ARTS

Edinburgh Festival

Better by the Mile

Five days in the life of Festival-goer Rupert Christiansen

Inever actually saw the legendary car sticker which read 'Glasgow may be miles better, but Edinburgh is slightly superior', ma sì non e vero, e ben trovato. And at last this most beautiful of northern cities has some cause for self-congratulation: its pro- vision for the arts has vastly improved over the last few years. You can be served with intoxicating liquor at the spruced-up Usher Hall. The City Art Centre handsomely accommodates major exhibitions. The new Traverse Theatre, dug into the basement of an office block, seems to have retained all its old identity, vitality and commitment to young writers. Next door, the Royal Lyceum Theatre has been elegantly reno- vated. By the summer of 1994, the city's first decent opera house should be open for serious year-round business. Most impor- tant, the broadest-based and jolliest of European festivals seems to be recovering its balance and dignity under the director- ship of Brian McMaster. I haven't enjoyed myself here so much for ten years or more.

Sunday: The Fringe this year is contro- versially dominated by a cartel of three venues — the Assembly Rooms, the Gilded Balloon, the Pleasance — which present the bulk of the stand-up comedy and, in the opinion of socialists and traditionalists, drain audiences away from new plays and darker avant-garde terrain. To be brutal, I'd far rather spend an hour with one of the Assembly Rooms stand-ups than endure some pious and pretentious piece of stu- dent drama. For one thing, the general level of verbal invention is so much higher; for another, the acting is sharper.

Mark Thomas, for instance, is a brilliant performer: politically edgy, sexually shame- less, blazingly intelligent and very, very funny. I was less enthusiastic than others about Lea de Lana, a fat, cheerful, noisy lesbian who intersperses her prattle with some moderately accomplished scat singing, but she had guts, good humour and a point to make: and she wasn't dull.

Monday: To the City Art Centre, for The Waking Dream, an exhibition of the first century of photography, drawn from the Gilman Collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York. The early experi- ments with colour are particularly ravish- ing, but it is the images of cadavers, lunatics, murderers and public executions that haunt me. Sweetness and light are only restored by a glorious concert performance of Cosi fan tutte at the Usher Hall, conduct- ed by Sir Charles Mackerras. The cast could hardly be bettered: Felicity Lott's Fiordiligi all buttery ease, Marie McLaugh- lin's Dorabella the most vividly charac- terised since Janet Baker's, a wicked little Despina from Nuccia Focile; the men,

Jerry Hadley, Alessandro Corbelli, Gilles Cachemaille, almost as good. Mackerras's tempi were brisk and the weaker arias in the second act weren't cut, but there wasn't a minute when you didn't feel the heart and soul of this great opera palpitating.

Tuesday: A filthy breakfast in my dingy old dump of a Morningside hotel drives me to the extravagance of lunch at one of Edinburgh's finest new restaurants, the Vintner's Rooms in Leith. The 17th- century dining room is as much the attrac- tion as the quiet and careful food: well worth £30 a head.

Back to the Assembly Rooms for Jenny Kotin's hilarious one-woman show, Tempo- rary Girl, which draws on nine years in that dreadful profession. Miss Kotin makes par- ticularly pertinent observations on the ethics governing use of the telephone and photocopier, and reflects profoundly on the purloining of stationery.

In the evening, the unadulterated joy of the Mark Morris Dance Group, an Ameri- can company which for sheer musicality alone knocks all other contemporary bare- foot ballet out of the ring. People who should know better have been publicly

It transferred from the Fringe . .

whingeing that the Festival needs more populist events of a 'Pavarotti in the Park' nature. Rubbish! What it needs is more creative talents of Morris's stature, unfa- miliar to cultured British audiences. What on earth has the Edinburgh Festival to do with puffy old superstars?

Wednesday: Another pleasure of Edin- burgh today is the pastoral tranquillity of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, run by the widely admired Richard Calvocoressi. It has an impressive perma- nent collection of modern classics and has made several notable contemporary acqui- sitions. The current upstairs exhibition of early 20th-century Russian art may be nothing much, but there is a Vuillard, a Kirchner and a Ben Nicholson downstairs that I'd like to kiss, lick, fondle or perhaps just plain steal. The atmosphere of the whole place manages to be both soothing and austere: it is one of those rare galleries in which one can concentrate.

On to the dear old King's Theatre, short- ly to be superseded by the new opera house, for Scottish Opera's new production of a Verdi rarity, I due Foscari. Howard Davies mindlessly updates the action from the Renaissance to the 1880s, and the first act is a dismal catalogue of Verdian clichés which the cast sing perfunctorily. But there's thrilling stuff in the second act, including a rip-roaring duet for wronged hero (a charmless Chinese tenor, Deng) and his desperate wife (a tough Russian soprano, Katerina Kudriavchenko). The third act is short and dramatically ludi- crous. Richard Armstrong's conducting did everything it could to maintain credibility, but it's not an opera I want to hear again.

Thursday: A very strange lunch at the Traverse theatre: what is advertised as a bacon and cheese salad turns out to con- tain melon, tuna and warm strawberries as well. Or am I the victim of an oral halluci- nation? More confusion is roused by Peter Sellars's version of Aeschylus' The Persians at the Royal Lyceum, for which the transla- tor Robert Auletta has seen fit to add to the original text a lot of banal rhetoric about the Gulf war and the horrors wreaked by the Allied forces. The naked ancient play would make its own statement on the matter far more powerfully, but I thought Sellars' production was masterful, tensely charged and passionately enacted, exploiting complex light and.sound effects yet never obscuring narrative or character.

My sense of the power of the perfor- mance as sheer theatre is enhanced by the utter awfulness of my two ensuing forays into the murky realms of Fringe new drama. No names, for pity's sake: I am try- ing hard to forget.