Fear of Roses Assembly Roxy ★★★

There’s always a tricky balance to be struck with site-specific theatre. What’s more important: the show itself, or its unusual setting? And to what extent does its location enrich or even impact on the essence of the text?

Tunnels Army @ The Fringe ★★★

Displacement looms large over every quietly impressive frame of Limbo, writer-director Ben Sharrock's magnetic film about a young Syrian man called Omar (Amir El-Masry) who finds himself biding his time in the remotest reaches of Scotland on the way to some unknown new life. 

Scottish singer-songwriter Dorothy Allison pretty much defines cool. Her band One Dove was the first to snare Andrew Weatherall as producer after his success with Screamadelica, and together they created Morning Dove White: an extraordinary album that fused country and western melancholy with deep dub and electronica.

The heading may be a bit misleading. There were no vocalists at this year’s ingeniously adapted East Neuk Festival – live events held exclusively in the big space of the Bowhouse, St Monans, to a compulsorily limited audience – and the only rain was that which pelted down on the roof of the venue during the most intimate moments of Beethoven’s D major Quartet, Op.18 No.3, with the Castalian Quartet valiantly persisting.

Glasvegas deal in hyper-emotion, personal dramas playing out in Spectoresque caverns of sound.

That a film has a cult following doesn’t mean it’s a masterpiece, and 1985’s Restless Natives is sweet but ephemeral, a Scottish crime caper that can’t hold a candle to Bill Forsyth’s sparky debut, That Sinking Feeling.

Shortly after Arab Strap split up in 2006, Malcolm Middleton was quoted saying “I don’t think we should ever get back together”. That’s the sort of fighting talk that’s just begging to be cast up by tired old hack music writers tasked with reviewing the inevitable comeback – but the trick, in this case, was that the comeback was never inevitable. The Falkirk duo built a reputation on electro-acoustic songs about drink, drugs and shagging. Who wouldn’t want to hear how that all turned out?

It’s odd that there’s still no name for the wave of genre-agnostic British bands of the '00s.