What's on today

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THEATRE: BLACKBIRD

In this new production of David Harrower’s acclaimed 2005 play, Monarch of the Glen star Dawn Steele leaves Lexie far behind to play Una, a woman who, 15 years on, seeks out and confronts Ray (Robert Daws), who had an illicit relationship with her when he was 40 and she was just 12. The play is a rare example of theatre for real grown-ups, designed to leave few of our comfortable certainties intact.

• Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 7:30pm, 0870 060 6647

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FILM: GONE BABY GONE

Ben Affleck has made so many mediocre blockbusters that it is easy to forget the fact that he first shot to prominence as the Oscar-winning co-writer of Good Will Hunting. Affleck’s first film as writer-director is, like the earlier film, set in Boston, and has an insider’s sense of place that prevents it being just another downbeat detective thriller. It tells the story of the abduction of a child, and the efforts of a local private investigator (Casey Affleck) to track her down.

• Cinemas nationwide.

3

MUSIC: RUSSELL WATSON

The people’s tenor, interviewed in The Scotsman Magazine at the weekend (see www.scotsman.com) launches his tour of the UK today. It’s an inspiring stage comeback, only a few months after discovering, for the second time, that he had a brain tumour.

• SECC, Glasgow, 6:30pm, 0870 040 4000

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VISUAL ART: JIM LAMBIE

This year’s Glasgow International is long finished, but you can still catch one of the art festival’s most successful exhibitions, in which the Scottish artist fills the entire ground floor of GoMA with his colourful sculptures and – most strikingly – his striped floor.

• Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, 10am-5pm, 0141-229 1996

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FILM: SON OF RAMBOW

Still winding its way around cinemas in Scotland, Garth Jennings’s new film is an inventive and touching tale about two boys who decide to make their own version of ultraviolent Hollywood film First Blood. Nostalgic but never sentimental, it is a classic coming-of-age story.

• Eden Court, Inverness, 8:45pm, 01463-234234

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FILM: HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY

Sublimely silly and smartly subversive, this sequel is also very funny, mainly because it’s impossible to dislike its two overachieving pot-smoking protagonists, as they fall foul of the War on Terror and are unfairly incarcerated.

• Cinemas nationwide.

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VISUAL ART: FOTO

This is the only European showing of an exhibition that has already done well in Washington and New York. Foto features about 150 images, by some 50 photographers, which emerged from the explosion of film and photography in central Europe between 1918 and 1945. It is a document of an era.

• Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, 10am-5pm, 0131-624 6200

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THEATRE: EVITA

Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice’s smash-hit musical is back on the road in a new production. If it’s a history lesson you’re after, look elsewhere, but their account of the life and legend of charismatic political leader Eva Peron has plenty of memorable tunes, particularly Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.

• Playhouse, Edinburgh, 7:30pm, 0844 847 1660

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THEATRE: ARCADIA

The fourth play of this year’s Pitlochry summer season, this is the Scottish premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Olivier Award-winning detective story, set during one dramatic weekend at a stately home in 1809, and a century later, as an academic investigates what happened.

• Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 8pm, 01796 484626

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THEATRE: KING LEAR

All this week, you can pop out and see Shakespeare in your lunch break – as long as you work at the top of Byres Road in Glasgow, that is. The makers of A Play A Pie And A Pint have cut the play down to around 50 minutes, as part of its season of truncated classics.

• Oran Mor, Glasgow, 12:30pm, 0141-357 6200