Critics’ choice 08/11/12

Published on 08/11/2012 00:00

What to watch this week

THEATRE

ENTARTET

OLD AMBULANCE DEPOT, BRUNSWICK STREET, EDINBURGH, UNTIL SATURDAY. 5.30-8.30pm today and 3.30-6.30pm Friday and Saturday.

KAI FISCHER is one of Scotland’s leading stage designers, a magician with settings and light. This week, there’s a brief chance for Edinburgh to catch up on his powerful performance installation Entartet, which reflects on the notorious Nazi-organised exhibition in Munich in 1937, and the relationship between government and art. What’s chilling is the familiar, apparently innocuous quality of the language the Nazis used, in arguing for their iron-fisted rejection of most modern art; see this show, think hard about it, and cherish freedom.

• Tel: [phone]

JOYCE MCMILLAN

FILM

THE LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL ON TOUR

THE GROSVENOR, GLASGOW, 10-12 NOVEMBER

Proving there’s more to Korean cinema than the works of Park Chanwook (OldBoy) and Bong Joon-ho (The Host), the seventh London Korean Film Festival brings its wares to Glasgow’s Grosvenor cinema this weekend, showcasing other sides of the country’s diverse filmmaking culture. Among the films screening are Padak (an animated fable for adults about mackerel grappling with the existential issues that arise from living in a seafood restaurant’s fish tank), As One Korea (a table-tennis drama about the first ever post-war unified Korean sports team) and Dancing Queen (a romantic tale about a husband and wife whose lives are spiced up when he finds himself accidentally running for mayor of Seoul and she becomes a pop star).

• Tel: [phone]

ALISTAIR HARKNESS

VISUAL ART

GALAPAGOS

FRUITMARKET GALLERY, EDINBURGH, UNTIL 13 JANUARY

Galapagos at the Fruitmarket brings together work by 12 artists who have all been beneficiaries of a residency scheme in the Galapgos Islands. They evidently found the experience transformative and brought back ideas that inspired work in a wide variety of media. According to the press release, together “they build a unique dreamscape of a remarkable place, messages for mankind from the stark realities of Galápagos”. Whether this really adds up to any new Darwinian insights, you will have to go and see for your self.

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DUNCAN MACMILLAN

CLASSICAL

HEBRIDES ENSEMBLE: EIGHT SONGS FOR A MAD KING

OLD FRUITMARKET, GLASGOW, 12 NOVEMBER; EDEN COURT, INVERNESS, 13 NOVEMBER; JAM HOUSE, EDINBURGH, 15 NOVEMBER; ST DUTHUS CHURCH, TAIN, 16 NOVEMBER

Written over 40 years ago, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ wildly extrovert music theatre piece, Eight Songs For a Mad King still packs a vicious punch. The subject is madness, that of King George III, portrayed by an actor/singer – Marcus Farnsworth in this brand new dramatic version – whose manic rantings at a number of caged musicians take musical parody to an extreme level. Stage director Ben Twist heads up the creative team of this Hebrides Ensemble programme, which prefaces the Maxwell Davies with music by Oliver Knussen, George Benjamin, Colin Matthews and Thomas Ades.

• Tel: [phone] (Glasgow); 01463 234 234 (Inverness); 0131-226 4380 (Edinburgh); 07521 077053 (Tain)

KEN WALTON

POP

BON IVER

VENUE SECC, GLASGOW, 10 NOVEMBER

Bon Iver, aka indie folk singer/songwriter Justin Vernon, has gone from recording his lo-fi indie debut in a remote cabin in the Wisconsin woods to playing Scotland’s biggest indoor rock venue in five short years. It remains to be seen if this unexpected trajectory, from the sleeper success of For Emma, Forever Ago to the more polished breakthrough of follow-up Bon Iver, Bon Iver (so good he named it twice), makes Vernon a victim of his own success, or if he and his band can still turn in a suitably intimate, aching performance in one of Scotland’s most thankless halls.

• Tel: [phone]

FIONA SHEPHERD