Contemporary Arts
The Edinburgh Festival
ROYAL attendance apart, the tenth Festival has begun with no special flourishes; the ruling committee, of course, must strain every nerve to find something remarkable every year, with- out beginning to think of birthday celebra- tions. That is the trouble with a show like Edinburgh's, which must always try to go one better for fear of people saying it has gone one worse; and which, being international, wants the steady perennial ballast that keeps Salzburg and Bayreuth on an even keel. There is much to be said for putting a local product well in the centre; but—leaving out the Tattoo and such memorable bits of Caledonian non- sense as the March of the Thousand Pipers— there has been none since The Three Estates.
One of the consequences (or would it happen anyway?) is Edinburgh's feeling, however gratifyingly the profits roll in, that these three weeks are a good time to be out of town; those remaining contributing to the neat sociological illustration that daily separates the sheep from the goats on the Mound. There, in the Royal Scottish Academy, the rooms devoted to the Braque show are full of gaudy jeans, horse- tails and urchin-cuts, beards, and arty talk in a fine variety of language and accent; while a hundred yards off, in the National Gallery, tweeds and town clothes move steadily round the Raeburn bicentenary collection, exchang- ing family gossip and looking from time to time at the walls where, in high-waisted gowns, brown broadcloth, or the superabundant tar- tanry of Scott's romantic revival, the pillars of the Northern Athens show them features hearty, vigorous, a little self-satisfied, almost identical with their own.
The Braque exhibition is an example of the 'trouble high-flying internationalism can land in. For five years the Festival has been work- ing through the greatest of the Impressionists and their successors, and now the supply is beginning to run out. Degas to Renoir to Cezanne to Gauguin to Braque is an unexcep- tionable sequence; indeed, in this inclusive panorama of all M. Braque's 'periods,' from Fauve and Cubist to his latest paintings, small landscapes oddly like Christopher Woods, it is possible to see a kind of summing-up of the whole thing, if not by a gigantic artist, by a most accomplished one. This is much the largest and most carefully prepared show of Braque's work Britain has had; to most of us who knew chiefly his embroidered marble table-tops, pears and jugs, the demonstration of his development is a handsome surprise. Furthermore, M. Braque was, recently made an honorary Scottish Academician. It is all very appropriate, but it cannot be said to have the excitement of earlier shows; and there remains the horrid question, What next?
In the Assembly Hall—which has also appeared recently to be digging itself into a rut—there has been an attempt this year to find something new, and at the same time to add a little national festivity to internationalism. Pleasure of Scotland, which has occupied the apron stage and come romping down the aisles during the first week, seemed originally a quite quixotically unchancy enterprise : an organised ceilidh, and on such a scale and in such a place, is a series of contradictions in terms. Nevertheless, George Scott-Moncrieff's experiment comes off with astonishing suc- cess: jumping over incongruities and awkward- nesses with a kind of insouciant warm- heartedness that by the end draws even a poly- glot audience of visitors into some sort of communion with the performers; an,d present- ing a number of things, the fruit of diligent searching in far places and in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies, which it would be rewarding to come across anywhere. Out of context, no doubt, and much of it quite alien : but you need not have any Gaelic to be moved by the harsh, strong, lamentable sound of a song from Uist or by the heroic declamation of an Ossianic legend (this, one tells oneself, is what Homer ought to sound like); there is a superb shock in hearing, in a high, hard voice and a powerful north-eastern accent, the bitter song of the Two Brothers which we know from the Oxford Book of Ballads, but which the singer had from her mother and her grandmother before her.
Odd transplantation does not end in the Assembly Hall; Under Milk Wood in the Lyceum is odder still. How on earth it could be done was a puzzle from the beginning, rousing at least as much preliminary curiosity as the prospect of a new play. Now we know, it is a great deal better than certain black forebodings suggested—it is probably about as good as it could be—but it is still evidently a work of misplaced ingenuity. There is no doubt about the ingenuity: Michael Trangmar's set, equipped with a great variety of little niches, booths, grottoes, curtained recesses, furniture that slides in and out, crams pretty nearly all of Dylan Thomas's Llareggub (the reversible name is boldly spelt correctly in the programme) on the stage; the huge com- pany directed by Douglas Cleverdon and Edward Burnham industriously and skilfully animate it. But the town and its inhabitants, wrapped in their spring-dream, exist already, perfectly living in the one unquestionable masterpiece that has been written for voices alone; to add sight to hearing is at the best unnecessary, at the worst distracting and vul- garising: presenting, with a nudge and a wink, What the Butler Saw to illustrate poetry. This is not to say that things don't look right. Most of them do (although Donald Houston, an all- too-visible Narrator, was a bit conspicuous as he larked about the scenery). Buddug-Mair Powell, for instance, is just my idea of Mrs. Cherry Owen; so is T. H. Evans my Reverend Eli Jenkins. But I don't want to see them at all; I don't even want to see Diana Maddox's delectable Polly Garter. I have been taught already to see with my ears.
Under Milk Wood is, of course, one of the Festival's exports, clearly labelled for trans- port to London and perhaps New York, where If it reaches more people than the broadcasts djd it will, I suppose, justify itself, like Shakespeare on the screen. The other official offering of the first week—the Gateway Theatre's Anatomist—is very much for home consumption : of all Bridie's plays the one that truly belongs to Edinburgh. The Gateway com- pany give it a rattling good show (some par- ticularly spirited acting by Lennox Milne and Mary Helen Donald as the ladylike sisters in the New Town, and a regular Captain Hook of a Dr. Knox from Tom Fleming, receiving his 'subjects' for dissection in the Old). For purposes of comparison with this early Bridie there is the Edinburgh University Dramatic Society's very late, if not latest, one, The Baikie Charivari, admirably produced in the elegant little theatre in Adam House: a curious object-lesson in the inventiveness and fertility of Bridle, and of the fundamental want of seriousness which rarely allowed him to carry' a play, or an argument, to a conclusion.
The University production belongs, of course, to the Fringe, of which there will be more to say later; leaving it in the meantime with the observation merely that it appears to be as thickly ciliate and strenuously stirring as
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