Angus Calder’s 1987 Reviews

Angus Calder’s 1987 Reviews

Through the Minefield

New Statesman 14th August 1987

‘Edinburgh Festivals’ comprehends not one world but hundreds, most of them very small. While some people vanish into Film House for days, myriad groupscules have their entire lives bound up in fringe shows. Advice to NS readers contemplating a sortie: don’t without trustworthy advice, fall for spiels in the Fringe Brochure like ’the story of a trade union martyr packed with songs and comedy’. Beware of groups called the Screaming Abdabs and of sordid church halls in the suburbs. To begin with, at any rate, stick to comfortable venues in the centre and go for companies with some track record.

The Traverse can certainly be relied on, although the three in-house productions of new British plays with Jenny Killick as director and John Clifford as writer-in-residence have now evolved a medium which combines stimulation with ingratiation.  Had Clifford’s ‘Playing with Fire’ been the first play of his I’d seen, it would have delighted me as much as ‘Losing Venice’, but now the mixture seems much as before. Take a myth and put it into a historical setting seasoned with anachronisms (This time it’s medieval France with a female version of Faust) Toss some croutons about poverty, gender and war. Serve very well acted.

The highly promising Amy Hardie uses the same recipe in ‘Noah’s Wife.’ Her script reworks the Flood in a Sudanese setting where people who live in primeval famine have transistor radios. Peter Jukes’ first play ‘Abel Barebones and the Humble Company’s convincing new-minted myth develops suspense and momentum. Kathryn Hunter playing a male soldier is sheer joy. Cliffordism works.

The Traverse world is big. Frank Dunlop’s is vast. He’s into his fourth year as Director of the Official Festival and has now firmly set his stamp on it. He’s acknowledged criticism – the concert programme is now refreshed with a high tally of new works, above all in the second weekend of Twentieth Century Music sponsored by the wonderfully enlightened Scottish Post Office. The Second World Theatre Season is very much Dunlop’s own thing. The range should prove exhilarating – Ireland and New Guinea, Tokyo, Stockholm, Helsinki, East Berlin and Shanghai. Above all, expectancy has surrounded the Gorky Theatre from Leningrad and the puppets from Georgia – all parts of an unprecedented USSR contingent – enough glasnost to make our eyes glaze over.

I can report later on the official conference involving Russian and Brit bigwigs. Meanwhile, after fighting my way through television crews at ‘Moscow: A Private View’, I found myself wholly scunnered to realise that technically the stuff was no better or worse than the run of professional contemporary art, but that its themes  (friends, flowers, my favourite view of Moscow) were so unadventurous that the term ‘petty-bourgeois’ rose ineluctably to mind.

Wittily deconstructive ‘Bits and Pieces’ by the late lamented Joseph Beuys at the Demarco Gallery – visual epigrams, little artefacts, trouvés -help me to get Art into proportion. One pleasure of the Vigorous Imagination, a roundup by works of young Scottish Artists is that some of them are equally irreverent, though I’m uneasy with the feyness of Wiszniewski and Conroy’s quease-making portentousness, compared to the exuberant whimsies of Stephen Campbell, whose vast international success as much as anything, explains why Scottish juvenilia top the bill at this Festival.

Open Letter to Yevgeni Yevtushenko

 New Statesman 21st August 1987

Dear Mr Yevtushenko, It was a privilege to meet you again after 25 years. That student magazine I gave you containing your poem’ ‘Koeshueti’ was my souvenir (as I hope it will now be yours) of a thrilling occasion when you read at the Cambridge Union- an angry generous young man from Siberia. Your declamation seemed to shake the walls and galleries of an institution which represented the elitist male -chauvinist fustiness at the heart of British political life. A few years later, as you have reminded me, you had the honour of being denounced by Bernard Levin, a man never frightened to raise his voice in defence of the strong against the weak. Some people still believe that you must be evil because you have not been detained by the Soviet state. But I was glad to see one of Britain’s best poets, Carol Rumens, warmly acknowledging your humanity in her Observer review of your new book ‘Almost at the End’

I’m eager to read it. Throughout a hopeful week when you and a dozen distinguished Soviet colleagues were reading and discussing in the Edinburgh Festival, I was remembering your poem ’People’ which moved me so much those many years ago and still does now:

           In any man who dies there dies with him

           His first snow and kiss and fight…

           Not people die but worlds die with them.

Poetry and other arts make it possible to imagine, share and preserve worlds. Perhaps the most astonishing feat of imagination on show in our current Festival is ‘Le Lavoir’. Our Traverse theatre has imported this French production by the Theatre de la Basoche. Twelve women act out a day’s work and talk in a washhouse in August 1914. The news that war has broken out is given maximum impact by the arrival of one of their husbands, a male intrusion. By this time one feels one has got to know a dozen people of a different time and place as well as they know each other. The offer of their world is so fresh, so spontaneous-seeming that days later I have only just realised that the play has authors – Dominique Durvin and Hélène Prevost.

I caught a remarkable ‘Chakravuha’ a beautifully devised reworking of a Hindu epic by Chris Theatre from Manipur. In our Jazz Festival I’ve heard an amazing Pole who plays kazoo, and such great veterans as Jay McShann and Al Carthy. The Stockholm Folk Opera’s ‘Magic Flute’ which has been charming full houses at Leith Theatre, takes a wilfully perverse view of the text, but bubbles with such vitality that one’s love of Mozart is enhanced.

It was a pity that my own background involvement in the ‘Rum and Scotch ‘event at the Book Festival prevented me from attending your own poetry reading. I wish you could have heard Jean Breeze, Grace Nichols and John Agard from the Caribbean perform their verse with intense dynamism, a challenge to which four excellent Scots poets responded. One of these was Liz Lochhead whose new play ‘Mary Queen of Scots got her Head chopped off’ has been a smash hit, brilliantly directed by Gerry Mulgrew. I’ve always thought Mary a bore, but an excellent young cast succeeded in humanising her and such grim personalities as John Knox and Bothwell.

I met you at the Round Table Conference whose topic was ‘Culture in the USSR Now’. You and your colleagues did an excellent job of convincing us that glasnost is genuine. But I felt uneasy about the prospect of real change or of a deep sharing of worlds. The ‘Round Table’ was a simply a platform in which the large majority of participants were male -  apart from the translator.  One thing which made the audience gasp was when Neal Ascherson said we were conferring in a country of 5 million people.  Small countries are big to those of us who live in them. Perhaps it’s easier to be human in a small country which couldn’t conceivably gain from a big war. Perhaps it’s easier also if you’re a woman.

You asked me where the Scottish writers were. I joked that you were too famous and they were frightened to approach you. But of course they were busy sharing worlds with others on the Fringe. Please come back some day when people are less distracted. I hope that glasnost implies that we will soon hear your woman poets, not as part of a big delegation but in ones and twos. And that you yourself will sit in an Edinburgh pub talking as freely with others as you did with me.

As edited by Kate Calder 25/11/25

photo from 1987 Fringe Poster (School Competition)