Lyonised
BY IAIN HAMILTON F4VERYONE has passed through Lyons. Few of you, if any, have stopped there. Nobody seems to love Lyons among the bold travellers going south to be jostled in Avignon, or to sweat in the ring at Nimes or Arles, or to idle by the oily border of the culture-laden sea. This,is a pity, and I think everyone mistaken. But I used to be exactly the same my- self when Lyons was only a long glimpse of tenements, bridges, dusty squares, and an echoing railway station where one nipped out to buy a bottle of mineral water. A violent history, a lot of silk, the Credit Lyonnais. And so, like Mr. Fitz- thingummy, one said farewell to the retreating chimneys and turned to the smug contemplation of the fabulous valley which debouches into Provence and that overcrowded coast where easy on the eye is hard on the pocket.
But Lyons is an admirable town.
Looking down across it from the fearsome neo-Byzantine basilica which crowns the hill of Fourviere (where first the Greeks from Massilia and then the Romans, colonising Gaul from the Province, put stone upon stone) one sees the main part of the city squeezed tight between Sa6ne and Rhone, and straining upward in compensation. Coming down from the hilltop, where the heat of the sun is tempered by a mild breeze drifting from the Alps, one steps through a wall of solid warmth into streets where the air has scarcely budged an inch in three days. And in the morning dawn comes up like thunder, i.e., with Radio Paris letting it rip through the tenement win- dow a foot or two from your hotel room. But what of that on the edge of Provence? Italy is infinitely worse, Tunis a bedlam.
Lyons is a pleasant provincial city and I am fond of it. It is an ideal town for a festival. For one thing, it is large and wholly unselfconscious; and since few of you ever stop there, it is full of people minding their own business rather than yours. I myself find it agreeable not to be charged an extra thirty francs for a cup of coffee, and to go to a play or a con- cert at which 99 per cent. of the audience is local. Considering how shrewd the Lyonnais are by repute (the Manchester of France, as the travel-writers used to say), I find it strange that they have not added tourism to all the other industries that bring the cash flowing in from the four quarters like four golden Rhones. Next to Paris (which is in its own cosmo- politan category) and to Marseilles (which rejoices in its own peculiar attractions) stands Lyons in size and impor'tance; and it is a much more obstinately 'French' city than either of its seniors.
Lyons has an annual festival of the arts. It came in rather late on this post-war market and missed its fair share of pub- licity; but, as these things go, its festival is as good a non- specialised jamboree as one could see outside Edinburgh. I have thought so in past years, coming down the hill from a splendid performance of Amphytrion in the Roman Theatre or of Bach in the odeion next door; or sweating cheerfully in the Mused Saint-Pierre between early cool Renoirs and late hot ones; or even speeding back from CharbonnFeres and an adaptation of Macbeth which lost the poetry and blew up the melodrama until the play looked like something out of a horror comic. I thought so again this year as I w,orked my way, between luncheons and dinners which were admittedly of a fortifying excellence, through a programme which ran from the sweet comedy of Pergolesi to the socially conscious decorations of Leger (including his latest acrobatic proles in tasteful combinations) to a not wholly certain Three-Cornered Hat by L'Orchestre de l'Association Philharmonique de Lyon to an admirable Moliere double-bill which marked the ter- centenary of that joker's first visit to Lyons with his troupe. As I thought how extraordinary it was that the two drawing- room comedies, Le Sicilien and Les Fourberies de Scapin, should have been successfully translated to the wide open spaces of the Roman theatre on the hill, I recalled how last year the same setting had been filled to its limits by a pro- duction of The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, with Debussy's full score, that would certainly have been a nine days' wonder if produced (as Madame Korene produced it) at Edinburgh. I was too late this year, alas, to see Monsieur Sartre's Les Mouches in that splendid setting, and I left too soon to enjoy what a friend tells me was an unqualified triumph of pro- duction and performance—Gluck's Orpheus under the stars and against the broken columns.
Lyons is an enterprising town and it is probably only a matter of time before its festival, growing in scope and scale, makes more of an impact on the culture-market. So will it be discovered by more of those who now pass through it. I should like to think of its cafes being crammed with the culture- happy for three weeks every year (like the tea-shops of Princes Street).
When that happens it will be time for Clermont-Ferrand, say, to start up something for the lone prowler.
Previous page
