Contemporary Arts
Edinburgh, 1955
BEING at the Edinburgh Festival is a timeless experience; to anyone who was at the 1954 version 1955 will bring few novelties either on the stage or in the art gallery. Last year we saw the Old Vic, Thornton Wilder and C6zanne. This year we are to see Thornton Wilder, the Old Vic and Gauguin, and, great though the difference may be between the two post- impressionists, it is hardly enough to revolu- tionise either Edinburgh or the critic's reaction to it. No, the only novelty was the mist swirling around the castle and causing a city that always hovers between the Gothic and the classic to come down heavily on the side of melodrama.
Under its blanketing humidity the stranger can recall, with the relish of one reading thrillers in bed on a rainy night, each blood- curdling episode of a history noted for its scarlet colouring. It is, I think, the Scottish sense of humour (which led in the Middle Ages to such practical jokes as the crowning of a pretender to the throne with a red-hot crown) that makes of Edinburgh such a sinister city. The visitor feels strongly the monstrous quality of much Scottish literature (Weir of Hermiston, for example) repeated in the granite of the houses and the rock on which they are built. Northern Gothic, Gothic with- out the luminous thought that made a human- ism of it in the south—but then, walking through the squares and crescents of the New Town, the calculation is upset, and the debate on the character of this fractured city post- poneji.
The fog then is consonant with one half, the Gothic half, of Edinburgh, and has also the merit of enabling the visitor to dream a little if he is so disposed. Not so the more usual festival landmarks. The babel of tongues in Princes Street, the flags, the festival clubs shocked into a month's life out of drill halls and assembly rooms—the flags and processions —all these are the apparatus of the interna- tional festival, the device by which modern Europe has increasingly tried to convince itself that its shares in its cultured heritage still stand at par in a world where the bottom has fallen out of every other market. Europe and America come to Edinburgh to be reassured, and it is understandable that the works which they come to see should have no great suit- ability to the setting, since the keynote of the city itself is the concealed disquiet that comes from the lowering face of history lying in wait rather than asleep.
Whatever the reason—and I doubt if any of these imaginings were present in the minds of the organisers—the official programme has a thoroughly Londonian (or Parisian or New York) flavour. At the Lyceum there is Julius Ceesar done by the Old Vic company. This is one of their better productions; in particular Michael Benthall has made the death of Caesar with the awed silence of the conspirators fol- lowing it most impressive. In this production everything is worked out in terms of character; there is a tendency to neglect the fact that Julius Casar is first and foremost a political play. In particular John Neville's Mark Antony struck me as a little too noble for the part. Mr. Neville acted with great intellectual distinction, but seemed not quite gross enough for this debauched and merciless triumvir. The conspirators also were not quite convincing; one had the feeling that they would never have made it, that their obviously amateur status had nothing to do with the scheming, avari- cious fathers of the late Roman republic. Gerald Cross's Caesar was surely too ridiculous a figure for a statesman, whose greatness even in death is a main theme of the play, As Brutus, however, Paul Rogers scored a real success, transforming him into a sympathetic figure by the simple expedient of wearing a beard and looking worried. The stoic once thrown over- board, Brutus's speeches no longer had that pious moralising tone which generally makes them a little ridiculous. As Portia, Wendy Hiller was far too much the simple country girl, and also proved herself incapable of speaking Shakespearean verse. All in all, this was a good average production, but it did not come up to the recent Henry IV.
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At the Assembly Hall is Mr. Wilder's play A Life in the Sun, a new version of the Alcestis legend specially written for the apron stage. ,Unfortunately, this seems to be a failure (on the whole I like plays that modernise classical myths); but the reasons for this failure are in fact rather interesting, and, since I have not the space to deal with them here at the length they deserve, I should prefer to reserve them for next week. For the moment I shall merely say that there was no very obvious causal rela- tionship between the form of the play and the stage at the Assembly Hall and that my dis- appointment at the play was in no way due either to cast or production. Tyrone Guthrie whipped the pace up as far as he could (he could not quite prevent it from being slow) and Irene Worth gave a very fine performance as Alcestis, very ably seconded by Robert Hardy as Admetus and Rupert Davies as Hercules. The fault was in the play and primarily in Mr. Wilder's approach to the adaptation of legend. More of that next week.
Perhaps, however, the most purely enjoyable festival item is the two rooms of Gauguins at the Scottish Academy. The early Gauguin is especially well represented; passing through pale impressionist pastiches, it is only half-way round the first room that an individual style makes its impact in the pictures painted in Martinique, and the confirmation of the im- portance of the 1887 visit to the West Indies and of the meeting with Van Gogh shortly before is dramatic. Frchn then on Gauguin was to develop on his own lines to end in the great Tahitian friezes (if one may so describe them) which are represented in this exhibition pri- marily by the Tate's Feta Iheihe, that long glowing picture.
Yet this exhibition (which is by no means so complete as the one held in Paris some years ago) does suggest that the evolution to Tahiti was not inevitable. Pictures like the Yellow Christ or the Calvary (Le Christ Vert) show a wilder, if not more passionate, side of Gauguin's genius. The brooding sensual calm, shot with primitive terror, that informs his Tahitian pictures, might easily have been ex- changed for something more dynamic, some- thing more European, in which the smooth tapestry of his surface might have gained in tension from being broken. Did he not end in a blind alley in spite of the epic magnificence of the last paintings? When we compare Gauguin to Ozanne (and their juxtaposition in two suc- cessive years of the festival invites the compari- son) it is possible to see the gap that separates a great painter from a very great painter, great- ness from genius. The enjoyment we get out of Gauguin's work should not blind us to the fact that, in one sense, it ended in defeat; the promise of pictures like The Vision after the Sermon was not quite fulfilled and the painter ended his life in the primitive heaven or hell he had created for himself and posterity.
So the festival marches on and so we con- tinue to ask ourselves just how long it can go on living on the ideas of four or five years ago. None of the items on the official programme, with which I have dealt this week, marks the slightest departure or novelty, and, if one must hand the director and his aides the Kabuki dancers, those of us who happen to be con- cerned with the theatre are rapidly being driven almost exclusively to the `fringe' entertainments for our real enjoyment. Even if the standard is low, it is the product of enthusiasm, and fre- quently it is high. What is difficult to bear is repetition of the same cultural conjuring trick time after time. I said at the beginning of this that being at Edinburgh is a timeless ex- perience, but, of course, constant repeat per- formances do eventually force the critic-to a full and horrid consciousness of time, if only through his own sense of boredom. Timeless does not mean eternal, and the new director of the festival would do well to remember it.
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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