The Arts: Critics’ choices

Published on 21/03/2013 00:00

Our critics give their picks of the best theatre, film, music and art in Scotland this week

THEATRE

Takin’ over the asylum

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 6 April

IT’S not the easiest in theatre, to take your own successful 1990s television sitcom, and turn it into a powerful 21st-century stage play. Writer Donna Franceschild and director Mark Thomson make a brilliant job of it, though, in this fine and moving Lyceum-Citizens’ co-production, in which down-at-heel DJ Eddie McKenna – played by a superb Iain Robertson – arrives at a Glasgow mental hospital to try to retstart the in-house radio station, and finds himself fighting for light, love and human dignity against intolerance and bureaucracy. The comedy is hilarious, the tragedy is sharp, the ensemble acting is terrific; don’t miss a show that’s like Scottish One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, with better jokes.

• Tel: [phone]

JOYCE MCMILLAN

FILM

Found Footage Festival

The Grosvenor, Glasgow, tonight

Playing as part of this year’s Glasgow Comedy Festival, the New York-based Found Footage Festival returns to the city tonight with another selection of oddball clips culled from VHS tapes that hosts Joe Picket and Nick Prueher have spent years sourcing from charity shops across America and then mining for comedy gold. Skilfully edited, and tied together with an amusing live commentary from Picket and Prueher, last year’s show at the GFT featured bizarre corporate training videos, and rare footage of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his bodybuilder heyday being ultra sleazy. This year’s event at the Grosvenor promises the Sexy Treadmill Workout exercise tape, a Spring Break home movie from 1985, and video instructions on how to care for your ferret. Hilarity will ensue.

• www.foundfootagefest.com

ALISTAIR HARKNESS

VISUAL ART

The House of Annie Lennox

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 23 March until 30 June

Annie Lennox is much more than a pop singer – some of her more elaborate videos and concerts are almost performance art – so the idea that she should have an art exhibition devoted to her isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. First shown at the V&A in 2011, and also displayed at Aberdeen Art Gallery last year, The House of Annie Lennox contains photographs, videos and costumes taken from her personal archive and spanning over three decades in the music business.

• Tel: [phone]

DUNCAN MACMILLAN

CLASSICAL

RSNO: Ma Vlast with pictures

Perth Concert Hall, today; Usher Hall, Edinburgh, tomorrow; Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 23 March

Smetana’s wonderful set of tone poems – Ma Vlast (My Country) – was groundbreaking in setting the benchmark for 19th-century Czech nationalism. The music lives and breathes Bohemian spirit and colour, best known through the most popular of them, Vltava, effectively a musical journey tracing the river from its source in the hills to the broad stretches as it reaches Prague. What makes this performance unique is the addition of projected images specially commissioned from symphonic photochoreographers James Westwater and Nicholas Bardonnay. Peter Oundjian conducts.

• Tel: [phone] (Perth); 0131-228 1155 (Edinburgh); 0141-353 8000 (Glasgow)

KEN WALTON

POP

Culture

ABC2, Glasgow, 24 March

This roots reggae trio, who formed in Kingston, Jamaica in 1976, erroneously predicted the apocalypse on 7, July 1977 on their classic Two Sevens Clash, thereby living to harmonise another day. Tragedy of a more personal nature hit when frontman Joseph Hill died on tour in 2006. His son Kenyatta, at that time the group’s sound engineer, filled in for the rest of the tour and has been the lead singer ever since, ably supported by original member Albert “Ralph” Walker and Telford Nelson, who joined in 2001.

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FIONA SHEPHERD