Edinburgh News

This March, a programme of events in Scotland, surrounding St. Patrick's Day, illustrate how these two great nations are moving in the oldest yet closest of friendships and explores how often there has been a reluctance to admit or engage this closeness, with both nations holding on to a complicated historical legacy and becoming intimate strangers, existing with their backs to each other and reluctant to forge new chapters.

Shattered Head is the title of a piece of sculpture made by Scots Italian artist, Eduardo Paolozzi in 1956. This short play shows the acclaimed artist in the last years of his life when he is confined to a wheelchair and the inside of his own head has been shattered after his stroke in 2001.

Dear God, I hate myself. So wails Jamie Stewart as he stands wracked, seemingly almost in pain, at the microphone. His eyes are permanently screwed shut as he wrestles with technology to expose whatever demons lie rank within him.

Richard Egarr, Music Director of the Academy of Ancient Music, was the guest conductor of this performance of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven compositions played by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. 

Now Martin McDonagh has been thrust into the spotlight for award-winning short films and his Oscar nominated feature length In Bruges, it seems only fitting that the Lyceum present his first major

Songs For An Airless Room styles itself as somewhere between theatre and a piece of music to be performed. If this is fairly grandiose and self-regarding it nevertheless is an ambitious collaboration between live musical performance and screened film.

Last year’s innovative lunchtime theatre series "A Play, A Pie and A Pint", a successful collaboration between Glasgow’s Òran Mór and the Traverse Theatre, is back in Edinburgh for the next 5 weeks.  This time they have had the good sense to include the classic meat pie (Òran Mór’s own, I am told) among the choice and very good it is too. Aussies take note!

As a child I don’t suppose I was alone in pondering heaven and hell and wondering how it was decided which I should end up in at my death. John Henry Newman’s long poem, The Dream of Gerontius, is a dream just about that.

A prodigious playwright, Douglas Maxwell will have at least 5 of his plays performed this year - including a musical for Cumbernauld Theatre. 'Promises, Promises' however is a monologue written in the voice of a primary school teacher who feels drawn to protect a mute six year old Somalian girl, allegedly possessed by the devil.

It may not feel like Spring, but for gardeners the growing season is almost upon us. It means that garden waste collections become fortnightly from March. To mark the occasion the City of Edinburgh Council has been giving away free bags of compost made from recycled garden waste. The first giveaway was yesterday at Fox Covert Primary School in Corstorphine, with further compost give-aways planned today and later.