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Lynn MacRitchie – The Participation Art Event 1973: Provocation or Prophecy

When Lynn MacRitchie gave a public lecture at Edinburgh College of Art in February this year titled The Participation Art Event 1973: Provocation or Prophecy, it shed light on one of Scotland’s lesser known avant-garde art happenings that might finally have found its time. Instigated by MacRitchie while a student at ECA more than half a century ago, The Participation Art Event (PAE) explored the idea of art being a collective action rather than an individual, studio-bound pursuit. Over five days in December 1973, PAE took over ECA’s Sculpture Court, where a series of participatory actions took place. At the centre of this were David Medalla (1942-2020) and John Dugger (1948-2023). Medalla was a Filipino artist and activist who in 1964 co-founded the kinetic art based Signals London gallery, and was one of those behind hippie/counterculture collective the Exploding Galaxy.   It was through the latter that Medalla met Dugger, an American artist who landed on the scene in 1967. The pair c
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Sunset Song

Dundee Rep Five stars   The landscape is everywhere in Morna Young’s new version of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel. Conceived for Dundee Rep with director Finn den Hertog, the production sets out its expansive and impressionistic store by way of rows of soil that fill designer Emma Bailey’s stage. This is accompanied by the pulsating drone of composer Finn Anderson’s score.    As the show’s eight actors step out from the banks of musical instruments lined up either side of the stage and into the fields, it is as if they are sizing up the place to see if it has any future. Once they come together for a haunting vocal chorale that seems to draw its strength from the earth under their feet, they can rest assured about that in what slowly evolves into a mighty telling of Grassic Gibbon’s story that puts the fearlessly independent figure of Chris Guthrie at its heart.    Danielle Jam plays Chris with a sense of defiant pride in the face of assorted adversities that include death, sexu
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The Girls of Slender Means

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Take five girls. Put them in the same house together with only one borrowed designer dress to share between them in a world where dreams of poetry, dancing and clothes are on ration, and everyday desires look set to explode. So it goes in Gabriel Quigley’s appealingly breezy new adaptation of Muriel Spark’s 1973 novella, brought to life with a busy flourish in Roxana Silbert’s expansive production.   Things begin in the 1960s, when glossy magazine high-flyer Jane Wright discovers the death of posh boy poet Nicholas Farringdon. This provokes Jane to rewind to 1945, when she, Selina, Pauline, Anne and Jo were living in the May of Teck Club. This was a run down Kensington boarding house set up for ‘the social protection of ladies of slender means below the age of thirty years’ who wished to pursue some vaguely defined occupation.    Half a century after it was published, Spark’s study of young women on the verge in a world where post World War
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James V: Katherine

The Studio, Edinburgh  Four stars   Appearances can be deceptive in the latest episode of Rona Munro’s series of history plays, which, over the last decade since the original James Plays trilogy, has begun to resemble a centuries spanning zeitgeist busting soap opera. Take episode five, brought to life in Orla O’Loughlin’s chamber sized co-production between Raw Material and Capital Theatres as a series of intimate exchanges highlighting matters of life and death before our heroines take flight en route to personal and political liberation.    The production’s young team of actors line up at the start of the play like some Trainspotting film poster homage set to a techno soundtrack on Becky Minto’s candle lined set. In fact, they are acting out some of the fallout of the execution of Protestant reformer Patrick Hamilton at the hands of Scotland’s sixteenth century religious establishment.    As the play’s subtitle hints at, it is left to Hamilton’s rebelliously inclined sister Katherin
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Jenny Matthews - Sewing Conflict: Photography, War and Embroidery

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow Five stars   From Greenham Common to Palestine, Jenny Matthews has long been on the frontline of international protest against warfare. As a founder member in the 1980s of all-woman photographic agency, Format Photographers, and in everything that followed, Matthews’ images have brought to life the women caught in the crossfire of numerous conflicts and atrocities across more than forty years. Two decades on from her book, Women and War (2003), this solo show brings together several bodies of work that immortalise and honour her subjects using the most tender of means to keep them in the frame.   This is as clear in the series of twenty-three quilts lined with images from Matthews’ archive, as much as it is with the thirty-five portraits that use embroidery to mask the faces of Afghan women in Facial Derecognition (2021). It is there too in Torn Apart, an up to the minute series drawn from the crisis in Sudan, and a new series of images from Gaza.    In
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Fraser Taylor – Instant Whip

“Images provoke memories like music provokes memories,” says Fraser Taylor in the foyer of Glasgow School of Art’s Reid Gallery, where his Instant Whip exhibition opened a few days earlier. Shown across four rooms, Instant Whip unveils an archive of printed textiles, garments, sketchbooks, a stage backdrop for Glasgow band The Bluebells and record sleeves for pop contemporaries Friends Again. With much of the work drawn from Taylor’s time as co-founder of influential design collective, The Cloth, the exhibition’s busy array of vividly coloured works look like an inventory of his life transformed into an immersive stage set.   Navigating the spaces with Taylor, his Proustian promenade through his back pages is given extra kick by the fact the archive material on show was missing presumed lost for several decades. Only when three boxes arrived at his studio in 2014 was Taylor reintroduced to a world he thought he’d left behind.   “It was literally like my heart stopped beating for five m
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This is Memorial Device

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Five stars Second comings are all the rage these days, as pension plan heritage rock tours cash in on a band’s influential legacy to claim their place in history. While such a fate is unlikely to befall the long lost quartet of David Keenan’s epic novel about the most famous band you’ve never heard of, judging by this scaled up revival of Graham Eatough’s bold stage version, they are already the stuff of legend.   Or at least Ross Raymond seems to think so. As brilliantly brought to life by a wide eyed and restless Paul Higgins, Ross is the former fanzine writer who was at the centre of what passed for a music scene in Airdrie between 1983 and 1985, and witnessed the convoluted crash and burn of local anti heroes Memorial Device. Greeting the audience as if giving a library history talk, Ross unpacks a lifetime’s litany of reminiscences about Big Patty, Richard, Remy, and especially the mercurial power of band frontman and driving force, Lucas Black, represented i
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