The Traverse fringe programme was announced this morning and for once I'm ahead of the game.  Not only that but I'm saving money by booking preview performances.  However it does mean two marathon days.  Five plays on one day starting at 11 am finishing at 10pm and four on another starting at 10am finishing at 9.30pm. 

Since my record for Fringe shows is seven in a day it shouldn't be that overwhelming but don't expect me to remember much about them afterwards.    

It was a lovely afternoon yesterday and I set out enthusiastically to play golf.   My enthusiasm gradually wasted away as the number of golf balls in my bag decreased.  The last two ended up somewhere in the gorse lining the 18th fairway.

Making idle conversation whilst enjoying tonsorial attention the other day I offered the information that I was holidaying in the islands of Orkney and Shetland this summer.  "Is that near Stornoway?" I was asked.  On learning the true whereabouts of my holiday destination and being given as a bonus  the name of the island group sheltering Stornoway the barber lady generously absolved her geography teacher of responsibility crying mea culpa and swearing to peruse a map over her tea that evening.

I hope she did.

I was crying mea culpa myself as I left a performance of Sutra.  I chose to go, nobody forced me.  Did I think that I would get a lot out of 70 minutes of Kung Fu like prancing and grunting or what?  I grant you it looks lovely and it's very athletic and I'd never have thought you could do so much on a stage with a couple of dozen coffin sized boxes but it didn't float my boat.  Others thought much more highly of the work.

I felt similarly negative about This House.  Maybe I'd have enjoyed this story of the internecine battle between Labour and Tory whips in the period 74 to 79 if I'd seen it in the theatre rather than as a satellite transmission to a cinema, but I'm not sure.  I think the political and social changes that took place during that time are better deserving of a theatrical airing than the struggle to get members through the lobbies.  Others thought differently.

I shan't bother comparing my opinion of the RSNO's performance of Elijah with what anyone else thought because I know it was great, especially the off-stage children's choir.  Ethereal is the only word for that.

The costume design and construction students from Queen Margaret University have been showing off their creations.  It was marvellous stuff.  I think the girl who did our excellent Tempest costumes a few years ago came from that course.

Their Costume Showcase was held in the debating hall of what used to be the Men's Union but is now called Teviot Row House. The building had quite a few bars in my time but seems to have even more nowadays including this rooftop one which I'm sure wasn't there in the 60s.

It's been going since 1984 but 6 o'clock this morning was when I heard of it for the first time.  No doubt all my tweeting friends had already been up for hours celebrating international dawn chorus day.  I hope to hear some of them in the new BBC "Tweet of the day" series starting at 05.58 tomorrow.

Birds of a different feather were plentiful in a surprisingly interesting and moving film that I stumbled across yesterday.  I'd spent the better part of the day helping with the Forth Bridge paintingish task of clearing and tidying the Grads store in Home street and popped into the Cameo for a revivifying coffee.  I took it into The Look of Love which was just starting.  A biopic about Paul Raymond seems an unlikely cesspit in which to find a diamond but the performances were excellent, the evocation of the times masterly and the central drama of his relationship with his daughter altogether affecting.

Raymond may have been known as the king of smut but he's outdone on the screen this week by Almodovar's I'm So Excited.   Is it funny? Yesish, but it's like Frankie Howard with the innuendo replaced by direct action.  Those who suggest it's a metaphor for the state of the Spanish nation are over intellectualising a money making romp.

There was an unexpected amount of romping in Zinnie Harris's version of A Doll's House, a revival of which has replaced the play that featured in the Lyceum's brochure published almost a year ago.  It surprises me that such forward planning fails so infrequently but in this case the replacement is a very satisfactory show.  I enjoyed it a lot.

Chinese dumplings replaced pies in the A Play, a Pie and a Pint mini series that is currently running.  The two shows playing in Edinburgh are at the Bedlam and while the Traverse generally fills up for these lunchtime shows there could not have been more than 25 in the house to see Secrets, and most of them seemed to have a connection with the Confuscius Institute which is sponsoring the Edinburgh performances.  That's a shame because it was an intriguing little play in many ways.

Not least in that there seemed nothing particularly Chinese about it.  A man turns up at the house of a woman he had abandoned eighteen months earlier.  She is now married and has a child.  He thinks it might be his.  He suggests they go away together.  After an emotional struggle she agrees because she is still in love with him.  He then hums and haws, says he didn't really mean it and anyway he's getting married next week to his boss.  She throws him out and sits down in tears.  Chinese women have it as bad as any others, eh?

The only tears at the Grads' reading of Julius Caesar (to be performed in November) were tears of laughter.  Not particularly appropriate for a tragedy you'd think but due to the random allocation of roles made on the hoof amongst the inadequate number of people present.  At one point I could hardly read for the tears in my eyes as I grappled with a conversation amongst three characters all being played by me struggling to differentiate them with a range of funny voices.  At least I wasn't being addressed as "girl" as was one hefty male Grad.

All that indoor entertainment was balanced by a glorious summery day on the golf course.  Imagine, short sleeves at last, winter is over, the thump of willow on ball is in the air etc etc.  Alas for one day only.  Maybe it will come again next week or next month or .....

The SCO dress code is all black with jackets optional, and ties whose absence looks as though it might be obligatory.  The classical player's need to show that he and his music are not as stuffy as they are thought to be, is it?

The music at the Britten centenary concert that I hadn't planned on going to was anything but stuffy.  The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings by Britten himself was simply divine. It was preceded by two pieces that I suppose might be described as challenging, i.e. modern.

In introducing Harrison Birtwhistle's Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum the conductor pointed out that it was written when Monty Python was all the rage and that it probably needed to be listened to with a sense of humour.  You could believe having heard it that if you wanted to translate the Python anarchic style into sound you'd very likely end up with something like this.

Martin Suckling's Storm, Rose, Tiger saw the light of day as recently as 2011 and the 32 year old composer was there to enjoy it with us.  He was also giving a talk before the concert which had it not been for a craving for food I'd have gone to.  I should have had a bigger lunch.

Unusually for me I bought a programme - I thought I should at least know what words the tenor was singing.  Apart from that benefit I was able to read plenty about all the music.  Thanks to my saxophone studies I understand the words in those descriptions better than I used to but in the end it all boils down to whether the music you hear pleases you.  Storm, Rose, Tiger pleased me so it doesn't much matter that Suckling talks about "intervals that fall in the gaps - a semi-tone and a half for example, or the interval between a major third and a minor third - that give the harmony a special and often (to my[i.e. his] mind ) radiant quality".

Unusually for me also I sat upstairs.  It must be years since I was upstairs in the Queen's Hall and I was pleased to see that the pews have had their hard bench seating replaced by fold down seats something like the strapontins in the Paris metro, only more comfy, since I plan to sit upstairs next season. 

The second half was given over to Mozart's Symphony No. 40. It was lovely but I preferred the modern stuff.

Coming back to what the musicians wear I'm conscious that I haven't mentioned the women.  The SNJO doesn't have any and in the RSNO and the SCO the women wear a variety of little black numbers.  Let's leave it like that.  Enough attention is paid to women's wear.  Let's see the boys glamming up for a change.

The jazzmen's suits were Hawaian extravaganza compared to the white tie and tails worn by the RSNO's saxophonist the following evening.  I suppose the appearance of a saxophonist in a symphony orchestra is rare enough that not to have had him wear the 200 year old uniform would have seemed doubly indecorous.

Not that wearing the tie and tails outfit is uniformly applauded.  This item from Toronto (from whence the RSNO's current music director came) muses on how long it may last and includes a little video showing that I'm not the first person to have thought of enlisting the talents of students to rethink musical uniforms.

The saxophonist was there to play in Copland's Piano Concerto which uses stylistic elements associated with jazz. While it's unusual to see a sax at a symphony concert it is probably even more unusual to have two piano concertos on the bill.  In the first half of the programme Xiayin Wang played Barber's Piano Concerto.  I enjoyed both pieces but the Barber wins hands down in terms of  bravura and excitement.

That excitement means the orchestra and the pianist have to go like the clappers a lot of the time and it's not surprising, aesthetic reasons apart, that Xiayin should have changed her iridescent gold dress at the interval for a similarly iridescent blue one to tackle the Copland in.  Harder to tell if the string players changed one white shirt for another but given the sweat they must have worked up in those tailcoats I shouldn't be at all surprised.

The McEwan Hall is used to fancy dress in the form of academic gowns and mortarboards but today the students of the Edinburgh College of Art (but lately fully incorporated into the university) were holding their fashion show there.

For an absolutely delightful hour and a half we were treated to a parade of imaginative, colourful and beautiful work.  Especially interesting I thought were the performance costumes.  It all sped past so fast that I'm treating myself to a DVD of the event if I can get the website to accept my money.

Here's just a few tasters from the snaps I managed to take.

   

The members of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra could benefit from a word with some of those students. They produced a great concert of big band music this evening but in their grey suits, white shirts and conservative ties they looked a little dull. Something to do with the jazz musician's need to have his music taken seriously is it?

In this neck of the woods when you want to know what an experienced critic thought of a show you've seen you turn to Joyce McMillan, unless it is an amateur show, because Joyce does not (as she told me once) have enough time to include them.

Fortunately we have another critic who does find the time, and wondering whether my thoughts about A Boston Marriage were a little ungenerous I turned to see what Thom Dibdin had made of it.  I found my opinion expressed rather more cogently than several hours labour on my part would have produced. 

I had a little excursion out to the Falkirk Wheel recently and would recommend it.  I'd even recommend getting into the wrong lane on the M9 and seeing a bit more of the countryside than is strictly necessary.

One of the bonuses of going there is that you can take in the Antonine Wall as well although I don't think we came across it.  But then you probably need the eyes of an archeologist to be sure since what's left is mostly just bumpy ground.

I happened to pick up a magazine in Italy last month that featured articles about the edges of the Roman Empire and it includes this picture that I thought at first was the Antonine but is in fact Hadrian's wall which is in a much better state although the picture still has something of a photoshop air to it.

They do admit that this picture of a Roman lavvy is an imagining but declare it to be based on structures that are still well preserved.  Elsewhere perhaps.  I have seen them in Ostia but not in West Lothian where the Wheel's facilities were bang up to date.

200 years before the wall was built Julius Caesar was strutting his stuff in ancient Rome, inspiring Shakespeare's play which in turn inspired some of the criminals taking part in a production of it to lead better lives on their release.

So said the docudrama Cesare Deve Morire which follows the inmates of a high security prison as they put the play together.  You can see that it's all about parallels in the lives of the prisoners and the characters but despite some interesting moments I found it disappointing.  The reason is I think that I expected more docu than drama.  There is for example a scene in which a scene between Caesar and Metellus(?) is being rehearsed.  The dialogue between the characters turns into a personal argument between the prisoners based on the similarity of the dynamics between Shakespeare's pair and the dynamics between the  two prisoners.  It came over to me as wholly staged.  Now that's not necessarily a bad thing but it meant I had little faith in much of the documentary truth being shown.

On the other hand the joy of the cast after they took their call at the end of the show seemed 100% heartfelt as did the words (scripted or not) of the prisoner being locked up afterwards - "since I discovered art this cell has become a prison".

Being locked up or rather, in the expression that has come from Boston this week, in lock down, was one of the alternatives offered to the participants in Deadinburgh.  This great fun show doesn't need my description.  Read Claire's.

There were lots of questions to be answered in Deadinburgh and asking questions to get at the truth is at the heart of Rob Drummond's Quiz Show.  I caught the penultimate performance and am glad I did.

When the play opens we are the studio audience in a TV quiz show.  The floor manager puts us through our applauding paces and then the contestants enter and the quizmaster bounces on.  The questioning starts and it's all a very light-hearted and funny parody of just such a quiz.  But as the play goes on it gets darker and darker until all the truth comes out, the play ends and the audience sit in silence.

No floor manager could have made us applaud at that moment but when the lights came up and the cast came on stage to take a bow the applause was deservedly generous.

The run is over but there's bound to be a revival.  Until then avoid reviews and hope that those who saw it will keep shtum.

That's a lot of percussion lined up in front of me at the Queen's Hall but it turned out that not all of it was active at the same time and much of the banging was quite restrained.  Indeed the tubular bells were struck ever so gently and infrequently in an ethereal sounding piece by Arvo Pärt.  On the other hand there was some really loud, lusty and athletic double bass work in Britten's Prelude and Fugue for Strings.

The SCO are celebrating Britten's centenary with three concerts and this one, apart from Pärt's Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, was a mixture of Britten and Purcell and it's one of the most enjoyable that I've been to in their entire season.  So much so that I'm going to go to one of the other three which I had not intended to do.

The hall was packed (the empty seats in the photo were for the chorus) in contrast to the Brunton Theatre where a small and doubtless select band watched four Victorian one-act farces the previous evening.  The staging had a raggedy church youth group air to it and although the three actors pumped hard at the chests of these old gems I think they need to accept that if not already dead then they are terminally feeble and will soon expire.

If I were a twit I'd have been tweeting to the world with joy this morning as I made my way homewards from Summerhall in deliciously almost warm Spring sunshine.  Has winter gone at last?

I'd been to Summerhall to hear Owen Dudley Edwards expatiate on Conan Doyle; not as the writer of Sherlock Holmes although that creation popped up frequently, but as a historical novelist.  Dudley Edwards spoke at a rate of knots for an hour without referring to a single note and in the couple of extracts he read performed with gusto, endowing the various characters with appropriate voices.  He has clearly been a loss to the stage.

This talk was part of the latest addition to Edinburgh's bouquet of festivals - the Historical Fiction Festival.  Yesterday I enjoyed some enlightening words on Walter Scott in a celebration of the completion of the Edinburgh edition of his novels.  All 29 volumes available at the special discounted festival price of £1300.  Perhaps they will be remaindered before I run the chance of bumping into Sir Walter and I will be able to profit from the scholarship that makes them preferable to the cheapo editions that have passed through my hands over the years.  I was a bit surprised to realise in the course of the talk that I have read quite a bit of Scott; not recently it's true but one of the speakers maintained that his omission from the current school curriculum is no bad thing since in her opinion it's better to encounter his work as an adult, so maybe it's time for a second exposure.

I was also surprised later in the day how scenes from The Leopard came back to me as they were mentioned in the discussion between Alan Massie and Joe Farrell of Lampedusa's superb tale of the transition from aristocratic hegemony to bourgeois thralldom in 19th century Sicily.  Thanks to the generosity of Valvona and Croalla the hour between the end of the discussion and the screening of Visconti's film of the novel was enlivened by a glass or three of Nero d'Avola.

In the course of this quaffing I was approached by two chaps one of whom said that surely I was Ken somebody or other.  I didn't catch the surname but surmised from his slightly shy manner that this Ken was a public person, whether a historical novelist or an academic commentator I know not.  My reply was simply no and that it is very easy to mistake one bearded bald headed old man for another.  But the three of us had a jolly chat for quarter of an hour so thanks to Ken X for that.

Unlike most book festivals this is not primarily a shop window for authors exposing their new works for sale.  Admittedly in the cases of Scott, Lampedusa and Conan Doyle that would be tricky but so uncommercial is it that the Summerhall bookshop has only a few books by some of the living authors who feature and now that I have bought their one copy of Conan Doyle's The Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard they have nothing at all by the dead ones.

There will soon be lots of books in Summerhall since the SCDA have found space there for their script library, having had to move from the council premises they currently occupy.  I don't want to claim all the credit but when they appealed for a new home in November last year I suggested they try there. 

Twits will no doubt have been exchanging 140 character bursts of applause over the Grads' production of Jerusalem which earned itself a five star review this week.  Last night is tonight so you still have time to see it - Adam House at 19.30.  It's a great show.

I suppose you can characterise anything that has men and women dancing in close proximity one to the other as being about love so Labyrinth of Love is a pretty good title for the piece that Ballet Rambert open their current tour with.  It was lovely to look at, had some gorgeous leaping around, staggeringly athletic lifts and a very impressive giant whose bottom half had to gyrate, run and swoop in the blindness of an enfolding skirt.  There's a glimpse of that in this video.  I loved the music, the singer and the background projections so that was a very satisfactory start to the evening for me.

The second piece which also had live music was less exciting.  It was beautifully done, pretty to look at etc but unmemorable.

Now for both of these pieces there was a deaf interpreter on-stage.  Since there was a singer in Labyrinth of Love you can see the point of that to pass on the words but it doesn't seem to me to add anything to make violin movements or whatever in a piece without words.  Indeed if you subscribe to the idea that dance is music made flesh it doesn't show much faith in the choreographer.

For the third and fourth items both the band and the interpreter headed for the hills and we were left in the one case with some mercifully brief shouting of recorded nonsense words and in the other some electronic tooting and scraping.

Now I don't object to electronic music.  Indeed I commissioned some for a theatre production I did but this was electronic music best appreciated by the deaf.

The Winter's Tale is not a play that I knew anything about so the RSC production visiting Edinburgh this week was welcome on that count alone.  The theatre was full on opening night as well it might have been for the production was splendid.

The story is pretty daft.  Leontes, King of Sicilia, is convinced on the flimsiest of evidence that his wife is pregnant by his best chum Polixenes, King of Bohemia.  P, who is visiting L, escapes with the help of L's right-hand man Camillo who doesn't want to carry out the orders he has to murder him.  The Queen, Hermione, is delivered of a girl child.  L is restrained from dispatching her to Hades and instead has her sent off to be abandoned on a distant shore.  Luckily for the plot that turns out to be Bohemia where she is found by a passing shepherd.

Hermione is pronounced dead and L's son comes down with a heavy dose of something that finishes him off too.  L then learns from the Delphic Oracle that he had the wrong end of the stick all the time.  His late Queen was innocent.  Weeping he is hoist aloft by a wonderful piece of stage machinery where he spends the rest of the first half and most of the second.

Years pass and Perdita (the abandoned Princess) grows up and attracts the attention of Prince Florizel (son of P).  Of course F and P are ignorant of her royal blood.  F doesn't care but P is livid that his son should be dallying with a shepherd's daughter.  I couldn't be sure from her accent on which side of the Pennines the sheep were grazing but it was one or t'other.  There is a lot of singing and dancing and Shakespearean horsing around before the young lovers flee pursued by P.

They get to Sicilia as do their pursuers et al, where thanks to the shepherd's revelations of how he found the girl and the trinkets left with her L realises she is his daughter.  There is a lot of rejoicing and relief on P's part that she's fit to marry his son after all (just need to tidy up that accent).

Even more rejoicing ensues when that nifty stage machinery is found to conceal a statue of Hermione that comes to life.  Everyone is very happy and no-one spoils the party by mentioning L's dead son.

The happy youngsters lead off a final dance that eventually involves the entire cast.  If you have ever tried to get co-ordinated movement from two or more actors you will know just how marvellous a piece of work this is.

Great show.  

Safely back from my first ski trip in ten years.

There wasn't a great deal of the hoped for Spring sunshine and blue skies but two days in the middle of the week were quite pleasant and I took my camera out.  Before that there had been mist and drizzly snow to add an extra layer of discomfort to the pain and suffering that my thighs were undergoing.

It didn't take very long to get the mechanics of skiing going again although I wasn't skiing with a great deal of confidence for the first  two or three days and I kept away from anything too steep or too narrow for the entire week.  That didn't ensure that I stayed on my feet all the time though. 

The week started off with a last minute cancellation of band practice because of fears that should the conductor get into town from the snow stricken wastes of West Lothian she might not get home again.

So I went to the pictures.  I had a choice between Shell and Side Effects, chose the latter and wished I'd tried the former.  Not that it was bad but it didn't live up to the hype in the programme (do they ever?) and it wasn't any more cheerful than Shell promised to be from what I had heard of it.

That was followed by a much more enjoyable evening at a Scottish Dance Theatre show.  Not many people were there which is a crying shame.  The evening started with our being told about technical problems delaying things.  I was quite taken in and launched into conversation to fill the gap but was summarily and sharply cut down by my more streetwise companion who knew that this was a wee spoof and the show was actually under way.  There was some great crowd forming and menacing stage crossing that I've marked down as just the ticket for conspirators approaching their assassination target and a brilliant trio duel (can you have a three person duel?) in which each dancer took charge by performing an action that caused their piece of music to be played instead of someone else's.  It was like playing three dimensional scissors, paper, stone to music.

The second half of the bill was a tongue in cheek Scandinavian/Russian angstfest with a hint of Greek tragedy in which dead birds were thrown around and a stag (also dead) was dragged across the stage. Blood dripped into a bucket, a woman with a blood-soaked bandage where her eyes should be wandered around, shots were heard and various melodramatic scenes were athletically danced.

The story of Novecento the baby found on a transatlantic liner who grew up on board and played the piano as it crossed and recrossed the Atlantic seemed almost normal in comparison.  A French translation of this Italian play was presented by a Belgian duo at the French Institute.  Although they were two one was a non-speaking pianist.  This is actually a monologue, very hard to do well and this actor was very good.  He moved convincingly between his role as the narrator (a trumpet player on board the liner) and other characters and did a great job evoking a storm.

It's been a popular play over the years and has been made into a film but critical reaction has varied from those who think it's drivel to those who think it's transcendental art.  I've seen it twice and am somewhere in between.

Ma Vlast is probably given the transcendental tag by Czech nationalists if by no-one else and I thought I liked it but was underwhelmed by hearing it tonight complemented by giant images of Czech countryside, townscapes, woods, concentration camp inmates and other things  projected onto screens above the orchestra.  These were said to be illustrative of the feeling of the music rather than directly programmatic but I found them by and large distracting.  

The last of the current pie, play and a pint season was written by a stand-up comedian, whose first play it is.  Well done for a first effort I guess would be my verdict on this comedy with a serious message in which a drunken Glaswegian painter spars with his posh art dealer.  The message is to do with the waste of life in war and I shan't spoil anyone's enjoyment by giving away what happens.    

The concert went pretty well on Friday and afterwards some friends came back to the flat for a drink.  I'd laid in some nibbles in anticipation of this.  Amongst them was a packet of crisps that proved surplus to requirements and on Saturday I thought I'd munch through them while watching the rugby.

Now one of my frequent moans is that the food industry can't leave well alone.  No sooner, for example, had the British public developed a taste for meusli than the industry started mucking about with it.  There are shelf-fulls of variations; with chocolate chips, with tropical fruit, crisp and crunchy etc.  You are lucky to find a straightforward bag of oats with some nuts and raisins and sultanas mixed in.

The same is true and even worse with crisps.  A good honest plain crisp is hard to find.  Dashing along the supermarket aisle scanning the packets, rejecting tomato and beef, barbecue, mexican chilli and so on and so on my eyes alighted on pepper and salt.  I grabbed it as likely to be the closest to plain that I would find without spending half an hour on the job.

My scan had unfortunately missed the adjective "popped".  I had never heard of a popped crisp.  They are apparently not baked, not fried, just popped.  On examination you can see bubbles on the surface and they are thicker than normal crisps.  They have a sort of woolly texture in the mouth.

They do not taste at all like potato crisps, unless crisps that have popped their clogs.  This is not surprising when you see that the principal ingredients are "potato flake (??), rice flour and salt".

Unfortunately we have not yet received our promised food waste recycling facility so these have gone to landfill.

So far this winter I have been exceptionally lucky and have avoided the least suspicion of a cold. This Friday however I'll have a red nose and be wheezing away.

Yesterday's snow has made a mess of my primulas and pansies but didn't get through the window to damage this beauty

I thought my Spring plantings were looking rather pretty in the good weather at the weekend

High Society is the complete antithesis of Werther; though just as we know from the start that Werther will top himself for love we know Cole Porter's heroine Tracy will end up back with her ex-husband Dexter.  Not even a bit of skinny dipping with Mike on the eve of her projected wedding with George will get in the way.

It's a brilliant product of the American musical theatre, although it started life on film, and this touring production rattles along merrily from the razzle dazzle of the opening title number where the numerous flunkies in the Lord household strut their stuff and Tracy dances through an extraordinary number of lightning fast costume changes, to the final happy curtain.

On the way endearing Uncle Willie sings a song in praise of gin and does as much inappropriate bottom pinching as he can get away with . The young Bolshevik writer sings Who Wants to be a Millionaire without a trace of irony while relaxing with a glass of champagne. Younger sister Dinah gets into the action whenever she can and with the help of a glass or three Tracy is reconciled to her reprobate father and dull old George eventually does the decent thing.

What a swell party they have and how we all enjoyed sharing it.