Angus Calder’s 1986 Reviews I
To a Different Drum
New Statesman 22nd August 1986
I COULDN'T BUT overhear the woman beside me say to her friend, 'I just like watching people doing things so well.' The old Brechtian idea came at me as if new: yes, that's what performing arts are about. It's not that they can't and shouldn't convey serious content, but exceptional skills are of their essence..
We were sitting, in improbable sunshine, in a close behind the Fringe office, watching a free lunchtime show,’Macattack’, by the Merry Mac Fun Co. It was delighting adults and kids with a mixture of pantomime and politics. 'You're all Jocks now. Know why? Because Mrs Thatcher has declared that everyone north of Dover is a Jock to cut the English unemployment figures.' Three men and woman, just graduated, I gather, were dressed outrageously in a mixture of punk and tartan. They sang and danced well, were nice with kids, but put the boot in very deftly. I was there because on the previous evening I'd seen the other half of their group in a brand new play, ‘Sharny Dubs’, set mainly around the disco at the Aboyne Highland Games. That was in one of the mankiest Fringe venues I've ever entered -had it been a warehouse before or a spit and sawdust pub - and who had thought of calling this graceless nothing of a space· the Crown Theatre? But the play, while a bit too long, was a charmer. I'd gone because of a buzz: a friend had told me about these good young people who were taking tartanry and Unionism apart simultaneously.
A jaded local theatre director said to me as we met in the crowded hell of the biggest Fringe venue, the Assembly Rooms, that as far as he was concerned the Festival was just a trade fair. Maybe, but it's the biggest on earth. Nearly 500 groups have flocked to the Fringe this year, and some have come thousands of miles to display their wares. All must be hoping to get a buzz started. A buzz in 1960 set Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett on course to become household names in Hampstead.·Stupidly, l myself ignored the buzz in 1966 about Tom Stoppard's ‘Rosencrantz’. But now I am buzzing about Merry Mac all over this city which for three weeks becomes the cultural capital of the world.
Beside the Fortieth Official International Festival and its monstrous Fringe, we have more than 160 films on show at the Film Festival, the always-controversial TV Festival, and a Jazz Festival bringing, amongst many others, that legendary Basie trumpeter, Harry Edison. It would be nice to suppose that this human-awful-wonder-of-god originated back in 1947 with popular local initiative - even that the dry, douce Edinbourgeoisie of lawyers and doctors and bankers was inspired by the ideals informing post-war reconstruction to create an international forum of skill and pleasure. But the notion can't even be related to the modest Nationalist afflatus which saw the first Scot Nat MP into Parliament in 1945 and generated two million signatures for John MacCormick's National Covenant. It was an Austrian, Rudolf Bing, then managing Glyndebourne Opera, who looked around for a suitable arena for a festival reuniting ravaged Europe in the community of High Art and fell in love with the Edinburgh skyline. The memories of those who were there during Bing's first festival tell us that the sun always shone: I doubt it. But the performers were the best conceivable - Schnabel and Fonteyn, Walter and Ferrier, Lotte Lehmann, Alec Guinness ...
The next year, another outsider, Tyrone Guthrie made a permanent imprint when he hit on the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland as the venue for the first revival of Lindsay’s ‘Three Estaites’ in nearly 400 years. If the most imaginative of Bing’s successors was possibly Lord Harewood (1961-65) who was English royalty, the longest serving was Peter Diamand who had been a German refugee from Nazism. And that key event in Fringe history, the creation of the Traverse Theatre in 1965 was inspired by an American, Jim Haynes. Many members of the Edinburgh Bourgeousie have given valiant service to the Festival but it isn’t now and never was their show.
Over a quarter-century of Festivalgoing, I've seen and heard many wonderful things. Late at night, long ago, Rostropovich and Richter played all the Beethoven Cello Sonatas. Somehow, a Japanese No company once cast a spell in the alien space of the Lyceum Theatre. There was Giulini's Verdi Requiem which left you craving that it would begin again all at once, a production of’ Antony and Cleopatra’ with Tutin and McCowen which critics didn’t much like but which still haunts me. But above all, even above that spectacular Japanese Macbeth last year, I would have to pick the Berganza-Domingo ‘Carmen’ of 1977, produced by the Festival itself, not imported pre-packed, and still the best on disc.
This points to a paradox. Opera provides many fine memories, and Edinburgh was selected, after all, by Bing, an opera man. Yet year after year a ritual wail goes up that it is impossible to perform opera of high standard in Edinburgh for want of a custom-built theatre. The ‘Hole in the Ground’ near the Usher Hall is a Festival landmark. It is where the opera house was to have been built. When Labour came to power for the first time in 1984, the latest plans in a long series were at once scrapped as too expensive.
Hence the bizarre press myth of the Philistine District council. In fact, it is now led by people to whom the arts matter a good deal. Following the demise of the GLC and the English Metropolitan Councils, it is currently the local authority in Britain which spends most on the arts. Councillor Paolo Vestri, chairman of finance, explains matters thus. In 1984-5 the new council increased grants for the arts dramatically, notable by finding money for small organisations. During the past year, it has had to accept a standstill – Edinburgh, after all, has a severe shortage of housing and all services are jeopardised by government cutbacks. Nevertheless, the Council has actually increased its contribution to the Festival, and by dint of reducing grants to some established clients, has managed to assist new ones. For instance it appears that photographic workshops are an up and coming community art form and the Council has responded by giving money for the first time to the high-profile Stills Gallery, mostly tied to educational outreach. Vestri believes that the grants budget must now be expanded again because the success of earlier initiatives has created fresh demand.
This day-by-day watering of the roots of the arts in deprived suburbs goes on behind the newsworthy facts announced at the Council’s press conference last week. The Society which governs the Festival, formerly recruited by invitation, is now, thanks to Council pressure, open to all. Building and cashaid have been supplied to open Richard Demarco’s New Gallery in a converted church. The Film Festival has got its first grant, the Traverse its biggest ever. And so on.
Festival, Fringe and local people seem to be fusing for the first time. Edinburgh in August may feel like a colony of London, but the natives are restive, and are getting their own way more and more. Scottish Painting dominates the exhibition programme. The Festival Director, Frank Dunlop, is attuned to the idea of People’s Art. Circus artists and jazz musicians feature on the Official programme. Dunlop’s own production of Weber’s ‘Oberon’ in the Usher Hall paradoxically proved that this music-drama is now unstageable – except with the special verve he brought to it. Packed houses loved it. Never mind that the heldentenor couldn’t cope with Weber’s excruciatingly difficult arias. Who will ever forget the by-play between Benjamin Luxon and the conductor Seiji Ozawa, who was throughout stranded with a band of excellent young German musicians in the middle of the improvised stage, while pantomime wonders went on around them?
A Cornish singer and a Japanese conductor in a work by a German: the Festival is still triumphantly international. The affectionate singing by David Wilson-Johnson and Nancy Argenta of Schubert’s settings of ‘Ossian’ gave me for the first time more than an intellectual understanding of what Blake, Napoleon and countless others found in the now-unreadable bardic effusions. At the Lyceum Studio, ‘Salt Water Moon’ by David French, in its European premiere was the first play I’d ever seen from and about Newfoundland. It’s a one-act love story set in the Twenties, projecting a strong vision of social class in historical context.
‘I like watching people doing things so well.’ Could anyone possibly improve on the timing and attack which Dublin’s Abbey Theatre put into a mostly wordless dramatization of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘The Great Hunger’ conveying with fierce mimed intensity the frustrated sexuality of an Irish peasant two generations back? After this, I trudged reluctantly up to the King’s. Effing late Ibsen in bloody German. Only duty to the NS dragged me there. Most other folk had clearly felt the same. The audience was tiny. Even at the interval, though I’d kept awake, even alert, I was still suspicious. I left the theatre an hour later jubilating. Bergman’s production of ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ brilliantly designed, acted with Japanese intensity, stripped and stylized to exactly the point where naturalism was not excluded but transfigured, had cumulatively overwhelmed me. Though deeply moved, I didn’t feel at all like crying. What was it Aristotle said about catharsis?
With NS photograph used for the original article which was given a double-page spread.
As edited by Kate Calder 28/10/25
