Edinburgh Theatre
Oddities
Nicholas de Jongh
No taste or whim is neglected here. Which other festival would offer you both Miss Patricia Gilbert USA in "The Assassination of President Kennedy followed by audience participation" and "The Living Manifestation of the Ancient Tarot cards with Dance of Death celebrations "? Ah Edinburgh, How well you suffer your sophistication for three weeks of the year while still preferring your annual example of political theatre — the nightly tattoo. This year there are great anxieties: the festival is staggering under the weight of the fringe: 100 groups — professional, amateur, undergraduate and freakish — are competing for attention, though most of them are thoroughly conservative. They perform A Day in the Death of Joe Egg or some such, and then ask why the critics keep away. The fringe is, you will therefore understand, out of control.
Of course the official dramatic offerings hardly rise much above the consistently dismal standards of recent years: the ' experimental offerings ' like that by the Theatre Laboratoire Vicinal in Tramp offered fifty minutes of shouts, screams and inexplicable tripping about the stage area, and Moby Dick by some accounts was as grim. Marlowe's Tamburlaine impressed not for its buckets of artificial blood but for its thoroughly eastern spectacular — full of decadent promise. The Actors' Company have provided both Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and another Feydeau dance through slightly disreputable bedrooms. The Glasgow Citizens have provided a Twelfth Night which has persuaded some critics to snarls of outrage. For here is a modern Illyria set permanently on a wh:Le sand beach, a white dove on the garden steps and hipyoung, thoroughly modern people suitable for Cannes. Worse: Viola, over whom so many have enthused so doubtfully when disguised as a girlish boy, is now played by a man.
Of course the play undergoes violent transpositions: Olivia's infatuated interest in Cesario no longer seems a lesbian aberration — a process she must undergo before self-knowledge. Orlando and Cesario or Viola are now homosexual, the muted undertones of the original sounding clear and perverse. The joyful reconciliation of the twins has to go since Sebastian and Viola are played by the same man. Yet, this apart, Giles Havergal's production exploits the play's susceptibility to wistful fantasy and its dreamlike summation more effectively and intensely than any production I have seen (John Barton's near definitive RSC revival excepted). It seems to belong — with its white sand steps leading to an aristocratic mansion — to a period out of time, high in a blaze of summer light shading into purple evening. "Youth's a stuff will not endure," sings Feste, another travelling hippie, and that is the production's motif. Here is a cardiganed Sir Andrew like some defiantly stupid public schoolboy drinking overlong at champagne, and Sir Toby an upper-class bore in a green suit. There is a sense of high spirits and love-games and needs played out before the demands of age and convention exert their will. At the Traverse, with a programme of formidable variety and range, C. P.
Taylor's Black and White Minstrels proves a compulsive act of narcissism and mild self-abuse for the ruling trendies.
Accommodated not in NW1 or Hampstead, the Jacksons and Vines are seen integrating themselves as a wife-swapping quartet. The humour lies mostly in the language, which is crammed with all the stale and reverently spoken jargon of non communication. Sex, if she is taken at all, is taken with grim seriousness and the play's tension lies firstly in the fact that Cyril and his wife are trying to retreat from all things difficult and liberal while their world of Guardian newspapers and a difficult black girl tenant threatens to overwhelm, Though Mr Taylor funks the play's resolution too easily, he is served by a production of fluency, ease and inventive detail by Michael Rudman and ideal performances from Tom Conti, Patti Love, Elizabeth Hughes and Taiwo Ajai.
Rep/ique, created by the Polish designer and director Josed Szajna, is a surrealistic and expressionistic vision of Auschwitz, achieved from Szajna's experience there. A pile of rubbish becomes a human mound from which the lost or losing people come scrabbling in sand for food, or searching for symptoms of life. Its horrors accelerate with strange amputated dummies, a body on a rack with a face, a body squelched into a grey mess and ending in a hand with a ring on it. Only some aural and visual excesses preclude the greatness which its beginning seems to threaten.
Briefly: David Mowat's Amalfi (Traverse) speeds the Duchess into modernity; she is looking and sounding with her crimson painted toenails like something out of the decadent side of Mayfair, with Danny Bosola in attendance. Antonio is asked to "come up and see me sometime ": it is a beautiful travesty, with music com plementing it. The social and psychological motivations are lost but it does remind forcibly that this age is not dead to those horrors. The Oxford Theatre Group, with Edward G like the Film Star, about a man whose encounter with a young handicap ped child offers his single chance of achievement, discovers a new playwright in twenty-two-year-old John Crane; the Cambridge University Theatre Company, with the one-act Grannie (author unknown), is true to its dour view of mutual dependence between mad son and mother going down; and C. P. Taylor's lunchtime Happy Anniversary (Pool Theatre Com
pany) is a ruby wedding celebration, rich in the sense of loss and waste. Let it not be denied there are still pleasures to be found here . . .
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