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Hayley Tompkins – 'Digital Light Pools'

The Common Guild, Glasgow until August 2nd Four stars It's the brightest and airiest of environments that have housed Hayley Tompkins' floor-based bird's-eye picture postcard views of holy-hued rainbows, high-rise city-scapes, earth-bound stone formations, tranquil blue seas and fog-bound multi-lane traffic surges thus far. Originally seen as part of Scotland's contribution to Venice 2013 and now forming part of the nationwide GENERATION programme, these off-the-peg images contained in plastic trays play with the full light-and-shade spectrum of the Common Guild's high-windowed town-house interior they've been reconfigured for on the floor alongside an empty chair to take in the view. The painted stick on the wall, half-consumed bottles of coloured liquid, fake steaks, baguette and a plastic salad sandwich in the hall suggests the left-over souvenirs of an off-piste picnic in some man-made make-believe utopia. Upstairs, newer works, on the wall

Andy Arnold - The Tron Theatre's Home Nations Festival 2014

There is a line in Liz Lochhead's play, Edwin Morgan's Dreams and Other Nightmares, in which Scotland's first Makar is asked by his biographer what he thinks of fellow poet Seamus Heaney's adaptation of Beowulf, which Morgan had done a version of some years before. Morgan's response in the play is that he considered Heaney's version to be “too Irish.” The line penned by Morgan's successor as Makar for a show first seen at the Glasgay! festival three years ago became the key for its director, Andy Arnold, to stage this month's Home Nations Festival 2014 at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, where he is artistic director. This  mini season of four pieces of poetic drama from Scotland, Northern Ireland, England and Wales looks set to coincide with the impending Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and its accompanying Festival 2014 arts strand which supports the season. Opening with a big community production of Dylan Thomas' masterpiece, Under Milk Wood, artistic dir

Toby Paterson - GENERATION

Standing outside his studio in Glasgow city centre, beyond its noise and smoky breath, Toby Paterson can observe a metropolis in a state of architectural flux. It isn't difficult to spot this influence in the Glasgow-born Becks Future winning former skate-boarder's body of work over the last twenty years. This is reflected too in Paterson's solo GENERATION show, one of the first out of the traps which opens in Kirkcaldy before touring to Inverness, Peebles and Dumfries in a deliberate focus on smaller locales outwith the central belt. “One of the things about the show,” Paterson explains, “is that there's a lot going on in terms of texture and scale. That goes right back to my formative experiences skate-boarding, when you're focusing on a tiny detail of whichever location you're using, and you occasionally take a step back and think, 'Oh, this building is interesting'. You're discovering a way of looking at things.” Since graduating from Glasgow Sch

The Admirable Crichton

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars There was never anything innocent about J.M. Barrie, as this 1902 dissection of class consciousness testifies in an at times remarkably progressive if ultimately redundant fashion. Richard Baron's revival has Barrie himself introduce his creation by way of his elaborate stage directions to set the scene. These concern the liberal-minded Earl of Loam, who gathers his three spoilt daughters, Mary, Catherine and Agatha, his equally brattish nephew Ernest and an extended coterie of aristocrats for a day of meeting the servants on allegedly equal if toe-curlingly awkward terms before setting sail on a family expedition. With the eponymous butler Crichton and mouse-like maid Tweeny accompanying, by the second act they are shipwrecked and, aside from Crichton, without a clue about survival. After two years, the girls have gone the way of most posh back-packers on gap-year, with Mary in particular morphing into an androgynous lost girl in thrall of Cri

Tectonics 2014 - St Andrew's in the Square/City Halls/Old Fruitmarket - May 9-11

Friday If incoming Edinburgh International Festival director Fergus Linehan really wishes to refresh his music programme with something more contemporary than the current model as he hinted at during a recent press briefing, he could do worse than look at  this second edition of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra's inspired three-day meeting of musical minds, which saw curators Ilan Volkov and Alasdair Campbell foster international alliances aplenty. While Volkov has been a mercurial figure, both with the BBC SSO and in Iceland, where a Reykjavic-based arm of Tectonics runs in tandem with the Glasgow event, much of the the groundwork over the last decade for something as sonically ambitious as Tectonics was done by the Instal and Le Weekend festivals, with Campbell in charge of the latter for much of its existence. The involvement of the BBC and the presence of Radio 3 in particular at Tectonics, however, suggests an official seal of approval that opens up an avenu

Ed Robson and Elspeth Turner - Cumbernauld Theatre, Stoirm Og and Beyond

When Ed Robson took over as artistic director of Cumbernauld Theatre, to suggest he had something of an uphill struggle ahead of him is something of an understatement. Here was a theatre with a proud past both as a community and professional venue, but which had just had its Scottish Arts Council grant cut. With heavy debts mounting, the theatre's closure seemed inevitable. Rather than appoint some number-crunching bureaucrat to step in and manage the venue's demise, Cumbernauld Theatre's board of directors were convinced enough by Robson's enthusiasm that he could turn things around. Seven years on, and things look very different indeed. With Robson still in post, Cumbernauld Theatre is alive and well with a mixed programme of visiting shows and in-house work. With an annual Company-in-Residence partnership set up last year with the award-winning Tortoise in a Nutshell company, the Edinburgh-based Stoirm Og company will be the second recipients of an initiative which a

The Yellow on the Broom

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Three stars This week's announcement by T in the Park that as of next year it will shift sites from Balado to Strathallan Castle may embed Scotland's liveliest music festival even firmer on Perthshire soil, but it is far from the first temporary tented village to plant roots there. This is made vividly clear in Anne Downie's dramatisation of Betsy Whyte's 1979 autobiography, which has barely been seen on Scotland's stages since it was first produced by the appropriately nomadic Winged Horse company in 1989. On the one hand, Downie has penned a richly evocative first-person rites of passage of Whyte's alter-ego, Bessie, the tobacco-guzzling brightest spark of the Townsley clan, a family of Travellers winding their way through 1930s rural Scotland. As Betsy, her father Sandy and her mother Maggie are forced to move from place to place, however, they run a gauntlet of class-room snobbery and institutionalised prejudice that looks frighte