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.