Edinburgh Festivals 2012
31 August 2012
Last week we were in Edinburgh for our biennial visit to the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe. We’ve been regular festival-goers since our first
trip to Edinburgh in 1994 but I think this was one of our best weeks. We
relaxed our pace a little, only seeing 22 shows this time, but either the
standard is improving or we are getting better at picking things to see. We
averaged 4.1 on our own personal 5-star rating system, and only saw 2 shows all
week that we rated lower than 4 stars. I think we also managed a greater mix of
artforms than ever before: we saw drama, stand-up comedy, improvisation,
poetry, spoken word, orchestral music, folk music, opera and two BBC Radio 4 shows.
There were many highlights but I think our favourite show was ‘The Boat Factory’,
a play by Dan Gordon, produced by Happenstance Theatre Company at Hill Street
Theatre, which looked at the history of the Harland and Wolff Shipyard in
Belfast. This two-hander told the story of an apprentice starting work at the
shipyard in the 1950s. It was funny, moving and fascinating with both actors,
Dan Gordon and Michael Condron, giving stunning performances as a range of
characters.
We also really enjoyed ‘Dr Quimpugh's Compendium of Peculiar
Afflictions’ – a delightfully silly new chamber opera by Martin Ward and Phil
Porter, produced by Petersham Playhouse, which we saw at Summerhall. Three
singers, accompanied by three musicians, portrayed an ageing doctor looking
back at his long career and remembering the many surreal, bizarre medical
conditions he had encountered and documented – like an operatic version of Oliver
Sacks’ ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’.
We saw an amazing performance
of Ferruccio Busoni’s ‘Piano Concerto’ by Garrick Ohlsson with the European
Union Youth Orchestra, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, at the Usher Hall (as part of the Edinburgh International Festival). This
mammoth, five movement concerto, composed in 1904, lasts 70 minutes and
finishes with a male voice choir singing a poem praising Allah. It’s a wonderfully
over-the-top piece of music and it was fascinating to witness this rare
performance with Ohlsson demonstrating outstanding technique and stamina and
the glorious sound of the men of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus creating a
brilliant climax.
The most bizarre moment of the week happened during ‘Austentatious’,
an improvised comedy show which re-enacts the ‘lost novels’ of Jane Austen. We
were part of a full-house packed into a room above a pub watching the actors creating
the story of ‘Vanity and Virtue’ when a live pigeon emerged from behind a
curtain and flew in a panic above our heads before flying into an unsuspecting musician
who screamed and bolted from his position at the side of the stage. Shocked by
this sudden intrusion, in a split second I think we all moved through a range
of emotions – from surprise to terror to hysterical laughter – as we tried to
work out whether this was part of the act. The funniest thing was the
immobility of the male members of the cast as the women took control of the
situation, threw a shawl over the bird and carried it outside. At the end of
the show one of the actors said “every performance of Austentatious is
different but we’ve truly never had that happen before!”.
This narrowly pipped our
experience at ‘Midnight at the Board’s Head’ in which Fine Chisel Theatre
combined the pub scenes from ‘Henry IV Parts One and Two’ with a host of other
extracts from Shakespeare plays to create a show in the cabaret bar at Zoo
Southside which ended with the entire audience on its feet, re-enacting the
Battle of Agincourt with balloons and party poppers!
As well as all this we enjoyed
the excellent folk trio Bellevue Rendezvous, the play ‘Wojtek the Bear’, the
remarkable life story of Hervé Goffings, the excellent Martin Oldfield as ‘Pierrepoint’,
the last hangman, Liz Lochhead reading her own poetry, Mark Lawson interviewing
Ian McEwan and the brilliant Jasper Fforde speaking at the Edinburgh
International Book Festival.
'The Importance of Being Earnest' by Oscar Wilde
31 August 2012
It’s many years since I saw a production of ‘The Importance
of Being Earnest’ (apart from the spoof ‘Spyski or The Importance of Being
Honest’ by Peepolykus, reviewed here in April 2009) but, attending an outdoor
performance of the play by The Pantaloons at Woburn Abbey the weekend before
last, I discovered that I still knew most of Oscar Wilde’s text off by heart.
Wilde’s knowing sarcasm worked well in the necessarily exaggerated delivery
that an open air production requires. The Pantaloons gave a charmingly silly
performance with a few very funny additions to the original – Jack and Algernon’s
journeys from the town to the country in the form of a musical montage, a
wonderful cinematic re-cap at the beginning of the second half (“previously on
Earnest …”) and an interval ‘Bracknell Factor’ competition (looking for the
best enunciation of “a handbag?”) which led to a wonderful pay-off at the end
of the play. All the cast were very funny but there was some great added humour
with Producer Mark Hayward having to deputise at the last minute for the
indisposed Helen Taylor as Gwendolen and Miss Prism.
Labels: Drama, Theatre
'The Testimony' by James Smythe
13 August 2012
It’s not often I have a book recommended to me by the writer’s
father but I was delighted to discover that the son of Voluntary Arts Board
member, John Smythe, is a very accomplished novelist. ‘The Testimony’ by James
Smythe is set a few years in the future when people across the world simultaneously
hear a voice in their heads. Is this the voice of God, some kind of radio
interference, a terrorist plot, a sinister government weapon or the work of
aliens? The story unfolds in a series of very short first person accounts which
alternate between 26 characters in a variety of situations around the world –
as if they are being interviewed by a reporter and this is their testimony. It’s
a very clever jigsaw: at first you feel there are too many characters and it is
hard to keep track of them all but gradually their individual personalities
shine through and you find yourself rooting for your favourites as they seek to
survive the global crisis. Although the setting seems like science fiction –
and the worldwide catastrophe that ensues reminded me of two recent TV series (‘FlashForward’
and ‘Torchwood: Miracle Day’) and is very much in the tradition of ‘The Day of
the Triffids’ or ‘The War of the Worlds’ – most of the jeopardy comes from the behaviour
of crowds, governments and individual people reacting to ‘The Broadcast’ rather
than any direct effect of whatever lay behind it. This reminds you how close to
chaos our ‘civilised’ society always is – a lesson demonstrated by last summer’s
riots. Ultimately ‘The Testimony’ is a story about people rather than gods or
aliens, and a genuinely touching humanity emerges from the disaster movie it
describes.
Labels: Books
'Emma' by Jane Austen, adapted by Laura Turner
6 August 2012
Two years ago we made the short journey to the gardens of
Woburn Abbey to see an outdoor performance of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by
Chapterhouse Theatre Company (reviewed here in July 2010). Last year we
returned to Woburn Abbey to see Chapterhouse’s adaptation of ‘Sense and
Sensibility’ (reviewed here in September 2011). And on Saturday we completed
our hat-trick of Chapterhouse Jane Austen dramatisations at Woburn with ‘Emma’.
Once again this production was adapted by Laura Turner and I think this this
show was the best of the three. It was certainly the funniest. Clara Edmonds
was an excellent Emma and Grace Scott’s Harriet Smith displayed a wonderfully
entertaining range of facial expressions and double-takes but Liam Webster and Vicky
Album stole the show in their gloriously over-the-top portrayals of Mr Elton and
Miss Bates.
Labels: Drama, Theatre
‘The Marriage Plot’ by Jeffrey Eugenides
3 August 2012
I’ve just finished reading ‘The Marriage Plot’ by Jeffrey
Eugenides (as an unabridged audio book, narrated by David Pittu). I very much
enjoyed Eugenides’ previous novel ‘Middlesex’ (2002) – an unusual, ambitious,
clever and gripping tale of gender, family history and inheritance. ‘The
Marriage Plot’ is a more conventional novel: the plot concerns the three
members of a love triangle who meet at university in the 1980s. It’s not really
a campus novel: the book opens on graduation day and although the story of
their university years is told in flashback (from each of the three
perspectives) we are more concerned with what happens to the main characters
after they leave university. Madeleine has been studying 18
th and 19
th
century fiction and is fascinated by whether ‘the marriage plot’ – resolving a novel
by having the two main protagonists marry, a mainstay of Jane Austen – is no
longer viable in an age of divorce and remarriage, where the wedding is no
longer necessarily the end of the story. Inevitably Madeleine’s own story plays
with ‘the marriage plot’ and keeps us guessing about her romantic future.
Eugenides also looks sensitively and achingly at manic depression and way it
affects the lives of the sufferer and all the people around them.
Labels: Books
WOMAD 2012
3 August 2012
This year the WOMAD Festival was celebrating its 30
th
anniversary. It was a glorious weekend at Charlton Park in Wiltshire and there
was plenty of fantastic music and more than a little wonderful dance (the ‘D’
in WOMAD). I saw 27 bands including 15 complete sessions – slightly fewer than
last year because I left early on Friday to watch the Olympics Opening
Ceremony. The highlights for me were:
- the amazing young Azerbaijani mugham singer Nazaket
Teymurova – haunting classical music from Central Asia (listen at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00wsz1z);
- the excellent young Cape Breton fiddler Chrissy
Crowley;
- the Alaev Family – a Jewish family from Tajikistan,
now resident in Israel who play the music of Tajikistan and the Bukharan region
of neighbouring Uzbekistan with enormous exuberance and three generations
together on stage, including their 80-year old grandfather;
- the polyphonic multilingual harmonies of Chet
Nuneta, featuring three female vocalists from France, Spain and Italy whose
sound reminded me of my favourite Finnish group Värttinä (reviewed here in
August 2006);
- the engaging songs of ‘the Norwegian Kate Bush’,
Ane Brun;
- the Peatbog Faeries – high energy dance beats
with Scottish fiddle and bagpipes;
- and the South African rock group Hot Water,
whose breezy guitar-based music would sound familiar to anyone who knows Paul
Simon’s ‘Graceland’ album.
But the best gig of the festival was definitely The
Correspondents: WOMAD doesn’t feature many British groups and those who make it
onto the programme are usually something special. The Correspondents mix swing-era
big band records with contemporary electronic beats. The result is cool,
serious and ridiculous. Their sound reminded me a lot of the French group
Caravan Palace (reviewed here in July 2009) who play the gypsy jazz swing of
Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli to pounding high-tempo electronic beats
and the Greek duo Imam Baildi (reviewed here in May 2009) who take old Greek
tunes from the 40's, 50's and 60's (from their father's collection of 78s) and
add modern instruments and beats. The Correspondents gave an incredible
performance with some of the most energetic and eccentric dancing I have ever
seen (try to imagine Doctor Who impersonating Michael Jackson). Frontman Mr
Bruce is a fascinating and slightly disturbing performer – see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGebmvnR158
– and his set included the first crowd-surfing I can remember seeing at WOMAD,
an experience he recovered from by having a nice cup of tea!
Labels: Concerts, Festivals, Music
