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.