If you’re one of those people who never escapes beyond the cosy west end bubble, this weekend is the time to venture to the far and distant land of East Lothian.

I’m talking specifically about the three harbour towns of Prestonpans, Cockenzie and Port Seton. If you know the area you’ll be aware that these towns have struggled hard against the tide of de-industrialisation and are gradually beginning to regenerate through community initiatives such at the Three Harbours Seafood Festival.

Organised by people of East Lothian, the festival is a great example of a community getting together to show the rest of us what they’ve got going. It’s been going for five years now and is perfect for foodies and art buffs.

The festival kicks off on Friday 28 May with an outdoor Ceilidh and birthday party led by the Islander Ceilidh Band. If you’re more interested in the food, why not visit the festival during the day on Saturday or Sunday. Entry to the festival is only £2 and the organisers promise cooking demonstrations, a great real ale tent and lots of fresh produce to buy. There’s free refrigeration all day so you don’t have to worry about your purchases getting ruined while you laze about in the sun by the sea.

Three Harbours Seafood Festival runs from Friday 28-Sunday 30 May at The Greenbelt, Edinburgh Road, Prestonpans. More information can be found at http://www.3harbours.co.uk.

The past few weeks have seen our prospective leaders battling it out over policy details, every last penny of their budgets, and the pressing question of political and parliamentary reform.

But there is one subject that craves immediate attention: immigration and asylum, considered by the British public to be the second most important issue, behind the economy, of this general election.

It is hardly surprising that politicians would rather be seen supporting a traditionally British (preferably fledgling) business, rather than photographed at an asylum centre, trying to find out what they can do to improve conditions, given how little effect the latter would have on their poll ratings.

They all agree, loudly and publicly, on the need to secure the economic recovery and to lower class sizes, but not one of them seems to be interested in developing a more humane asylum system.

The consensus among the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative Parties is that the immigration system needs to change, but by change they don’t mean that it should be made fairer — by, for instance instituting a fairer weekly allowance for single women and their children, or a better standard of living — they mean that fewer immigrants should be allowed into Britain, and those who are here should have a less obvious presence in cities and towns across the country.

The tragic reality of our asylum system made itself abundantly clear when, in March of this year, a Russian family committed suicide — jumping from the fifteenth floor of their Red Road flat in Glasgow. Having already had their benefits removed, Serge Serykh, along with his wife and child, died on the day they were told they must vacate their flat.

It was convenient for the media that, days after the suicide, it emerged that Serge had suffered from mental health problems. As the case faded away, the papers all came to the conclusion that asylum policy wasn’t to blame after all because Serge was given indefinite leave to remain in Canada, but, after accusing the authorities there of various subversive plots, left in 2007.

On reaching Britain, the family were placed in the Red Road estate. The family found themselves amongst hundreds of asylum seekers left in the flats; a sort of purgatory for those awaiting government ruling on their futures. It is no wonder that the area has been nicknamed The United Nations of Hell. And in fact the flats, synonymous with urban destitution, are now facing demolition.

On March 14, a demonstration was held in Glasgow in support of asylum seekers’ rights, with the Serykh family tragedy acting as a catalyst for this event. Over two hundred people marched from the Red Road estate to George Square with banners and placards.

One young woman from Gambia attended the protest with her children. She explained to me what problems she faced living in the flats. She said that she often spent nights piled into other friend’s apartments because the area is so unsafe. As a result of a government funding cut for asylum seeker support, she and her family have to survive on less than £50 a week. She described her struggle to maintain even a bare minimum standard of living on this amount. Her case has been rejected by the appeals tribunal and she is now simply waiting for the knock on the door from the deportation officials.

It has been all too easy for our political leaders to draw a cast-iron curtain of indifference over the immigration debate. And it is, therefore, just as easy for the general public to buy into the stereotypes that immigrants and asylum seekers want to avoid working, or can’t speak English, or are showered with cash, or all of the above.

A government survey in February showed that 77% of British people want to see immigration reduced, and 50% of men and 52% of women want to see it reduced by “a lot”. The recent influx of Eastern European labourers has increased fears that immigration threatens British jobs and wages. This fear — which disregards that fact that more than one million Britons live and work in other EU countries — further intensifies hostility towards those most in need of fair and compassionate treatment, especially in a time of rising unemployment.

The uniformity of opinion within the three main Westminster parties has given credence to the claims of the far-right. The British National Party unveiled its manifesto last week with a pledge to halt any further immigration from Muslim countries, and developed this policy on the preposterous assertion that indigenous British people will be in a minority by 2050. The sound and the fury of the ultra-right began to dominate the immigration debate some years ago and those who have had the opportunity to stem the tide of anti-immigrant rhetoric have failed to do so.

Last week, the BBC’s flagship news programme Panorama addressed the possibility that the United Kingdom is becoming overcrowded and, despite its bleak predictions, managed to remain relatively free of hyperbole. Nonetheless, it added strings to the bows of those who wish to take aim at vulnerable new residents in Britain.
Tales of wrongly detained torture victims, humiliating procedural checks and general neglect slide under the radar in favour of  more crowd-pleasing talk about points systems and population caps.

After the Red Road march, the Glasgow Campaign to Welcome Refugees stated that “the economic situation, the closeness of the general election, and the increasing threat from the BNP can only increase the temptation for politicians to ratchet up the scape-goating of asylum seekers.” This prediction has been proven correct, as the leaders’ debates have been characterised by rampant populism — the operative words have unquestionably been “cutting” and “decreasing”.

The dark side of this debate has been in the spotlight for too long. It shouldn’t be about how many people are here and what they cost. We are not talking about the national deficit. Immigrants and asylum seekers are not abstract numbers. There needs to be a calm and rational debate about what the best model for an ethical immigration system is. That will begin when public opinion is no longer dictated by a tiny, hate-filled minority, which knows only how to spread distrust and disorder.

Propped against the glossy white wall of the Mitchell Library’s top floor corridor, Don Paterson looks to me every bit the stray musician and vagabond poet. Having discarded his scratched and battered guitar case in the green room, and wrapped in a ragged navy blue winter coat complemented by a silk cravat, he could comfortably pass for a busker or rambling street performer.

But his unkempt appearance disguises his towering professional profile and strict artistic discipline. For the past ten to fifteen years, Paterson has been quietly establishing himself as one of the leading British writers and poets of his generation. Since the publication of his first collection, Nil Nil, in 1993, he has produced three further works of poetry, two books of aphorisms, two plays, and a translation of Rilke’s sonnets. He has also edited a Burns anthology and a selection of poems of the twentieth century greats.

His high standing among critics and peers has been repeatedly confirmed by the slew of awards he has received, and he has enjoyed a degree of commercial success few other contemporary poets could dream of. Still, for all his accomplishments, he retains throughout our conversation — conducted just prior to the 47-year-old’s appearance at the Aye Write! festival — an unpretentious and modest air: an inheritance, perhaps, of his working-class Dundonian upbringing and deep-bred, though long-resisted, Calvinist tendencies.

Paterson moved to London in his early twenties to pursue a career as a jazz guitarist — another ambition he has realised; he still tours intermittently with three-piece outfit The Lammas — but re-directed his creative energies toward poetry when he decided it provided a more effective mechanism for getting laid. In the past, when confronted with his youthful admission that he first starting writing poems “to impress women,” he has seemed chastened, saying, “It sounds like something I would have said at the time. Yes, that fits, actually — given the male insecurities. These things are complicated. You do different things for every conceivable motive that you possess.”

Resisting the temptation to embarrass him again, I opt for a less mischievous line of questioning. I ask first about the relationship between his music and his poetry: to what extent do they infiltrate and influence one another?

“I used to think that it was just the fact that you did the two things, that it wouldn’t matter if you laid floors and you did poetry, you’d see connections between the two,” he says, “but I think now there are strong connections between music and poetry, partly because form and content are the same thing. In music and in poetry the form generates the content and the content generates the form, so you’re not going to be aware of any meaningful distinction between the two. So in that analogy they work very closely together.”

Paterson speaks quickly and assuredly, his sentences often framed by sly grins, as though he is trying to suppress some secret or exclusive joke. His accent, with its subtly elongated vowels, still displays hints of a childhood spent in the north-east of Scotland.

He continues, “but also poetry is very close to song. There is no getting away from it. People like it when it is close to song, in fact they prefer it, and that has some consequences for the way that you write. In fact, there are all sorts of ways in which they map onto each other. They are sister arts.”

Paterson has written that he thinks “poetry works on the heretical principle that sound and sense are the same thing,” indicating a further affinity between the two expressive forms.

“Poets find that when they get the sound the right, the meaning tends to follow. These days it has proper explanation in linguistic terms as well, with some thing called ‘iconicity’ and the way sounds sound like the things they mean. Not in an onomatopoeic sense, but rather that all sorts of sounds affect the senses in ways we don’t understand.

“Poets have had this intuition for a very long time and have always worked on that principle. They know that if they get the sound of a line right, then it gets closer to the truth of the thing they are trying to invoke.”

Paterson’s own intuitions have served him well. His latest collection, Rain, was met with near uniform critical approval on its release last autumn. The Independent gushed that it “gleams with authenticity” and urged people to “read it now, before it becomes famous,” while The Times enthused over the titular poem’s “wonderful lyric force”. The Scotsman, perhaps drifting a little into hyperbole, described it as “superlative and moving… a contemporary classic.”

It has earned its author a plethora of accolades (yet more to add to his groaning trophy cabinet), not least among them the coveted Forward Poetry Prize and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, an award bestowed by the Poet Laureate, currently Carol Ann Duffy, who remarked of the work, “It is formally very accomplished, and technically brilliant; but it also taps into deep, timeless human experiences.”

Rain contains some of Paterson’s most profound and unsettling pieces. The Error, for instance, perfectly articulates an apparently permanent sense of pointlessness or insignificance: “As the bird is to the air/ and the whale is to the sea/ so man is to his dream. His world is just the glare/ of the world’s utility/ returned by his eye-beam”.

In Correctives, he explores themes of loss and loneliness. Referring to the natural shudder in his young son’s left hand, he writes, “He understands the whole man must be his own brother/ for no man is himself alone;/ though some of us have never known/ the one hand’s kindness to the other.”

Many of the poems in Rain have an elegiac quality and Paterson frequently revises the discomforting prospect and impending reality of death — that of his own and that of those close to him. The centre-piece in this respect is Phantom, composed in memory of his friend and fellow poet Michael Donaghy, which treads tentatively toward the existential abyss (“We are ourselves the void in contemplation./ We are its only nerve and hand and eye./ There is something vast and distant and enthroned/ with which you are one and continuous”) only to pull back, eventually, into the material world (“I closed my mouth and put out its dark light./ I put down Michael’s skull and held my own”).

“Rain is a book that has a lot of death and sadness in it,” he explains, “and you draw from your immediate biographical circumstances to a certain extent. Bad things had happened to me over the last few years,” he says with a slightly morbid laugh. “It wasn’t so much a bad case of life as just life happening and, you know, you’ve just got to take it on the chin.”

Do the darker moments of life filter disproportionately into the poetry? “No, there is no guarantee that they are going to do that at all. Poems are only useful, I think, when you need something assuaged, when you have to explain something to yourself — at least that’s how I use them. I use the composition of poems as a way to interrogate things I don’t understand, of trying to work out what’s true, when I don’t know what’s true.”

The idea of composition as interrogation reflects Paterson’s belief that poetry should be a “moral project”, a belief, he claims, that shocked guests at a dinner party in London when he first announced it.

“It is what people expect from poetry. It should not exactly be a moral excitation of guidance, but it should allow for the serious questions to be raised and discussed to the best of your ability and expressed as best you can, and I think when you stray from that project it becomes trivial.”

One of the serious questions Paterson raises and discusses in Rain is that of how to reconcile the elemental and physical aspects of human experience — the immense indifference of the rationalist world-view — with the sensual ones; with the actuality of emotions like love and affection. Paterson has spoken of his recent “painful conversion to hardcore scientific materialism” and I wonder if the tensions in Rain echo the obvious unease he felt throughout that process.

“Well,” he pauses a moment to consider his response. “Yeah, probably actually. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I mean that is not a bad way of putting it at all. Yeah, uhm. Will yes do?” he smiles, “I think you’re on the money with that.”

This is typical Paterson; just when things look like they are going to get too heavy, too intense, he deftly shifts the tone of discourse. Presumably this is what one reviewer meant when he described Paterson as a “master of shadow play”.

I am reminded of The Hunt, a poem from his 2003 collection Landing Light, which draws the reader into a sinister, disorienting narrative while deliberately projecting the impression that the protagonist is being watched or pursued, but then ends abruptly with the lines, “so I put my hand out hoping this/ might break our dead impasse/ and he had made to tender his/ when my hand hit the glass”.

Further, in Rain, Paterson makes a point of adopting and adapting the voices of other poets and the structures of other’s poems, particularly those originally written in languages with which he is unfamiliar. Is this a further attempt at disguise; an effort to distance himself from the moral and emotional depth of his own statements?

“It’s just because of art I suppose. I’m a lousy linguist but I read a lot of stuff in translation. It’s that thing where you identify certain trends in Anglophone poetry and you think what can other people, other languages, offer by way of a corrective or to move that on in some way? But mainly it’s just selfish. I get sick of my own voice and I figure if I steal one for a while it might lend me some bravery to do things I wouldn’t have had the voice to do otherwise.”

Paterson has often advised interviewers and audiences that they “should never trust a poet,” and playful deceit is, evidently, a motif of his work. It occurs to me that he may just be a uniquely talented storyteller and dissembler, stringing me along as an unwitting questioner with some flashy but insubstantial insights into life, death and hardcore scientific materialism. Why should I believe anything he says?

“Oh, you can trust me,” he grins again, eyes glittering, “you can perfectly trust me.”

Rain is published by Faber in hardback, RRP £12.99 and will be out in paperback in August.

Dramatically speaking, successful conspiracy theories — those that linger in the public consciousness long after the event that inspired them has actually occurred — are composed, in roughly equal measure, of the absurd and the sinister.

Take, for instance, the common belief that Diana, Princess of Wales was assassinated. “Classic example,” explains Times columnist and author David Aaronovitch. “We got to the stage where there was an ITV documentary saying there were murky questions here and 35 per cent of the British population were saying, ‘yes, there is a murder plot involving the Duke of Edinburgh’. But look at the actual circumstances of her death. There isn’t a plot in the world that could have killed her.

“Nobody knew where she was going that night, nobody knew what car they were taking, nobody knew who was driving it, and nobody knew what route they were going, but somehow or other, the wicked powers-that-be planned it all. And, if that wasn’t enough, she would have survived if she had been wearing her seat belt. Not promising.”

For Aaronovitch, conspiracy theories possess an almost limitless source of comic potential, as well as paranoia, farce and danger. In his new book, Voodoo Histories — a witty, irreverent, yet systematic assault on the conspiricist tradition — he takes us on a whirlwind tour of some of the twentieth century’s most eccentric and pernicious theories, from Stalin’s campaign against acts of so-called counter-revolutionary industrial sabotage to the widespread perception that September 11 was planned and executed by the Bush administration.

Along the way, he provides a catalogue of intriguing, if frequently overlooked, historical facts: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were manufactured by an intelligence agent working for Tsar Nicholas II in pre-Bolshevik Russia; Frank Capell — the first historian to argue that Marilyn Monroe had been murdered — authored a crack-pot polemic called Henry Kissinger: Soviet Agent; Norman Baker, a sitting Liberal Democrat MP, is convinced that Tony Blair had Dr. David Kelly whacked by MI5 while still resident at 10 Downing Street.

Aaronovitch says he felt compelled to write a book debunking conspiracy theories after a conversation with a colleague on a BBC assignment in Tunisia in 2002.

“I was filming with a young guy called Kevin — who doesn’t mind being named, by the way — who was great, really bright. But all of a sudden, during a drive, he laid on me the moon landing theory. And I just thought it is kind of amazing that someone would want to believe this stuff.

“It seemed so clear to me that it would be much harder to organise a hoaxed moon landing than a real one. With a real moon landing, all you’d need is ten years research, trained astronauts, rockets and so on. Where as for a hoaxed moon landing you’d need thousands and thousands of people to fool their families and the rest of the world for decades. And that is really hard to do. Life just doesn’t tend to work like that.”

The discovery of Kevin’s subscription to this theory was a turning point for Aaronovitch because it revealed a fascinating truth about the phenomenon: “Conspiracy theories are, essentially, if you really want to categorise them, dumb things believed by clever people They are certainly invented by clever people. The people behind, say, the 9/11 theories tend to be students, academics and professionals.”

On the whole, though, Aaronovitch is reluctant to sketch out a conspiracist personality type — despite their being generally intelligent and well educated, they don’t share any further emotional or psychological characteristics.

“There are some who are, if you like, serial conspiracists, where there is not a conspiracy theory ever invented that they won’t grab on to. And, yes, I think for some there is a sort of semi-religious urge to grasp on to the notion that there is a big plan behind everything.

“But most people just become convinced at particular times and at particular moments. The obvious example is [the murder of] John F. Kennedy; a popular president shot down by this kind of absurd assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, purely because the motorcade was routed passed the place where this guy — who had already tried to shoot someone a few months earlier — was working. It’s no more sensible than that.”

Aaronovitch tempers his robust skepticism with bursts of good natured humour, approaching his targets with, for the most part, a measured jocularity, sometimes even with a degree of warmth — or at least pity. He is, however, keen to stress that while there is an obvious distinction between those conspiracy theories that peddle relatively harmless nonsense and those that develop into monstrous popular myths and inflict intense suffering, they both stem from the same conceptual root.

“The Templar bollocks, for example, which was put out on BBC Chronicle in the 1970s and fronted by this incredibly knowledgeable looking guy who told this story which then ended up on the front of Dan Brown’s book, nobody gets killed for that; the Catholic Church maybe gets mildly annoyed, but nobody dies.

“Whereas the Protocols of the Elder of Zion and the notion of Jewish conspiracy has been fabulously damaging. But although they are not at all the same, they are very, very distant cousins. If you can be induced to believe one, you can be induced to believe the other.”

Surprisingly, Aaronovitch himself admits to having fallen prey to at least two conspiracy theories over the years, both of considerable historical significance.

“For a large part of my life I was convinced about the JFK theory. I mean, I didn’t think it very hard and I didn’t have any evidence. The ‘magic bullet’ persuaded me. We were always told about this bullet that couldn’t possibly have been fired, but now we can do really first-class computer reconstructions of where people were sitting in the car and so on, and its now clear that there’s nothing left to explain here.

“And I’ve always thought that Hitler set fire to the Reichstag. But when reading Fritz Tobias’ really excellent book about the Reichstag fire, and looking at other sources, I discovered that he almost certainly didn’t. But we teach that in schools here, though, we actually teach it in schools!”

As is the tendency with conspiracy theories, the absurd meets the sinister. In Voodoo Histories, Aaronovitch dismantles many of the modern era’s most devastating untruths, without forgetting to draw heavily on the funny side of the unfunny.

Voodoo Histories is out now in hardback, published by Jonathan Cape, RRP £17.99.

Not so much a side-project as an attached-at-the-side-project, Evelyn Evelyn is not only one of the must thinly veiled musical hoaxes in history, but also one of the most interesting and affecting (barring of course Joaquin Phoenix’s foray into hip-hop– that was a hoax, right?). Dresden Dolls’ Amanda Palmer and long-time friend/collaborator Jason Webley bring out the best in each other as siamese-twin sisters Eva and Lynn Neville on this album, finding the perfect outlet to capitalise on the former’s taste for the intelligently macabre and the latter’s hand at carnivalesque folk.

The tone of this album is has two-headed as its stars, exploring both the interior thoughts of the twins as well as the exterior view of them, and this binary is set up immediately. Beginning with Evelyn Evelyn, the day to day concerns of the the sisters are reeled off as they navigate their path along the periphery of a society who see one oddity rather than of two people, ‘Should we be movie stars, can we be millionaires?/ I want to be famous, they’re watching us anyway’. Conversely, second track A Campaign of Shock and Awe is principally narrated by this external gaze. A seasick waltz carries the step-right-up sales pitch of Palmer and Webley, a dizzying call and response which encircles the girls, and the listener, like a drunken vulture as it presents a catalogue of exploitation.

The dress-up opportunity is taken to float, as they sing themselves, “between eras and genres”, from the Vaudevillian shuffle Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn? to the country twang of You Only Want Me ‘Cause You Want My Sister, in both cases masterfully pairing the appropriate subject matter with their chosen mode. This playful spirit is also seen in the gypsy-classical lunacy of Chicken Man and in naive ode to animal husbandry Elephant Elephant, but care is taken to balance whimsy against woe– and whoa is there woe. The inventory of misfortune and abuse extolled by the twins against a haunting score in the three Tragic Events narratives gives J.T Leroy a run for his/her money, and is made all the more disturbing by the disembodied monotone through which its narrators speak.

Palmer and Webley don a number of masks on this record and it works almost perfectly, the only misstep perhaps being My Space, which lovingly lampoons the New Wave Power Ballad; While succeeding comedically, it makes for relatively turgid listening after a record of such energy and accomplished musicianship. The duo find their footing for a redeeming finale of Love Will Tear Us Apart on the ukulele, thankfully, bookending an absorbing tale of oddity and audience with tongue fitfully and firmly in cheek.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we had a theory of everything?” This sentiment is likely to be expressed by a theoretical physicist, whose area of science has been searching for some sort of ‘Unified Field Theory’ since Albert Einstein coined the term.

The idea is to find some way of joining all the fundamental forces together with the fundamental particles to make a neat and simple formula that somehow explains the universe. ‘Superstring Theory’ has, for many years, been the best candidate for the task, despite its far-flung predictions and apparent un-testability.

This was the subject of the engaging lecture given by Professor Brian Foster and violinist Jack Liebeck as a prelude to Liebeck and pianist Katya Apekisheva’s recital.

Both the lecture and recital were based on Einstein and his connections with music. The link was somewhat tenuous — not much of ‘Superstring Theory’ has anything to do with music, and not much of the recital’s programme had much to do with Einstein — but it was inspiring to hear science joined with music. Einstein was, after all, a great aficionado of classical music and amateur musician himself. He recognised the subtle nature of understanding and the need for approaches other than that of science.

Despite its undeniable success and contribution to the world’s prosperity, most modern science has been based on a strong general principle: to reduce in order to unify. In other words, if we look closely enough at the world around us, then we will see underlying similarities. The discovery that the universe is largely composed of a hundred or so chemical elements is a good example of this. Yet reductionism has its dangers: look at Freud’s destructive attempts to explain human behaviour by means of a few subconscious urges. If we zoom in too closely, we miss the big picture.

Unfortunately, Liebeck and Apekisheva’s playing was infected with some of this harmful reductionism.

Rarely have I heard two such excellent musicians play so well together at the level of single notes, yet so far apart in terms of larger shapes. The shorter phrases were integrated, but in terms of sound, colour and narrative structure, the players were in different worlds.

Equally, when it came to the massively varied styles of the composers programmed — J. S. Bach, Brahms, Mozart, Dvorak and Bloch — it seemed that the performers were trying to play them all in a similar way.

Heterogeneity is to be celebrated; in music this means different techniques and different sound worlds for different composers, especially if the programme stretches across three centuries.

Both performers favoured a somewhat direct approach, avoiding the mystique that makes for the most engaging playing.

This gave the Mozart a certain brutality, but it worked excellently for the Bloch. A composer of Jewish origin, Ernest Bloch often used Jewish motifs in his work, including the three-movement Baal Shem, which Liebeck and Apekisheva played with great energy and conviction.

It was illuminating to hear in Brian Foster’s lecture that the elusive ‘Superstring Theory’ posits explanatory vibrating strings that are actually larger than the current fundamental particles (quarks and the like). In order to understand better, we often need to take a step back.

Jo Shaw

My Name Is Rachel Corrie is one of the  last decade’s most critically acclaimed pieces of political theatre for good reason.

Every sentence, joke and entreaty for the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is taken directly from the journals, blogs and answer machine messages left behind by Rachel Corrie; an American political activist who was killed in March 2003 by an Israeli tank, aged just 23.

Ros Philips’ production at the Citizens Theatre uses these insightful sources verbatim and the result is both inspiring and affecting. Philips’ production is an honest and faithful portrayal of Rachel’s great ability to convey her deepest feelings and hopes through writing, with touching and self-deprecating wit. Above all, it communicates Rachel’s idealism without ever seeming like a political diatribe or a personal tirade.

Herein lies the momentous appeal and the heartbreaking reality of My Name is Rachel Corrie; it is both a political and a personal tragedy. Rachel’s writing portrays all the horror of violence in a conflict which seems no closer to resolution now than in 2003.

Her detailed account of the suffering of the Palestinian people and their dignity in the face of insurmountable military power ensures that any sense of self-importance is tactfully avoided.

The audience is privy to a barrage of facts and figures about water sources and helicopters, which feels as overwhelming as it must have done for Rachel. Her intimate, day-to-day account of life in a war zone, with its insight into Palestinian domestic life as well as the logistics of peaceful protest, ensures that the audience feels a sense of identification and involvement with Rachel and her cause.

The reality of ongoing conflict becomes inescapable in the tiny stalls studio. Mairi Phillips’ commendable performance allows Rachel’s sense of justice and hope to take centre stage in the personal and reflective set. Changing from a dreamily decorated and brightly coloured bedroom to a make-shift tent effectively communicates the self-awareness of Rachel’s journey.

This unassuming lack of self-righteousness is one of the most charming aspects of Phillips’ performance as Rachel, as it acknowledges her past mistakes as we progress from a re-reading of her diary to the documentation of every moment in Gaza. Phillips’ portrayal of Rachel is so easy to identify with that it is almost unsettling.

Music and costume are utilised well, but never allowed to overshadow Rachel’s words. Phillips never relinquishes the audience’s attention or empathy and her magnetism is a perfect match for Rachel’s soaring and lucid writing. The sense of intimacy that the audience is afforded at the beginning of the production makes the final tragedy seem like a personal loss, as well as a political travesty.

The deeply exuberant and humorous beginning to the production makes only for a more tragic end as we see Rachel’s faith in non-violent action begin to waiver. Ros Philips’ production never feels exploitative and the same can be said for its conclusion. The raw normality of her final email is that of a determination to continue to try and help the Palestinian people and retain optimism in the face of so much suffering, which makes this personal and political tragedy even more harrowing. It is often asked whether the world is forgetting about Palestine. My Name is Rachel Corrie is a resonating and moving production, which can only help draw attention to this conflict and to the life of an incredible young woman.

Tom Bonnick

Martin Crimp’s The City — which was first performed in 2008 but feels older; as if perhaps it could have been written at any point in the last thirty years — is a strange, increasingly alarming play: after initially giving the impression of being a (slightly awkwardly staged) kitchen sink drama of sorts, it rapidly evolves in the latter half into a more surreal, often-disturbing dramatic experience that has something of Pinter or Sarah Kane about it.

It is ostensibly the story of a horrifically unhappily-married couple, Clair (Selina Boyack, pictured) and Chris (Ronnie Simon), who both treat their relationship like a game of chess in which one can only have an advantage by seeing several sentences ahead in a conversation — wedlock as psychological warfare.

Crimp is fascinated with language and meaning, components which form the structural basis for the play. Clair and Chris tell each other anecdotes and relay episodes from their days at work and home (Chris has an unspecified office job and Clair, perhaps in a moment of overly heavy-handed symbolism, is a translator) — and then Crimp distorts his vision of the world by following up these anecdotes with a discomfitting existentialist surrealism.

The effect erodes both the distinction between truth and fiction, and the audience’s certainties, until it is not entirely clear what is really happening and what only belongs in the minds and words of his two lead roles.

Periphery characters are introduced and hover on a threshold between reality and fantasy. A neighbour comes to complain about the noise being made by Chris and Clair’s daughter playing in the garden and her grievances transform into a powerful, rather terrifying monologue discussing an unnamed war taking place somewhere abroad, in which her husband is involved in some capacity and which demands of its participants particularly brutal acts of violence — it is one of the play’s most interesting and shocking scenes. Later, in the final moments, the daughter herself emerges and plays a piano piece from behind a screen at the behest of her parents and Jenny, the neighbour – the women all wear the same pink jeans and appear to be morphing into one another; their identities somehow interchangeable.

The Tron’s Changing House theatre is a fantastic space for this production — dark and slightly claustrophobic — and director Andy Arnold, on typically excellent form, maintains tight formal control over his cast. Boyack and Simon enter the play standing unnaturally far apart; both upright and rigid, and Simon does not let go of a tightly-gripped briefcase for some time: between them they create a vaguely unnerving atmosphere from the very beginning, which is only fully articulated with the introduction of the surrounding cast.

This is a uniformly outstanding version of Crimp’s story, made so by Boyack’s icily brilliant performance and Simon’s pitifully spineless one.

Tom Bonnick

Everything that’s wrong with Stewart Laing’s adaptation and direction of Puccini’s immensely popular 1896 opera La Boheme — performed in Glasgow by the usually superb Scottish Opera — seems to be a consequence of the dramatic modernisation to which it has been subjected. That sounds like there’s a lot that’s bad, which isn’t true, really — one aspect in particular doesn’t work, and its general wrongness permeates the rest of an otherwise fine and sometimes excellent production: the result is a slightly confused and occasionally bittersweet pill.

Laing’s fundamental mistake is in believing that the prevailing cultural atmosphere of nineteenth-century bohemian Paris could be satisfactorily evoked by a more contemporary New York hipster scene. What was already a fairly insubstantial story — redeemed by Puccini’s powerful score — has been rendered almost non-existent by the crippling emotional constraints of modernity, and all of the male leads — supposedly a group of writers, philosophers and artists — are unconvincing as anything other than boorish pseudo-intellectuals whose lives we are given no good reason to invest in.

Chief amongst them is Rodolfo (Avi Klemberg), a writer, who by the end of the first act has fallen in love with upstairs neighbour Mimi (Celine Byrne). The dramatic and romantic pinnacle of Act I should, in an ideal world, be O Soave Fanciulla, a heartfelt, rousing duet in which the couple proclaim their mutual adoration. Byrne, who is outstanding throughout, brings real commitment to the scene, but Klemberg delivers his lines without passion or urgency — a situation not helped by uniformly prosaic and unimaginative supertitles and some shaky acoustics for the first half-hour.

Things pick up in Act II, which has been transported to an über-cool art gallery from its original, somewhat less glamorous setting, with dynamic crowd scenes, improved depth of sound and a quicker pace — and we’re also introduced to Musetta (Nadine Livingston), the former beau of Rodolfo’s friend Marcello, who steals the show with diva-esque antics and fantastic stage presence.

When the inevitable final-act tragedy arrives, it feels grating (however expected): the setting and characters simply aren’t imbued with the pathos or richness of feeling required in order for an audience to care, and when Rodolfo declares to Marcello that he’s scared and thinks Mimi is dying, he may as well be offering his buddy another beer, for all the lack of sentiment.

In the hands of conductor Francesco Corti, the Orchestra of Scottish Opera give a terrific rendition of Puccini’s music, which really leads one to the conclusion that this is a production best enjoyed with eyes firmly closed. As well as a disappointing translation of Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa’s original libretto, staging (Act II excepted) is truly dismal — the large space is made to feel bland and empty.

Byrne’s first-rate performance only throws into sharper relief the deficit in Klemberg’s — although in fairness, this is largely because of how little he is given to work with. Mimi makes ornamental fake flowers and Rodolfo is a poet — it should be the other way around.

Maxwell Ward

To say that Jim Carrey’s films are defined by the elasticity of his face is a little much, but it can give a big, gurning clue about what they hope to achieve. That’s why I Love You Phillip Morris is an anomaly in his portfolio, a film which has familiar rubbery expressions, but also moments of pitch-black humour, drama and a heartfelt love story. It is, all in all, surprisingly hard to define.

The story, which we are reminded is true, follows the life of Steven Jay Russell (Jim Carrey), a con artist and serial prison escapee. During one of his first spells in jail he meets fellow inmate Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), and quickly falls for him. It is the start of a relationship that provides the motor for the film; a love story of exhilarating highs and crushing lows across Russell’s life as a conman, inmate, and fugitive.

The film, which has not been released in the US due to delays finding a distributor, has been re-edited to be less controversial, apparently on the basis of its homosexual content. It is a troubling illustration, if true, of intolerance throughout the US market, and it makes a big statement when films with multiple murders can be seen as mainstream, but those with romantic storylines between two men can’t.

That’s not to say that there are no adult scenes in this film, but the sexual content throughout felt more Carry On than graphic to me. It could be as a consequence of the re-edit of course, but more likely because of the film’s lack of a clear identity, a condition wholly analogous to Russell’s ever-changing persona.

At times the development of Russell and Morris’s relationship, especially in the sex scenes, can feel disturbed by irreverent jokes. It is as if I Love You Phillip Morris cannot decide whether to focus on the drama and character development of the story, or whether to maximise Carrey’s comedy potential, leaving the humour feeling forced and the story interrupted.

That being said, both Carrey and McGregor put in strong performances. Carrey brings his ceaseless energy to a role in which he well cast, an impressionist playing an impressionist, while McGregor is very convincing as the vulnerable Phillip Morris, providing excellent, restrained support that allows a sense of romance and heartbreak to develop subtly. It is his consistency that provides the necessary grounding on which the film succeeds; he invokes compassion, while Russell’s stranger-than-fiction story will keep you entertained throughout.