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Henry 1V / Henry V

Royal Botanic Gardens, Glasgow Four stars War is everywhere just now, both onstage in the numerous commemorations of World War One's centenary year as well as an increasingly ugly real world. The centrepiece of this year's Bard in the Botanics 'What  We May Be' season, goes forth with three of Shakespeare's history plays to tackle both the personal and political consequences of conflict. Bard in the Botanics director Gordon Barr not only condenses both parts of Henry 1V into just over two hours, but has it played in the catwalk of the Kibble Palace by just three actors. It's a version full of macho swagger that charts Prince Hal's wild years from estrangement from his father and slumming it with Falstaff to finding out where his true loyalties lay. There's an acerbic edge to both James Ronan's Prince and Tom Duncan's Hotspur, while Kirk Bage lends emotional depth to Falstaff as well as the King. As Hal takes the throne and leaves the gang beh

Random Accomplice - News Just In

News just in. The 2014 Commonwealth Games about to open in Glasgow is not beyond satire. This is the case, it seems, despite the now abandoned plan to demolish the city's iconic Red Road Flats as part of the Games' opening ceremony. Neither does the derision from some quarters which greeted the unveiling of Team Scotland's official outfit seem to have deterred further parody. Both incidents, in fact, look set to be given a nod in News Just In, the new nightly, hot off the press portrayal of an imaginary TV news-room from Random Accomplice that forms part of the Commonwealth Games' Festival 2014 arts and culture strand. Set among the presenters of the fictional Tartan Tonight show, News Just In will highlight the show's larger than life presenters both on and off air. Your hosts of Tartan Tonight – named, incidentally, a good six months before STV's new Scotland Tonight show first aired - will include newsroom anchors Fergus Butler and Delta Barke

John Byrne - Dead End

It's sometimes easy to forget that John Byrne was a painter first, long before he became a playwright. While he has earned a living as an artist since 1967, only latterly, it seems, has the Paisley-born author of the Slab Boys Trilogy and TV drama, Tutti Frutti, received the acclaim for a body of work equally rich in baroque, multi-hued narrative as his stage and TV writing. With Byrne's mural for the auditorium ceiling of the King's Theatre, Edinburgh cementing the importance of his criss-crossing relationship between the two mediums when it was unveiled last year, two major exhibitions this summer should remind audiences of the instinctive and audaciously good-humoured flourishes which possess his paintings. While Sitting Ducks, a collection of some fifty, largely unseen works from private collections that forms the body of a long overdue show at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery is already up and running, it is the twenty-odd brand new pieces that make up Dead En

The Neutrinos - KlangHaus

Despite it's name, the new show by dark-hearted art-rock ensemble The  Neutrinos is about much, much more than mere music. By keeping the audience in the dark of Summerhall's already atmospheric Small Animal  Hospital and utilising an array of slide projectors beaming out  home-made slides created by artist Sal Pittman to play with the early  evening light, KlangHaus (it translates as House of Sound) becomes what the Neutrinos describe as a 360 degree immersive experience. “It explores extremes of performance,” explains Neutrinos vocalist Karen Reilly from the band's spiritual home of Berlin, where the seeds of KlangHaus were sired. “With the slides we can really shape-shift the room, so your perception is altered, and because the room was a small  animal hospital, the idea of anaesthesia keeps returning.” Reilly and co are currently drawing some last-gasp inspiration from visiting Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain), the artificial hill built in  Berlin out of World War

Luke Fowler - The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott

Scottish National National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh until November 2nd Four stars Luke Fowler's ongoing fascination with icons of radical thought has extended from film-works on punk band The Homosexuals and composer Cornelius Cardew to his Turner nominated dissection of anti-psychiatrist RD Laing. Each of these has cut-and-pasted sound-and-vision collages of archive footage and newly filmed work to create a set of suitably world-turned-upside-down narratives. Like them, this 2012 study of Marxist historian and CND activist E.P. Thompson's involvement with the Workers Educational Movement is both an impressionistic portrait of its subject as well as a timely reminder of a vital figure all but airbrushed out of official history. For this sixty-one minute piece originally commissioned by the Hepworth, Wakefield, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Film and Video Umbrella, and now shown in Scotland for the first time as part of GENERATION, Fowler slows things down to

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