Who needs foreign travel when the sun shines in Edinburgh?  The question I asked myself as I lunched al fresco in George Street on the eve of my departure for the Dolomite ski slopes.

I'd made the humdrum trip into town to buy socks to keep my skiing feet toasty but was seduced by the warm Spring sunshine into taking a table at Browns.  They served me the nicest fishcake I've eaten in years followed by some tasty lamb sausages and quite whetted my appetite for embarking on a summer project to lunch in all the pavement eateries in George Street.  I also spied a place called Veeno in Rose Street that offers a multitude of Italian wines and a few snacks that I've pencilled in for a visit sometime.

On my way along Rose Street I discovered work going on to transform the former Charlotte Baptist Chapel into a theatre.  News to me, and exciting news too but old news to Google.  Planning permission for the project was given to the Danish ballet director Peter Schaufuss a year ago.  But as the Scotsman article pointed out at the time there is a deal of difference between permission and completion.  Luckily it looks as though it's well on its way.  With the new hall to be built for the SCO at the back of St Andrew Sq. and a concert hall in the former Royal High when St Mary's Music School takes it over (assuming the overblown and unwanted hotel project for the building is quashed) there will be oodles of places for culture vultures to wallow in.

The high spot of my recent cultural wallowing was undoubtedly Northern Ballet's Casanova.   It was a tremendous show.  Staging, costumes, lighting, music, choreography were all superb and the athleticism of the dancers quite staggering.  You can see bits of it on Northen Ballet's site and read a review here.  It's on tour till May and is a must see for dance fans, but make sure you read the story line before you go to fully enjoy the work.

The story line of Le Malade Imaginaire is well known and Les Escogriffes, who it turns out are alive and kicking after all, impart it well enough but their production was less than riveting in comparison with how the Italian students had presented their Goldoni piece.  They were also a little unwise in not binning the interlude ballet bits that no doubt thrilled the 17th century theatre goer but do nothing for modern tastes.  So I could have been better entertained but it was quite a fun evening all the same and I couldn't fault the company for effort.

It was going to see Arkle's production of Da that alerted me to Le Malade Imaginaire because it was taking place in the  same building and still had a night to run. Da has been described as a bitter-sweet father and son drama.  The curtain rises on a expatriate Irish writer who has returned home for his adoptive father's funeral sitting in the old family home and on the brink of leaving. The play follows his reflections on his relationship with his parents and the events of his youth.  The twist is that his father, mother, younger self and other characters from the past all take part in the action.  It's a clever device and is neatly employed but there is not a lot in the piece that is not present in other works of reminiscence.

It was nicely staged and on the whole I thought the cast worked well.  I have to declare a personal interest in as much as I should have auditioned for the part of the father had I known about it in time.  I thought Charlie made quite a good fist of the part but... Being critical I think the production let itself down when sound effects that should have come from the back of the audience came from the back of the stage.

Family relationships of quite a different stripe are the subject matter of Noel Coward's comedy Hay Fever.  Mark Fisher's review in The Guardian is the most interesting I've seen and having read it I can certainly see the connections with Shakespeare and Albee but didn't join the dots when I was at the show.

Everybody knows that your latin lads and lassies are born dancers so it was no surprise to find the Festival Theatre packed for the visit of this Cuban company.  They were indeed wonderful and energetic dancers who were able to put their bodies through a couple of hours of routines that combined the suppleness of elastic bands and the strength of steel.

It is often the case with modern dance (especially if you don't have a programme) that while admiring the beauty and skill of the presentation your little mind has to work hard to make sense of what's going on. 

This show didn't seem so tricky to interpret.  The first piece screamed lust to me.  The second was life with an ipod (boring) and the third clearly military.  No doubt their revolution which still features highly in the national consciousness I opined to myself.

I am grateful to Claire, who enjoyed the show with me, for pointing me to this review which expresses far more succinctly, knowledgeably and elegantly than I could just what I thought. 

The university language students habitually put on plays round about this time of year and I saw the Italian one the other night.  It was a first class production of a Goldoni comedy about two families and their friends organising themselves for a summer holiday.  The acting was suitably over the top and the fun was fast and furious.  It was exceptionally well directed with lots of clever little ideas.

I enjoyed it so much I thought I'd seek out what the others were doing.  I couldn't find any trace of the French but the Spanish and Germans both had shows on offer.  Whether by accident or design their shows were on exactly the same three evenings as the Italians and I couldn't make it to either. Mind you the German one would have been well out of reach linguistically.

Subsequently I've discovered that an exhibition is being held in April to celebrate 50 years of Les Escogriffes, which is what the French lot call themselves, so although they seem to be dead on the internet and on social media maybe they are alive in the real world and still producing.

My clarinet class had an outing to the Usher Hall to hear Mozart's Clarinet Concerto.  Very nice it was too and now Julia has got us playing a tiny extract, just sixteen very straightforward bars but recognisable as the main theme of the slow movement.

Having enjoyed a modern production of La Traviata on stage in Genoa in December I was interested in seeing the Metropolitan Opera's version, also non traditional, when it was broadcast to cinemas at the weekend. I enjoyed it a lot and adored the staging which reminded me of a wall of death arena from the Links Market of my youth, though it was rather more tastefully clad. The vast chorus all wearing identical masks peering over the edge was just one of the beautiful and powerful pictures that abounded.  The large clock half covered with a floral cloth temporarily halting Violetta's decline to death as her and Alfredo's love was at its height was another. The Observer tells you all that I can't.

There is another production, this time from The Royal Opera House, coming to cinemas soon but I've maybe had enough tubercular tragedy for the time being.

Man made tragedy featured in Viceroy's House, the film by Gurinder Chadha of Bend It Like Beckham fame about the partition of India in 1947.  It's a large, lush and beautifully shot film in the British costume drama tradition with an inter confessional love story woven into the blood and slaughter of the movement of Hindu to India and Muslim to Pakistan.

Film critic Mark Kermode in The Guardian has warm words about the film which I echo but its political analysis blaming Churchill and exonerating Mountbatten is hotly contested in The Mail by historian Andrew Roberts.  He argues his case powerfully and I know nothing either way.

People arriving at the Assembly Rooms for the Caledonian Hunt Ball in the late 18th century as imagined in Edinburgh's Georgian Shadows event celebrating the 250th anniversary of Craig's plan for the New Town.  It makes for an interesting stroll in the early evening from Register House to Charlotte Square by way of St Andrew Square and George Street.

The Queen's Hall is another fine Georgian building though fifty years or so younger than the Assembly Rooms.  One thing I particularly like about it is its intimacy, the closeness to the action.  The SCO had a choir on stage for Mozart's Coronation Mass which brought the band another twenty feet or so further into the body of the kirk so that I was practically sitting amongst them.  Although I was very happy to hear that in a year or two they will have a new home in the hall to be built on the site of the Royal Bank offices I once worked in behind St Andrew Sq.  I fear some of that family feeling will be lost.

Family feeling of a different sort was on view at The Lyceum where The Winter's Tale has just finished its run. On fairly slim evidence King Leontes decides his wife has been having it off with his best chum (the king of Bohemia), orders the chum's murder (though he forewarned escapes), banishes his new-born daughter to be exposed to the wilderness where wild beasts roam in the firm belief that she's not his, arraigns his wife and casting aside the report of the Oracle on her chasteness as false news declares the trial must continue with a death sentence as the probable outcome when enters a messenger.

The king's son brooding on the queen his mother's fate has died.  Understandably she swoons but less understandably Leontes suddenly realises that's he's a tosser and all his jealousy has been misplaced.  The queen is taken off for medical attention but her woman is back in a jiffy to report that it's too late, she's dead.

Now this is classed as one of Shakespeare's comedies but up to this point the laughs have been few.  Luckily the atmosphere brightens.  The scene switches to Bohemia, the wee baby is rescued by a comic shepherd and his son, sixteen years pass, it's the sheep shearing festival, the baby is now a comely maid and is beloved by the Bohemian prince. We enjoy the rib-tickling comic turns that the bard provided for his groundlings, made actually comprehensible and funny in this production.  There is music and dancing and much jollity but alack and alas it doesn't last.

Polixenes (king of Bohemia and unmurdered chum of Leontes) turns up and berates his son for dallying with a shepherdess, unaware that's she's really a princess.  Everybody including herself is unaware though the old shepherd must at least suspect she's from a different social class than him given the money she had about her person in the wild woods all those years ago.

Florizel and Perdita (our young lovers) are advised to go off and introduce themselves to Leontes who rouses himself from the torpor he's been in for sixteen years and says how he wishes he could make things up to his old chum.  Said old chum is pursuing Florizel angrily but on finding him with Leontes a reconciliation takes place, Perdita is identified as the onetime cast out princess and a statue of the dead queen comes to life.  Could it be she wasn't dead but in hiding all those years?

Whatever, all is now happiness and Leontes and his queen go off arm in arm.  The young lovers have their parents' blessing and all the subsidiary characters are in a good way.  So it's a comedy after all.  But not quite.  Shakespeare has left Leontes' son still dead and the good old retainer who was charged with getting rid of the baby.  Truly a tragi-comedy then.

It all sounds a bit daft but it was an excellent production, thoroughly enjoyable and I says so who saw it twice.