An initiative from the Edinburgh Festival Theatres Trust is going some way to help young professionals get themselves seen.  They have established a company, the Attic Collective, of actors from 18 to 25 who will perform three shows in the course of the year, one classic, one new and one musical.  I imagine that membership of the company will be restricted to one year but it's a good crack of the whip for them.


I went to their first production.  It was a version of Lysistrata and was well done, imaginative and entertaining, if a bit shouty.  Aristophanes' play is generally described as a bawdy anti-war comedy.  This version was certainly bawdy with a profusion of giant inflatable penises adding to the fun and a fair sprinkling of Trump inspired sexual jokes.

Photo Greg Mcvean

I'm looking forward to seeing what they do later in the year with The Threepenny Opera which will be set in today's Edinburgh.

Before going to London in November I had a look to see what was on and one show that caught my eye was No Man's Land.  I've always liked Pinter and McKellen and Stewart are a powerful double act.  But tickets were both scarce and pricey so I didn't see it.  Now thanks to the streaming revolution that brings masterworks to our local cinemas I have seen it and for a very reasonable price.

It was as incomprehensible yet captivating as so many of his plays are.  Indeed the only one I can think of as having a pretty straighforward narrative is Betrayal and even then it's told backwards.  Anyway I thoroughly enjoyed the mysterious meanderings of the characters who inhabit No Man's Land.  Its Wikipedia entry covers what the critics have said about the show over the years (it premiered in 1975) and it's comforting to learn that none of them understood it either but like me had a jolly good time watching it.

In theatre in the flesh I saw Picnic at Hanging Rock performed by an Australian company at The Lyceum.  It was a very interesting production with an unusual stylistic unity and provided, as Mark Fisher said in The Guardian, a masterclass in stage management.  Like the critics my chums loved it but my admiration is less whole-hearted.  I  have a nagging feeling that I must have snatched forty winks shortly after the girls disappeared because I was somewhat lost storywise as the show progressed.  I blame that glass of Picpoul before curtain up.

I had more than one glass of a number of alcoholic beverages at Phil's house at the weekend where nearly a score of souls were gathered to celebrate Burns.  It was a great evening with great grub and great craic.  I paid for my supper by addressing the haggis and by contributing the fruits of my attendance that day on a bread making course.

There are five 2017 calendars on my walls of which this is the most recently acquired.  The title page of this lovely calendar is a view of Burano taken by my friends whose passion is the adventures of Donna Leon's Venetian detective Commissario Brunetti.

More particularly it is the tracing of all the places in Venice associated with those adventures.  They have produced a beautiful map showing many of the locations and have published several guidebooks to Brunetti's Venice with a new one coming out next year.  They are all aimed at the German market because although Donna Leon's books have a following in many countries the Germans are top fans thanks to highly popular TV adaptations.  (Sub-titled DVDs are available in the US.)

Each of the twelve months has a picture of a Brunetti related place and a brief legend which with the help of a dictionary to augment my limited German I hope to translate month by month.  I made sense of January once I realised that I had looked up verschleißen (worn out) instead of verschließen (locked).   How you arrange your "i"s and your "e"s is at least as important in German as it is in English. 

I spent the weekend with another foreign detective, one that I had heard of but never seen.  I was given a boxset of The Killing for Christmas.  That's five DVDs with four episodes of compulsive viewing on each.  So I found myself at midnight and later with Sarah Lund swearing I would just watch one more episode and then go to bed.

I've seen three operas in as many months and have two more lined up before the end of March.  For someone who declares himself only mildly appreciative of the art form that seems a bit much but I have an excuse for each of them.

Leaving aside The Marriage of Figaro which I commented on at the time, the next was La Traviata which I saw in Genoa.  Well I was there on holiday and you have to find things to do when you're on holiday and it was a lot more fun than sitting through Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, the only theatrical offerings I found.

I enjoyed the show and the staging was lovely.  There are a number of pictures of the production on this site.  Here's one in which Violetta and Alfredo are enjoying their bucolic idyll before life caves in and we work up to that long drawn out heroine's death scene beloved of operatic writers and fans.

A free ticket as a reviewer's chum persuaded me to the cinemacast (what is the official word for these? ) of the Metropolitan Opera's Nabucco.  It's a big production with a very large chorus and a couple of massive sets mounted on their revolve.  The story concerns war between the Babylonians and the Israelites and the opera is well known in particular for one of Verdi's great numbers, the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves.  In real life it was sung by the crowds following Verdi's coffin to his funeral.  Here are the slaves getting ready to sing it on the Metropolitan Opera's stage.

It's a beautiful and moving song and well merits its fame but for me the musical highlight of this production was one of the soprano's arias.  Alas I can't put a name to it.

Next up is a production by Scottish Opera of The Trial.  Christopher Hampton, who's a playwright I admire and Philip Glass, a composer whose music I like a lot have turned Kafka's wonderful satire into an opera.  No excuse needed for going to that.

The last of this set of shows takes me back to the cinema and The Met.  This time I'm paying for a ticket.  It's expensive enough at £25 but Nabucco tickets in the real opera house were on sale from $475 when I went onto their site to read the programme so it's a steal really.  This time it's La Traviata.   I thought it would be instructive to see two versions so close together especially since both are modern stagings.

Glasgow likes to call itself "the dear green place" and according to The Guardian's listing of the greenest cities in the UK merits the nickname since 32% of its surface area is green space.  That makes it the second greenest city in the country.  But in first place with a whopping 49% is the city pictured above, Edinburgh.

I've been back in the said green spot for ten days or so but must confess I haven't strayed far from its paved or tarmacked spaces.  More than that, apart from attendance at a convivial Hogmanay dinner and an audition for the Grads' next show I've taken my pleasures at home.

My diary is filling up with outings though so this restful period will not last much longer.  It certainly won't last long enough for me to get through my Christmas books and DVDs.  I'm only on the first one which is a ream sized volume of Vivienne Westwood's diaries from 2010 to 2016.  Unlike most published diaries it's extensively illustrated.  There are fashion pictures of course but also some more personal illustrations and a deal of stuff related to her environmental/political preoccupations.

I hadn't realised that she was such a fervent environmentalist but to say she has a bee in her bonnet about climate change goes no way towards describing her fervour.  It's a most interesting book and something of a riveting read.