Travis, one of the headline acts of Edinburgh Summer Sessions
Blindness, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, June 29-July 3 Scotland’s theatres are gradually opening up and one of the first major shows is this production from London’s Donmar Warehouse (above), an adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s dystopian novel. Audiences wear headphones for a performance narrated by Juliet Stevenson in immersive binaural sound. Tickets are £22.50. Call 0131 529 6000 or visit capitaltheatres.com
Edinburgh International Children’s Festival, Edinburgh, May 25-June 6 The bulk of the annual festival is online but the opening and closing weekends see a series of pop-up outdoors events – or “site-specific encounters” if you prefer – in the Royal Botanic Garden and at venues in Granton and Craigmillar.
Culross, Fife It’s not just for Outlander fans, you know. Visiting this handsomely preserved village beside the Forth is like time-travelling back to the 18th century. Cobbled streets, a palace, and, if you walk to the top of the town, a small but impressive abbey. Pop into the Biscuit Cafe on the way down the hill. Visit nts.org.uk
Tak ma doon Road, Kilsyth One for eager cyclists, this road out of Kilsyth climbs to more than 300ft in less than three miles. At the top there’s a car park with impressive views over the Forth Valley (if the weather is kind).
Scottish Opera, live in your livingroom mearnsleader.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mearnsleader.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
THROUGHOUT the Covid-19 pandemic stage artists across Scotland have been finding innovative ways to engage with their audiences, despite the closure of the theatres. No company has been more committed to this noble project than Scottish Opera. Our national opera company’s pandemic offerings have included acclaimed films of Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. Indeed, during a slight loosening in coronavirus restrictions, they even presented a brilliant, physically distanced live production of Puccini’s La bohème, which was performed in the car park of the company’s Glasgow studios. Now, as we look forward to a progressively more vaccinated, increasingly “normal” future, the company has announced an exciting programme of filmed and live shows to take us from spring and into summer. There will be two films, Live In South Lanarkshire (which premieres on April 23) and Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (which will start streaming