays.  Their offerings in the Fringe this year are The Witch of Edmonton and Death and the Maiden.

The Witch requires the director to guide a sixteen strong cast through the tangled undergrowth of a 400 year-old tale that's he's already had to cut to fit a time slot.  It's a tale of witchcraft, belief in the devil, bigamy and murder with a daft laddie sub-plot thrown in.

Despite some excellent characterisations and imaginative staging it didn't quite come off for me, failing to generate the atmosphere of tension and fear that I think it needs.  With its awkward doors and undisguised function room appearance the venue doesn't help take us back to the world of seventeenth century life and beliefs either.

The action of Death and the Maiden on the other hand takes place in a modern domestic interior for which the venue is fine.

Patricia believes that a chance visitor to the isolated house by the sea that she shares with her husband Gerardo is the doctor who participated in the torture to which she was subjected fifteen years earlier during a period of dictatorship.  She determines to take the law into her own hands and wrest a confession from him.  Gerardo is appalled.  Not only is he a lawyer but has just been appointed to a commission established by the new democratic government to look into the misdeeds of the old regime. 

So the stage is set for a debate about justice and revenge, do two wrongs make a right, what value has a forced confession and so on.  It's very well done and the question of whether or not he is the man she thinks he is is never resolved.  You have to make up your own mind.

No programme was available at Attempts on Her Life so I googled the company to see what I could learn about them.  Nothing apart from the fact that they had another production in the Fringe - The River by Jez Butterworth.  I enjoyed The Grads production of his Jerusalem a couple of years ago so I thought I'd give this one a whirl.

The play is set inside a fishing shack near a river somewhere.  It's a simple stylised set.  Doorways are indicated by uprights of unplaned 2x2 timber.  A sideboard and cupboard are skeletons only. There are a couple of chairs and a table of the same material with untreated plywood for seats and tabletop.

The two girls who were in Attempts are also in The River but not the men.  (Trouble with multi-tasking perhaps.)   

When the action starts we see a man and a woman in conversation.  They are having a teensy weensy argument.  He wants her to go with him out in the moonless night to catch fish.  She wants him to admire the sunset with her and then leave her to read her book.  He waxes lyrical about fishing and he also tells her he loves her and that she is the only woman he has ever brought to share the tranquility of this spot and its joys.  Maybe the love bit wasn't in the first scene but you'll see it was something of a theme.

In the next scene the man is on the phone reporting agitatedly that the woman he's been out fishing with has disappeared when there's a "yoohoo!" from outside and in comes a woman.  But it's not the same one.

He tells the cops all is well, tells her that he loves her and that she is the only woman he has ever brought to share the tranquility of this spot and its joys.

She in turn goes out, to have a pee as I remember, and the first one comes back.  This sequence is repeated several times but both women ultimately leave him and as the play ends, spoiler alert, a third woman comes in.

Will she be told that he loves her and that she is the only woman he has ever brought to share the tranquility of this spot and its joys?  I think so but that's a supposition since fortunately we are allowed to leave the theatre at this point.

It was well enough done but I call that pretty thin material.  The rave reviews of other productions of the play in London and New York talk about mystery and ambiguity.  Granted we never know whether he's just a serial shagger or a sincere seeker after a perfect soulmate to whom he will be faithful for ever after but I didn't care either way.  Maybe the problem is that the actor (no programmes this time either so nameless) isn't the mega man needed for the part.

Always something different on the Fringe.  Can you imagine enjoying a show where seven people stand in a line having had their footwear nailed to the floor and sway about very athletically, indeed dance, while four clarinetists play behind them?

No?  Well it's surprisingly entertaining.  I went with some of my clarinet class to see Correction last night and enjoyed it though not quite as much as the hollering, whooping crowd of supporters behind us did. 

 

Sue McKenzie and Ingrid Sawers drew a big crowd to the very beautiful St Andrews and St Georges West at lunchtime yesterday for a saxophone and piano recital from Bizet to Nyman and beyond.  As you would expect the playing was perfect and all four of the main members of the saxophone family; soprano, alto, tenor and baritone were deployed for our delight.

Like Sara Kane's 4.48 Psychosis, which the Grads produced very successfully a few years ago, Martin Crimp's Attempts on her Life does not allocate dialogue to specific characters nor even define what or how many characters there may be.  So it's a wonderful vehicle for a theatre company to let their imagination loose on.

This company uses two men and two women dressed in black business wear but barefoot in a black draped set containing only four chairs.  Their footwear stands in a neat row at the side.  They appear in various combinations and guises in the seventeen scenes of the play, each of which is an attempt to define Anne or Annie or Anya, the name varies.  We are led to believe at the start of the play that she has committed suicide.  Was she an artist?  Was she a porno star?  Was she a terrorist? Was she in fact a luxury motor car swishing elegantly along winding Mediterranean roads?

Crimp himself said " Attempts is not political ....but each scene, or attempt, is really an attempt to grab capitalism and really grapple it to the ground, but then it gets up again and it presents another form. So I think the play is a kind of wrestling with the joys and the horrors of capitalism."

That's not a thought that struck me as I watched though I can see what he means.  But never mind that.  It's a joy to listen to the text and the actors are terrific.  Go.

Attempts was in Adam House and I then slipped next door to the Jazz Bar in my more usual role  there of punter to hear a dozen Kurt Weill songs sung by an American called Bremner.  He seems to have dispensed with a first name, at least professionally.  Mack the Knife was there of course but so were songs with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Ogden Nash to name but two.  He was ably supported by piano, double bass and multiple reeds.  The latter all being played by the very able Dick Lee going by his Sunday name of Richard.  An enjoyable show for cabaret fans with CDs for sale to remember it by.  I resisted temptation.

If Attempts on her Life has a meaning under its surface, The Last Hotel, a brand new opera in the EIF,  is content to just tell a story. The music is intense, urgent, expectant and the singing matches it.  A man, his wife and the other woman meet in a rundown empty hotel.  There's a suitably manic hotel porter, silent throughout bar a scream or two, who cleans up, serves food and drink and handily doubles as stage crew while the protagonists twist and turn in their dance of duty, guilt, dreams, life and death advancing via karaoke and buffet to the other woman's suicide.

Sounds pretty grim and it's certainly not a comedy but it's a gripping and exciting ninety minutes proving that contemporary opera is not all bad.