Angus Calder’s 1986 Reviews II
Traverse Tales
New Statesman 29th August 1986
Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre – that awkward indispensable venue – is, as it always has been, just big enough to be adaptable, just comfortable enough to be tolerable. Jenny Killick, now director, tells me that she sensed when she arrived that the relationship between the Traverse and city was ‘uncreative’. She’s been doing all she can to remedy that, and has bumped up audiences by a third in her first year. Staff at the door and in the bar are now cheerful and friendly. Frequenting the place as much as I did last week, I found myself reminded of Ian McEwan’s phrase ’womanly times’. Quietly, unassumingly, Killick has given the Traverse a warm, open feel, and the programme she has put together for this year’s Festival combines in the mind to emphasise the absurdity of macho values and the need to replace them with affection and imagination.
From South Africa, the Traverse has had Percy Mtwa’s ‘Bopha!’ performing to packed houses. Three men from Earth Players (Johannesburg) act with immense energy and great skill. Centred on the contradictory position of a black policeman, this play avoids crude agitprop and illuminates psychology as well as society. The Tarragon Theatre of Toronto has also provided a remarkable play. I think ‘Albertine in Five Times’ will haunt everyone lucky enough to have caught it. One of the cast told me that the translation has lost the Quebecois humour of Michel Tremblay’s original. But poetical intensity survives and the conception is brilliant. Five women represent a widow battered by life at five ages from 30 to 70. All remain on stage throughout, together with Albertine’s confidante , Madeleine. Their reveries and quarrels illuminate the processes of memory, how it supresses, how it distorts. Sweet successful Madeleine gradually comes to seem someone of less moral consequence than her tragic sister. The cast all act finely, with Joy Coghill as the embittered, pill-swallowing Albertine at 60 eventually erupting into domination.
Killick herself directs two of three new plays from Scotland with her characteristic light touch and deft moral pointing. ‘Kora’ by Tom McGrath, is a documentary about a struggle actually witnessed by the author, of tenants and social workers trying to improve conditions in a Dundee housing estate. Kora herself, warmly rounded out by Michelle Butt, is a generous Welshwoman who loves having babies. Her neighbours include the McLaverties, who are puppet figures wheeled on and off stage, helping to keep naturalism at bay. Though unfeeling officialdom eventually prevails. The play is charged with faith in ordinary human nature and hope of renewal. John Clifford’s ‘Lucy’s Play is a romp about a saint set in Syracuse in 300 AD. Good to see Kate Duchene back as St Lucy. God the Father makes a brief hilarious appearance, the Mother of God a quietly touching one. My only reservation is that the play pushes much the same points against war and machismo as ‘Losing Venice’, the hit of last year’s Festival Fringe. I’d like to see Clifford try something different.
That’s what Chris Hannan has done and the result, ‘The Orphan’s Comedy’, is momentous. His ‘Elizabeth Gordon Quinn’ was immensely promising but too short for the issues it took on and too big for the Traverse’s intimate space. The new play fits exactly. How does one describe its flavour? W.S Gilbert with political bite? Ben Jonson bang up to date? Brecht with Glaswegian warmth and passion? It is brilliantly written, in a non-naturalistic style. Characters and situations are all over the top. This aspect suggests a debt to Dario Fo while the futuristic-but-here-and-now plot suggests Alasdair Gray’s novel, ‘Lanark’, seminal for younger Scottish writers. But the central idea of a government so committed to the Low Unit Cost Society that it encourages childbirth so as to maximise the number of consumers is all Hannan’s own.
World on Fire
New Statesman 5th September 1986
I’ve never enjoyed an Edinburgh Festival more. Among many happy memories that will linger I have heard Harry Edison, Buddy Tate and Al Grey, backed by that incomparable rhythm section of Ray Bryant, Milt Hinton, and Gus Johnson, blowing what may be almost the last authentic storms from the swing era in Mike Hart’s best-ever Jazz Festival. And just as my palate was most jaded it was refreshed by Opera Restor’d’s delicious recreation of the first performance of Purcell’s ‘Dido’. (Fringe)
The theme of this year’s ‘Official’ Festival was announced as Scottish Enlightenment, to coincide with the vast programme organised by Edinburgh University and involving scholars from all round the world. But the major focus of pub and café discussion has been Frank Dunlop’s World Theatre Season. Much of it has been strongly controversial. Even Nuria Espert’s admittedly remarkable 15-year-old production of Lorca’s ‘Yerma’ on a trampoline set polarised opinion between those who found it freshly exciting and those, like myself, for whom the keen edge wasn’t there. Even the inspired use of Leith Town Hall by the Folkopera Company of Stockholm for its ‘Aida’ did not impress music purists. Verdi with synthesisers? What next? Opera might be popular. Verdi himself, I think, that man of the people, would have loved it. ‘Aida’ became political, as giggling courtier-girls in the triumphal march scene greeted the arrival of basket after basket of severed hands.
But there’s been no argument about the Toho Company’s ‘Medea’, which juxtaposed World Theatre and Enlightenment in the most piquant manner possible, using the Georgian classical courtyard of the university as the arena for Greek tragedy, kabuki style. Everyone who saw it was awed and delighted by the grandeur of Ninagawa’s direction and the extraordinary acting of a man, Mijijiro Hira, in the title role. For instance, when Jason embraces his sons after Medea has decided to kill them, Hira is on the ground, facing away from most of the audience: restrained yet forceful movements of back and shoulders project complex emotion. Costumes and use of music are thrilling. The chorus enters in black under huge hats with veils, carrying fierce plangent oriental lutes. Later, bare-headed, these men powerfully mime feminine concern and shock until as Media goes in to murder her children, they turn cloaks inside out in a split second and stand arrayed in red.
Just before, I’d seen Franca Rame’s monologue ’Medea’ in which that unique actress, girlish and worldly, uses child murder as a symbol of the need for women to escape the constraints of wife and mother. It was tail-piece to the Franca Rama/ Dario Fo play ‘Open Couple’, very funny yet profound through its acknowledgement of the complexity of the social situations in which men and women are trapped in domestic farce and tragedy. It says much for the home-grown cabaret ‘Nippy Sweeties’ that it isn’t eclipsed by comparison. Written by Liz Lochhead and performed by her, Elaine C Smith and Angie Rew, it has been a deserved sell-out, unwavering in its feminist commitment, full of moments of warmth and subtlety.
Meanwhile the Scottish Enlightenments has been celebrated in an excellent exhibition, ‘Hotbed of Genius’ in the Museum of Antiquities. Downstairs tapes talk and sing you into the atmosphere of Enlightened Edinburgh as you pass tableaux of it social life, highlighting the roles of Hume, Adam Smith, the great chemist Black and the geologist Hutton. Upstairs, books and pictures in profusion deepen understanding.
There are lovely things in the major art exhibition, ‘Painting in Scotland: The Golden Age’, some seen before, like Ramsay’s portraits of successive wives, but others trawled in from afar and private collections. Raeburn at his best can be magnificent. From Ireland comes his unexpected ‘Sir John and Lady Clerk of Penicuik’, two homely middle-aged people standing in Lothian landscape under light which transfigures both them and it. Thomson of Duddingston’s privately owned ‘Fast Castle on a Calm Day’ fascinates by the way he uses a favourite subject, castle on cliff, for its formal properties, verticals on verticals, signifying not ‘romance’ but ’composition’.
But was 1707 to 1843 really the Golden Age? For my money, the last hundred-odd years have seen much greater originality, with at least a score of Scottish artists from Orchardson through to Joan Eardley, who merit much wider recognition. Now John Bellany’s ‘international’ stature at the age of 44, is suggested by a retrospective at the Gallery of Modern Art. His painting has acknowledged a wide and eclectic range of influences (Rembrandt, Courbet, Beckmann , to name just a few). But, at each stage of his journey from social realism through increasingly fraught expressionism to a personal crisis since when he has calmed almost to elegant blandness, he has registered obsessive individuality, constantly returning in imagination to childhood in a small Lothian fishing port. Imagery of boats, fish, seabirds recurs from first to last.
Bellany’s commitment to figurative art is echoed by the most interesting of his younger contemporaries in the ‘Scottish Art Today’ exhibition which has gathered a dozen of them to create new work in public at various points round the city or in the core show at the College of Art. The most resolved is Peter Howson, whose powerfully built proletarian males stand tensely at odds with circumstances or each other. But there’s a hint of ‘Clydesidism’ to this – the pastoral cult of vanishing heavy industry – and I prefer Ken Currie’s explicitly elegiac view of working-class life. His ‘Self-Taught Man’ in a dying tradition reads Gramsci, his ‘Unemployed Lovers’ are two men embracing wistfully outside a bar.
Keith McIntyre’s direction at 26, is less clear – and he’s more intriguing. His pictures of Moffat Borderers in gala dress at first sight suggest nostalgia, at second people absorbed in a dream of a freer Scotland. They brought to mind Alasdair Gray’s injunction that we should work as if in the early days of a new and better nation and when I mention Gray to McIntyre as he painted in his open studio, he replied that he reckoned that almost all the other young ’artists at work’ would, like himself, have read ‘Lanark’ when it first appeared a few years ago. Gray’s novel is perhaps performing for them the role that MacDiarmid’s poetry performed for Bellany – showing you can be both completely Scottish and internationally modern.
As edited by Kate Calder 5/11/25
The photograph is John Bellany’s 1962 painting ‘The Boat Builders’
