T he tram-cars still bound down Princes Street like matronly gazelles,'

Eric Keown wrote. That was in 1951, the fifth Year of the Edinburgh Festival. It is diffe- rent now. The trams have bounded away, perhaps to the tram museum at Crich. The Festival Club, the Fringe Club and the Press Club have all gone to new addresses. And the festival has done something to live IV to its proper name, the Edinburgh International Festival.

It began a mere two years after the second world war, a conscious gesture of world solidarity. The first director was a Viennese, Rudolf Bing (now Sir Rudolf). He was a music man, so he had no difficulty in making the festival interna- tional; music is an international art. The theatre was another matter.

In its early days, there was much reliance On English and Scottish repertory com- panies. The Old Vic was at Edinburgh six Years of the first nine, carrying their work from the Waterloo Road to the Royal Lyceum or the Assembly Hall. Some man- agements were brave enough to launch new productions in Edinburgh before bringing them to London. T. S. Eliot's Cocktail Party, Confidential Clerk and Elder Statesman all opened there.

The French, remembering the auld alliance, sent the Comedic Francaise, Louis Jouvet, Edwige Feuillere, Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault. As early as 1949, the Germans, enemies no more, sent Goethe's Faust from Diisseldorf. But as one critic wrote, 'a string of revivals from the home front, no matter how interesting as collectors' pieces, is no sub- stitute for new plays.'

The play's the thing

B. A. Young looks back on 25 years of theatre at the Edinburgh Festival

I did not begin to go until the early 1960s. By then, the rep companies had begun to offer what might be called festival productions even if they offered few new plays. Joan Littlewood put on Henry IV at the Assembly Hall, both parts carpentered into one. The Kirk never meant the Assembly Hall for a playhouse, and direc- tors had to devise some way of making the great debating chamber into a theatre. Miss Littlewood got her designer, John Bury, to put the stage on a wooden bridge across the hall, with half the audience on each side, as it was at the Traverse (which I will come back to in a moment). It was a pity that the company, exposed on this expanse, did not make a better job of the play; but at least they showed something we should not have seen at the Theatre Royal, Stratford.

Other companies were less unconven- tional. The Prospect Theatre, which brought Ian McKellen's Richard II and Edward II, settled for a fairly conventional stage in the area where at other times the elders of the Kirk would assemble. But the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre, with a radical young director, Keith Hack, and an im- aginative designer, Philip Prowse, trans- formed the place. Tattered bunting fes- tooned the galleries and candles burned dangerously at every pillar. Mediaeval cannon and wagon wheels dressed the stage, where human skeletons hung or lay among them. This was for Tamburlaine, full of potential savagery. Every sword- thrust sent a great squirt of blood out of the victim. There were three Tamburlaines; but as the actors were virtually indisting- uishable from one another this mattered less than it might. Perhaps this was not Marlowe; but festival it was.

Festive in another way was the Midsum- mer Night's Dream directed by Frank Dunlop, the present festival director, in 1967. 'Pop theatre' was his phrase for his current style, but there was nothing com- mon about it. Cleo Laine doubled Hip- polyta and Titania, with a setting of 'You spotted snakes' by John Dankworth. Puck, delightfully done by Hywel Bennett, had fur sprouting from shoulders to shins, and played as if he were a friendly house-dog. It was a doggy production; when Theseus (Robin Bailey) went hunting, he took a genuine pack of hounds with him. He gave some comically unexpected readings. 'My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind' was a regret: out of the Spartan kind, yes, but hardly the hounds of Sparta that Hippolyta recalled from her day with Hercules and Cadmus.

There was adventurous style among the foreign visitors too. Luca Ronconi gave a grand version of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso at the Haymarket Ice Rink, where the broad floor-space gave room for the mobile 'pageants' on which the events took place, the audience dodging between them. Ronconi came again later, with an `Aristophanic fantasy', culled from Aris- tophanes' plays. A series of beautifully established scenes processed along a cen- tral corridor at the ice rink for over four hours, telling the story Ronconi had blended from the plays.

There was a Romanian company under Liviu Ciulei, that gave Buchner's silly play Leonce and Lena and made a tremendous evening's fun out of it. There was a Polish company — but I have slipped into the Fringe.

The festival direction has no responsibil- ity for the Fringe. Edinburgh is strong on education and on religion, and so provides a lot of lecture halls, parish halls and so on. Every university that can edges into the Fringe with its revue or its Woyzeck. The Fringe gave us Rosencrantz and Guilden- stern are Dead and Beyond the Fringe, which killed revue as an art-form except at the Edinburgh Festival. There was even an annual visit from the University of South- ern California, with good performances of much that was current in the USA. They gave us Follies ten years ago. Only the Mark I version, though.

At the core of the Fringe is the Traverse, which has always declined to be part of the official festival (save once when they were

persuaded to give their Macbeth at the Assembly Hall). It began in an upstairs room in a turning off the top of the High Street. The stage was a clearing across the middle of the floor, banks of seats sloping down to it each side. There was a res- taurant attached, where you might find the founder, the young ex-USAF enthusiast Jim Haynes, sitting in his shirt-sleeves and dividing his attention between catering and box-office. I saw a matinee there in 1965, Green Julia by Paul Ableman, and one of the two players was Jonathan Lynn, now at the National and author of Yes, Minister. The late show that day was a revue from Trinity, Dublin, directed by Max Stafford- Clark, now running the Royal Court.

One year's cult favourite was Futz, about a man in love with a pig. In those censor-ridden days, there was always someone to make a naughty point. Some- thing called a 'happening' was dreamed up, such as a naked girl rapidly wheeled in a barrow across the back of the stage.

Richard Demarco, an Edinburgh art dealer, began a fringe of his own. In 1972 he invited a Polish company called Cricket- 2. They gave Witkiewicz's The Water Hen in what had been an'Edinburgh poorhouse. Tadeusz Kantor, once Grotowski's master, was the director; the play was hard to follow, and would have been almost as hard if the dialogue had been in English. Hardly anyone understood it, everyone enjoyed it.

One characteristic of the festival in the early days was the antagonism between the director and the city authorities. In 1967, for example, the Lord Provost ruled that there was no need to fly flags in Princes Street, as Edinburgh was beautiful enough already. He also complained that at the Festival Club he had seen too much drink- ing and too much 'necking' (his word). This was the year when the Scotsman remarked that 'the festival has made Edin- burgh a real capital city after a lapse of generations.' Then a councillor thought there were too many homosexuals in the Festival Club. (My own complaint was that the Club was always packed with OB technicians of Scottish Television.) Peter Diamand, the festival director at the time, reacted sharply to the Lord Provost. 'Either back the festival or drop it,' he said.

The current director, Frank Dunlop, has a record of good, interesting festival pro- ductions going back 20 years. His festival this year is international par excellence, with visiting companies from China, France, Finland, both sides of Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Papua New Guinea, the USSR and the USA. I wish them well, but I should warn them that Edinburgh audiences are suspicious of foreign lan- guages. At a fine production of Racine's Britannicus a few years ago, two Amer- icans sitting in front of me got up and left after hearing a couple of lines. 'It's in French,' one of them said scathingly.