ARTS
Edinburgh Festival
Not in for
a big surprise
Rupert Christiansen weaves his way around the good, the quite good and the utterly disgusting
Aslight pall hung over Edinburgh last week — less to do with the weather, I think, than the sense that the Festival was marking time and playing safe, presumably to ensure robust financial health for a bumper Golden Jubilee in 1996. So this year we had to sweat and make do with a lot of old favourites: Bondy, Chereau, Mor- ris, Sellars, Abbado, Mackerras, Bausch. All fine and dandy, of course, but there was none of the firecracker surprise that the best festivals can brilliantly spring where you least expect.
Sadly, the one novel foreign show of the first week proved less firecracker than damp squib. A drippy title like I was Staring at the Ceiling and then I saw the Sky is ask- ing for sarkiness — my favourite version: I was Staring at the Programme and then I saw the Exit Sign — but this new folk opera by the American composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars (who previously col- laborated on the wonderful Nixon in China), with a libretto by the poet June Jordan, is so squeaky-clean that you can't be too beastly about it. It explores, along impeccably multicultural lines, the dilem- mas of seven troubled Angelenos at the period of the earthquake. 'Leila has been trying to give advice on contraception to Consuelo, a single mother with two chil- dren, who is a political refugee from El Sal- vador' the synopsis tells us, and there's more of it to come. But before you make the usual noises about the tyranny of politi- cal correctness, let me add that the piece's good intentions are undeniable, that there are traces of wit and even irony in the interaction of the characters, and that an accomplished young cast really does seem to believe in every last drop of its bleeding- heart liberalism.
What such a simple and direct scenario requires is simple and direct music of the sort Bernstein wrote for West Side Story. No such luck: John Adams has long had a repu- tation as the most sophisticated representa- tive of his school, but you could tell he was playing naive here and it didn't work. With yards of awful Sondheim-style rambling arioso and not one good tune, the score was so dull and ploddingly paced as to sabotage the text's jumping optimism. Finally, I was puzzled: I couldn't see who this show was aimed at, or what it was doing at the Edin- burgh Festival. Shouldn't it be out preach- ing condoms and self-respect 'in the community', wherever that is?
Scottish Opera contributed a new staging of Dvorak's rarely heard The Jacobin. It was pretty dreadful, and obliges me to ask yet again why this interesting company can never quite get its act together? How was such a misconceived production ever allowed to pass beyond the drawing-board? It should have been an easy winner. The plot is a bucolic affair which interweaves the homecoming of the squire's long-lost son with the idea of the socially binding power of music: Meistersinger must have been at the back of somebody's mind, although there is a Verdian breadth and sweep to the ensembles too. The story is touching and strange, the score glows and sparkles throughout, and there are enough marvellous tunes, both patriotic and senti- mental, to satisfy even my exigent appetite.
Now enter some dreary marxisant East German director, name of Christine Mielitz, who orders the action out of the sunshine and plonks it down in what looks like a salt mine. The humour herein was pratfall, the atmosphere stygian, characteri- sation null. As if to complement this clunk- ingness, Richard Armstrong's conducting was heavy-handed and hell-for leather: one longed to hear what someone with the light touch of Carlos Kleiber could have made of the score's lilt, grace and charm. The poor singers — from sweet young things like Claire Rutter and Richard Coxon to seasoned pros like Donald Maxwell — were swamped by the over-enthusiastic orchestra. (Apropos, it is sad that the excellent plan of merging this band with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra has now been abandoned, owing, I gather, to pusillanimity at the Beeb.) At the Usher Hall, I enormously enjoyed the Kirov's concert rendering of Glinka's fantasy epic Ruslan and Ludmila. Italianate influence (Rossini especially) colours the score, but it's also fascinating to hear the seeds of a true Russian grandeur in the monologues and choruses. Valery Gergiev drove the entire performance with total conviction, painting even its quaintest moments in vibrant, glittering fairy-tale colour. Some of his male singers still wob- ble and boom as Slays are commonly sup- posed to do, but there was a fabulously pure soprano in Marina Shaguch (the tim- bre reminds me of Margaret Price's himm- lische Stimme) and a faultlessly elegant mezzo in Larissa Diadkova.
I leave the visual arts to Martin Gayford, and pausing only in reverence before the choreographic genius of Mark Morris, the dance programme to Jann Parry. In the 'legitimate theatre, Scottish plays featured strongly. The Festival's big offering, TAG's version of Alasdair Gray's picaresque fic- tion Lanark, was by most accounts an overblown flop, but at the Traverse I enor- mously admired the exuberant production of Sue Glover's Bondagers, a powerful and humane study of 19th-century women farm workers. It was brilliantly staged by the Traverse's director Ian Brown, who seems to be making a first-class job of running this great institution. At the Assembly Rooms, I found the adaptation of Irvine Welch's all-too popular novel Trainspotting utterly nauseating. For all its graphic detailing of the horrors of heroin addiction, it glamorizes the condition in a thoroughly irresponsible fashion and its scatological obscenity is simply puerile. Simon Donald's The Life of Stuff is a far more bleak and terrifying treatment of the same subject, as well as an infinitely better play. I wasn't shocked by Trainspotting — it was too bor- ing for that — but I don't mind admitting it disgusted me. The audience naturally loved every second, and it's impossible to get a ticket.
I dipped anxiously into the Fringe come- dy scene — I end up terribly upset if I come away feeling that I'm too old to have got the joke. But at the Pleasance, a buzzing hive of small venues far nicer and more convivial that the aggressive, hysterical Assembly Rooms, I enjoyed much of Mel and Sue, two clever and sassy girls with a good line in Emma Thompson imitations (I fell about at the thought of her appearance in Trois Couleurs: Beige) and a wonderful sketch about drooling 'Tuscanophiles who pronounce all their Italian prrrroperly. An amiable and skilful gay American Scott Capurro was also fun, especially when he started doing terrible things to innocents in the front row. I'm afraid I missed this year's wow Boothby Graffoe, but I was unamused by another much praised act Sir Bernard Chumley (Assembly Rooms) which seemed to me both witless and incompetent.
For the record, last year's Tampax and lesbian quips were mercifully on the wane, as is that tiresome business of making fart- ing noises into the microphone, but Michael Portillo and Prince Edward remain popular perennials of Fringe humour — a category in which I fear poor old Hugh Grant will also end up. More intriguingly, a friend who had trawled the halls deeper than me reported a weird out- break of goldfish stories. Something to do with the water shortage?
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