Tim Cornwell's Arts Diary: The night Creative Scotland got a laugh

THERE was a strong turn-out of the good and great-ish to see Hoors, Gregory Burke's new play, on its first outing at the Traverse Theatre this week. Spotted in the audience were Edinburgh City Council leader Jenny Dawe, who was barely seen to smile, Scottish arts chairman Richard Holloway, pictured, and fabulous former culture minister Linda Fabiani.

Were they startled to find, in the middle of Burke's dark comedy of foul-mouthed Fifers on the make, a passing swipe at Creative Scotland, the new arts quango which Holloway for one has been instrumental in creating?

One character, Nikki, who slides about the stage as the play's dangerously attractive younger sister, played by Catherine Murray, declares she works as a pole-dancer for the Scottish Government. "Part of Creative Scotland," she says, in a line that got a big laugh. "You can't beat a bit of culture."

Holloway appeared unimpressed by Hoors. The British Council contingent – represented on the night by Scotland director Roy Cross and chairman James Boyle – must have wondered about this latest offering from the writer of Black Watch, that appealing international success. An unflinching tale of a stag night gone wrong, how would Hoors fare in Slovakia, or Beijing?

Burke said yesterday that it was the first time since rehearsals began that the Creative Scotland line struck a chord.

"It's just an in-joke. The only time it's been laughed at was last night, when people there were in on the joke. You can tell what the audience was. I have no views on the subject. It got a big laugh, that's all I care about."

Friendship in the frame

A DIFFERENT tone across town on Tuesday night at the Scottish Gallery, where a memorial exhibition opened to the painter John Houston, who died in 2008, aged 78.

Among the guests: his Scottish contemporary, fellow artist and teacher David Michie, 80, the son of painter Anne Redpath. "It's lovely to see," said Michie, looking around the room, with Houston's large canvases glowing with colour. "It's full of familiar paintings, old friends, and some that are new."

The two men were art students in 1949, graduating from Edinburgh College of Art and setting out on a travelling scholarship together. They taught at ECA, and were elected as associate members of the Royal Scottish Academy in the same year.

The exhibition includes a drawing Michie did of Houston in 1953, in Italy. "We were very close. I was very touched that they should want to use it," he said.

Global search

THE director of the Dovecote Studios, David Weir, received a puzzling call recently from artist Keiko Mukaide: where, exactly, was her artwork?

Mukaide's installation Light of the North is on show at the Dovecote from today. Shards of dichroic glass – with a coloured coat first designed by Nasa for space visors – spread in circles across a wall, and are lit by a huge lighthouse lens. Inspired by the Japanese-born artist's new home in Cornwall, the piece was last on show at the Tate St Ives.

What Mukaide was looking for was the precise longitude and latitude of its new home, to put on the plinth. After some struggling with two GPS devices, one borrowed from a car and another from a sailing boat, Weir is pleased to report it at 55.56.54 N and 3.11.6 W.

"The statement around the art work is it is very much linked to navigation, and knowing where you are," he says. "It does make sense to actually have that co-ordinate."