Elgin cathedral is a ruin but it has lots of fascinating bits and pieces on display.  My favourite was the stone figure of an archbishop from the top of his tomb.  The label on its case explains that it would have been highly coloured when first created but of course the paint has not survived the centuries.  However at the press of a button and by lighting magic the colour is restored.

Colour was pertinent to the touring production of A Streetcar Named Desire that was on at the Kings last week.  The play is set New Orleans and its main protagonist, Blanche, is a lonely alcoholic remnant of plantation society who looks back with regret on the days that there was a coloured girl to cope with drudgery.  She has been forced to throw herself on the mercy of her sister in a white working class area of the city. There is talk of niggers in the text.  We are clearly in a racially divided society.  It seems perverse then to practice colour blind casting in that context.  But they did.

I had other slight reservations about the show but the fact that the first half ran for an hour and fifty minutes and didn't seem a jot too long testifies to it's being a pretty good production.

The Traverse runs its Play, Pie and a Pint series of short lunchtime plays twice a year.  I took a raincheck on the Spring series but I've seen the first two of their Autumn offering and they've both been excellent.

Pleading presents a young couple in an Asian jail, heroin having been found in their luggage as they arrived from the Australian leg of their backpacking holiday.  Too bad it's one of those places where they execute drug smugglers.  A local lawyer is trying to help them.  They plead ignorance. They tell one story.  They tell another.  Aspects of their relationship are revealed.  Through the lawyer the prosecution offer a deal.  Plead innocent and die or plead guilty and spend life in the distinctly unappetising jail. They have differing views.  The truth comes out. Serious stuff.

Death figured also, not surprisingly given its title, in Love and Death in Govan and Hyndland but here with much comic effect.  It's a one man show in which the actor, Stephen Clyde, brilliantly takes us through his mother's terminal diagnosis and death with love and humour.  He moves skilfully from character to character; mother, doctor, senior consultant, auntie, brother and himself never putting a foot wrong.  It's very funny and ultimately life affirming.

Cockpit is a brave revival by The Lyceum of a brave play that hasn't been seen since its first airing in 1948.  There's a sympathetic and sensitive review here. 

I've had the great pleasure of listening to The Rite of Spring not once but twice within the last week.  The RSNO played it at the Usher Hall and then the orchesta of Scottish Ballet at the Festival Theatre.  They of course were playing to accompany dancers in what I thought was a superb bringing into flesh of the music even though I couldn't see the logic that led Christopher Hampson from the first part of his interpretation to the second.  Claire didn't share my enthusiasm and has written amusingly about it.

In other ways I've been busy:  a talk about tartan, a talk about a Scottish contribution to the tea industry in Sri Lanka, the museum's Jacobite exhibition, the City Art Centre's Edinburgh Alphabet exhibition, a couple of Spanish films (one good one not), a French film (enjoyable but about which I can recall more or less nothing), a round of golf, an afternoon of sax ensemble, a U3A Italian group (good fun), the start of an adult education Gaelic course (which promises to be entertaining but challenging).  These plus my regular band and sax lesson have kept me from being bored.