ARTS
Edinburgh Festival
Time to make whoopee
Rupert Christiansen comes clean about the joys of this year's splendid Festival About 20 years ago, I had a terrible experience at the Edinburgh Festival Some East European theatrical outfit (I don't think it was anything to do with the subsequently famous Tadeusz Kantor, but I can't be sure) was creating a stir on the Fringe with some tremendously barrier- breaking event in a garage. The tickets were a wallet-emptying £10, but being an earnest undergraduate, I had to be there, even at the sacrifice of a couple of meals.
On arrival at the afore-mentioned garage, however, I was appalled to discover that my number had come up: you, Mr Christiansen, yes, you — as the junk mail exhorts — have been selected from an audience of tens to PARTICIPATE. Entire- ly against my will and despite pitiful impre- cations, I was obliged to surrender my spectacles, jacket and footwear and forbid- den to take my seat. Someone then threw a sheet over my head and pinioned my arms. For the next 15 minutes or so, I stood numbly awaiting my fate, prodded by what felt like a broom end. All I could hear was a stream of impassioned Polish haranguing and occasional guffaws from the piggish audience, not one of whom came to my rescue. I have never less liked being the centre of attention — at least that's what I assume I was — and remember thinking that perhaps the CCF on a wet Friday afternoon in November wasn't the nadir of earthly hell I had previously rated it.
But worse was to come: the broom end suddenly became insistent, propelling me up some stairs. The sheet was removed and I found myself in close confrontation with an obese naked woman crouching in a chicken run on wheels — no, I am not making this up. She crooned with assumed lasciviousness: Will you come in for to make love?' The invitation so paralysed me with virginal embarrassment that like Mac- beth and his Amen, demurral stuck in my throat: I simply could not utter. What hap- pened next remains a blank: the pain of it must be such that I have suppressed the memory. Yet inner scars persist. Ever since, I have taken a gingerly attitude to the Festival. No risks, no binges, no forays into the aesthetic unknown: not for me the six shows a day marathons or drunken moonlit cavortings on Arthur's Seat. Instead I take my doses of culture calmly, thrice per diem, confining myself to four units of alcohol, two-thirds of a chocolate bar and a hot milky drink at bedtime. Endurance is the key.
This year I confess to failure. For noth- ing could have induced me to endure the full seven and a half hours of Peter Stein's production in Russian of Aeschylus' The Oresteia (Murrayfield Ice Rink). Those I respect stayed to cheer, but frankly I found the two and a half hours of the Agamem- non (following which I left) so stridently acted, so prosaic in spirit, so lacking in rhythm or impetus that I was possessed by a vertiginous urge — pace the chicken-run trauma — to leap on to the stage, cast aside my clothing and run around making whoopee: anything, anything to relieve the plodding tedium of Stein's conception.
On the other hand, I surprised myself by enjoying the first episode of another epic, Robert Lepage's The Seven Streams of the River Ota (Meadowbank Sports Centre), which will be completed in two further instalments in 1995 and 1996. It is based on the familiar trope of benighted westerners meeting a purer eastern culture, and is set in modern Japan. At one level, the narra- tive runs along the one-dimensional tracks of soap-opera naturalism; at another, Lep- age provides a brilliant display of the arts of shadow puppetry, the magic wrought by mirrors, trompe l'oeil and son et lumiere. The combination made for some very pleasant entertainment, if nothing more, and has left me with the primitive curiosity to know what's going to happen next.
Elsewhere, much joy. Let me come clean: I think the Edinburgh Festival is great, and that the current directorate, now three seasons in, has done a pretty fabulous job of restoring the splendours that had looked so faded in the later 1980s. (Why on earth anyone should want to go to seleroti- cally fixated Bayreuth or star-stuffed Salzburg, when Edinburgh is available, youthfully exploding with a variety border- ing on anarchy and its liberated licensing laws, I cannot imagine.) This year, too, was made special by the opening of the Festival Theatre, the city's first real opera house, imaginatively renovated out of what was originally the Empire Theatre and latterly a bingo hall. The acoustics are superb, the sight-lines clear, the glamour dourly Scot- tish: I love the place already.
On to its vast stage burst the sublime members of the Mark Morris Dance Group, possessed by their mare's choreog- raphy to Handel's oratorio L'Allegro, II Penseroso e il Moderato, a great work of modern art — witty, poignant, inventive, supremely generous as well as supremely beautiful — which leaves all who experi- ence it exalted to the point of heaven. Later in the week came Baz Luhrmann's production for Australian Opera of Brit- ten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, cleverly moved to the British Raj, circa 1920, with the fairies transformed into Hindu sprites and the rude mechanicals into the denizens of It Ain't Half Hot, Mum. It was an unpre- tentious and innocent staging: perhaps its rather technicolour view of the pies whit- ed out its spookiness and sensuality, but who could resist such a welter of vim and fun, performed with such enthusiasm? Musically, I would rate it only beta beta, and Roderick Brydon's orchestra sounded comfortably solid when it should have been slitheringly viscous: but so would you if you were dressed up as bandsmen and plonked on the first floor of the pagoda which forms the centrepiece of the set.
The morning concerts at the Queen's Hall are another bottomless source of plea- sure. This year I was particularly impressed by the trio of 011i Mustonen (piano), Joshua Bell (violin) and Steven Isserlis (cello), playing Rakhmaninov, Ravel and Shostakovich. The chemistry between them is bizarre, pitching Bell's noble bel canto against Mustonen's edgy demonic intensity, but the result electrifying; I sincerely trust that rumours of their imminent disbanding are unfounded. American pianist Richard Goode gave an arresting Beethoven recital of burly heterosexual forcefulness, but I found the whiz-kid violinist Maxim Vengerov merely heartless. The technique may be staggering, but the tone is thick and the phrasing coarse: I'm not sure which I disliked more — his brutish account of Beethoven's 'Spring' sonata or his grace- less, rendition of a string of salon encores. His pianist was quite possibly insane, and after his murder of an innocent rococo andante by Mozart, I hope that he has been reported to the RSPCP.
Outside the official programme, I had the best time at the new Traverse Theatre, favourite dive of ambitious networkers and the smart set. Everybody had positive things to say about one or other of the plays on its varied and international menu, but I caught only two of them. That melan- choly comic genius, Tom Courtenay, gave a memorable impersonation of a Superfluous Man, aka old Russian drunk, in Stephen Mulrine's adaptation of Yerofeev's Moscow Stations; and a fine touring company, Com- municado, visited with its version of Synge's Playboy of the Western World. In the official Festival, Patrick Mason had coinci- dentally brought over his Abbey Theatre staging of Synge's earlier, more Beckettian fable The Well of the Saints (King's The- atre), and the two productions fell into the same trap: needless additions of Oirish- ness, some horrible recorded music, and a reluctance to give full rein to the magnifi- cent Blarney of Synge's language. The Well of the Saints is a slight affair, in any case, inflating what should be one act into three, and one can't blame Mason for overegging it a bit; but Playboy is a consummate mas- terpiece requiring no varnish, no excuse. Communicado's actors did a bold and decent job of it, but I wanted more sexual electricity between Christy and Pegeen, as well as something of the grander, more rapturous style of acting that I imagine, say, Daniel Day-Lewis and Fiona Shaw might bring to the roles.
Finally, the stand-up question. For the last five years or more, the Fringe has been inundated with this genre of comedy, but I have a hunch that the flood may now be abating. In fact, between the dismal humour peddled by this year's Footlights (The Pleasance) — no sex, no politics, no wit, no fun at all — and the taboo-free sca- tology of Robert Schimmel (Assembly Rooms), running the predictable gamut from condoms to tampons, it would be easy to feel that the world's store of jokes was running dry. Enfin vint John Shuttleworth (The Pleasance). This mumbling Pooter from Sheffield, keen to help out with 'the Rwandan thingie' and the composer of some amazing songs which he performs to the accompaniment of a Yamaha synthesiz- er, encapsulates (like Hancock before him) a whole layer of British working-class gen- tility and its rainy-day disappointments. I think it's the sharpest and funniest persona developed by a comedian (one Graham Fellowes) since Edna Everage first hit these shores, and I bet you'll be hearing more of him.
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