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Sights for sore eyes
Allan Massie
Iused to know an Aberdeenshire farmer who had a very pretty wife. Being con- gratulated on this one day, he said, 'Aye, aye, but the bloom's aft o' her.' It is hard, if ungracious, not to feel that way about the Edinburgh Festival sometimes. This is after all the 40th Festival, and while it would be absurd to expect that it could have retained the sense of adventure and audacity that informed its early years and made these festivals occasions of wonder and significance, there is inevitably a sense that it has all been experienced before and that the routine is a little stale. Edinburgh's eyelids are a little weary, and it is hardly to be wondered at.
The city too has changed, not for the better. The City Fathers, pompous worthy men, have been replaced by an aggressive- ly left-wing district council. The Lord Provost Sir John Falconer, who with Rudolf Bing and H. Harvey Wood of the British Council was the promoter of the first Festival, envisaged Edinburgh as being a meeting place for nations parted by the war: Edinburgh could help to remake Europe. It is not surprising that such grand ideals have withered. Other festivals have burgeoned meanwhile, and it is hard to say just where Edinburgh's individuality may now be found. One sees too the Festival used in the modern manner to advertise business: this year's target for sponsorship was 000,000. The Festival's sponsorship manager has been quoted as saying 'com- panies that give a lot to the arts should expect to get a lot in return'. I am not alone in finding this depressing. 'Mozart can sell more beer' seems to be a lamentable argument to be used by the organisers of a festival; and though of course it is never put so crudely, this is essentially what business sponsorship means, and it debases Mozart.
The early Festivals were rich in music and drama — Glyndebourne and the Old Vic were at the first of all, at which Bruno Walter conducted the Vienna Philharmo- nic and Kathleen Ferrier and Peter Pears sang `Das Lied von die Erde' with that orchestra. Drama, despite many great pro- ductions, has always been a problem, and the best approach to a solution was John Drummond's attempt to make Edinburgh a showcase for world theatre. That happily continues. The Stary Theatre of Krakov are doing Andrzej Wajda's version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment in the first week and there are two productions directed by Ingmar Bergman: Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman done by the Bavarian State Theatre and Strindberg's Miss Julie from his own Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden. The French Theatre de la Sala- mandre from Lille, which in 1981 brought the most compelling performance of Racine I have ever seen, are bringing what is described as 'a nonsense language farce'. There is a Japanese Medea and a Chinese circus, and a substantial Scottish contribu- tion too. One play of curiosity interest is the 18th-century tragedy Douglas, which on its first production produced the cry, Whaur's your Wullie Shakespeare noo?' (The true answer was of course exactly where he had been before: facile princeps; but let that pass.) There is also Rickie Fulton in a version of Moliere, A Wee Touch of Class. Moliere in Scots is the best Scots drama we have, and Fulton is the one unquestioned genius working in the Scot- tish theatre and music-hall. The Fringe as usual offers more theatre than anyone can swallow: John Clifford's Lucy's Play at the Traverse is worth seeing; there is a Sam Shepard premiere, Seduced; and on past form I would recommend a visit to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama's adaptation of David Copperfield.
In music the director Frank Dunlop has boldly jettisoned most of the London orchestras which have too often produced dull and routine programmes, and he had, equally boldly, transformed the Usher Hall into an Opera House (that controversy may be dead, but its ghost walks) for his own production of 'Weber's Oberon. The Maly Theatre of Leningrad are bringing two Tchaikovsky operas, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades. There is also Slonimsky's Maria Stuard and at least it is coming to the right place, though next year should see the Mary Queen of Scots theme flourish in the quattrocentenary of her death.
Nevertheless one can't avoid feeling, as in recent years, that the emphasis of the Festival has shifted and that the best things are now the exhibitions. The theme of this year's Festival has been announced as the Scottish Enlightenment, and if it is hard to make much of this in theatrical and musical terms the galleries make up for it. There is The Golden Age of Scottish Painting at the Talbot-Rice Art Centre and Upper Library Hall of the Robert Adam Old College of the University, more than 200 paintings, many drawn from private collections, and A Hotbed of Genius at the Royal Museum of Scotland. The former offers a marvel- lous choice of Raeburns, Ramsays and Willdes, and other fine painters like Nas- myth, Runciman and Robert Scott Lauder. The latter has a re-creation of 18th-century Edinburgh on the ground floor and a display of paintings, watercolours, books, manuscripts and sculptures above. These include Nasmyth's portrait of Burns and a magnificent Gainsborough of the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch from Bowhill; the manu- scripts include Robert Adam's volume of engravings: Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro. The third Enlightenment exhibition is called The Enterprising Scot, and is at the Royal Scottish Academy, where there is also a display of 50 watercolours by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
On a different tack the National Gallery of Scotland has an exhibition of 19th- century French painting, Lighting up the Landscape: Impressionism and its Origins: a mouth-watering show of Monet, C6- zanne, Courbet, Boudin, Bonington, Mil- let, Corot, Pissarro etc. The Scottish National Museum of Modern Art has a retrospective of John Bellany, claimed by some as our most important (whatever that means) contemporary painter. Two other exhibitions to be recommended are David .Michie at the Mercury Gallery and Fionna Carlisle at the 369 Gallery.
Even running through this list, which excludes Dance and the Film Festival and almost the whole of the Fringe, makes my first paragraph seem too pessimistic. Perhaps it is not Edinburgh's eyelids that are weary, but my own. Some of these exhibitions should revive them. By the way, the so-called Television Festival is not a Festival at all, but the industry's own chat show where if you are unlucky you can hear Michael Grade discuss deeply serious matters like programme scheduling. Women working in television will, we are told, have the chance to question its male-dominated structure in a session wittily entitled Ms/Management. Oh for a Muse of Fire, or Whaur's your Grace Wyndham Goldie noo?
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