Major productions return to Leith stageto see The Last Days

LEITH Theatre’s first full-scale theatre production in more than 20 years will be The Last Days of Mankind.

Premiering on November 11, it will run for one week until November 16.

The play by Karl Kraus will be co-directed by Scottish director John Paul McGroarty and Yuri Birte Anderson from Theaterlabor Germany and performed by a European cast featuring actors from Scotland, Germany, Poland, Serbia, France, Ukraine, Poland, Ireland and England. The Tiger Lillies have written 10 songs for the production and will perform alongside the actors in Leith Theatre.

McGroarty said: “Kraus was one of the few artists who kept working through the war, he was writing away, taking in newspaper clippings, writing about things as they happened. He made a docudrama 100 years before anyone had thought of a docudrama.”

Co-director Yuri Birte Anderson said: “Theaterlabor came here first in 2015. Leith Theatre’s main auditorium wasn’t open and we did workshops in Leith Dockers Club.

“Kraus was a Viennese satirist – very controversial – and he recorded everything he heard and turned it into a mega docudrama.

“Kraus perfectly manages to capture the war discourse of his time – the feverish war craze that seems over-the-top to us nowadays, but it was real. This will be truly ‘European theatre’.”

The last major theatrical production in Leith Theatre was in 1988. The theatre is now run by Leith Theatre Trust, which is restoring it.

This year it was used by the Edinburgh International Festival to stage a series of concerts, Light on the Shore, and hosted events by Neu! Reekie! as well as being a base for the Hidden Doors festival.

www.thelastdaysofmankindshow.com

Aberdeen to host British Arts Show

THE ninth British Art Show will tour to Scotland.

Irene Aristizabal and Hammad Nasar are the curators for the forthcoming edition of British Art Show, which will open in Manchester in 2020, and then go to Aberdeen.

The exhibition is the biggest touring exhibition of contemporary art in the UK. British Art Show 8 attracted more than 300,000 visitors to its tour of four cities from October 2015 to January 2017.

Aristizabal and Nasar were selected by a panel of curators from the Hayward Gallery, which organises the show, and the participating cities.

British Art Show 9 will tour to venues including The Whitworth, HOME, Manchester Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, University of Wolverhampton School of Art, Aberdeen Art Gallery, The Box, Plymouth – plus other venues in the city.

The show will be in Aberdeen Art Gallery between June and September 2021.

www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Dancers re-imagine sport in Prestonpans

A NEW festival called At Your Leisure is to see dance artists “re-imagining” sporting events in Edinburgh and East Lothian.

Running from October 29 and November 3, At Your Leisure has been curated and co-produced by a panel of Young Festival Producers and the East Lothian-based Room 2 Manoeuvre, as well as youth groups.

Shows include La Partida (The Match), which will take place at the Penny Pit Football Grounds in Prestonpans. The Gentle Way at North Berwick Leisure Centre from Austria-based Hungry Sharks takes judo as its inspiration and there is also The Boulderers from Kapow Theatre at the newly opened Loanhead Climbing Centre in Eden Rock.

www.atyourleisure.scot