Keeping The Fringe International

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on KEEPING THE FRINGE INTERNATIONAL for Sctosman Magazine, 31.8.13.
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IT’S HALF PAST TEN at night, in the vast Edinburgh International Conference Centre on Morrison Street; and in a huge lecture theatre with more than 500 seats, the Armazem Theatre Company of Brazil are preparing to present their award-winning Fringe show Water Stain, to an audience of perhaps eight people. They are part of a high-powered season of Brazilian work at the EICC, featuring four shows from across that vast country. And although Water Stain suffers particularly from the fact that it’s playing late at night, at a time when most Fringe-goers have moved on to comedy or cabaret, none of the shows is attracting much of a paying public, despite the high quality of the work; later in the week, Water Stain – with its terrific musical score for guitar and multiple accordions – easily wins one of the Scotsman’s Fringe First Awards, for work receiving its British premiere in Edinburgh.

Yet still, audiences remain small; and the Brazilians are not the only major international group struggling with tiny audiences on the 2013 Fringe. At the New Town Theatre in George Street, the great Tumanishvili actors’ studio of Georgia are presenting three shows, one in each week. But after a series of administrative disasters, their presence in Edinburgh is going almost unnoticed; and when I finally catch up with their terrific production of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano – featuring the kind of mature and brilliant ensemble acting almost unknown elsewhere on the Fringe – their superb work is being watched by three or four people from the company itself, and me.

Now in both of these cases, there are specific reasons why the companies could have done better, in terms of publicity and marketing. The Brazilians had no visible marketing effort at all in advance of the Festival, despite the scale of the season, and strong support from their own Ministry of External Relations. And the Georgians committed the cardinal Fringe mistake of missing the publication deadline for the main brochure, and of accepting the graveyard performing slot of 10 a.m..

Yet all the same, I wonder whether there isn’t a deeper shift behind this increasing marginalisation of non-English-speaking theatre from a Fringe that depends increasingly for its international profile on work from the anglophone world, from the United States, Australia, and English-speaking South Africa. Even leading companies from Belgium and the Netherlands – such as Ontroerend Goed of Ghent, who scored a success at the Traverse with their latest show Fight Night – now routinely perform in English, to overcome the resistance of English-speaking audience to any show with surtitles. There was a time, a generation ago, when sections of the Fringe audience would flock to see shows in Polish or Russian or Serbo-Croat, as the old barriers in Europe began to fall; whereas today, the coming of the internet age seems to have reinforced the dominance and insularity of the anglophone world, to an almost frightening extent.

Yet if we want the Fringe to remain truly international, the sound of other tongues, and the rhythm of other cultures, has to remain present in Edinburgh, not only in physical theatre and music, but in drama as well. Perhaps the various agencies around the Fringe – including the Fringe organisation itself – need to think about stepping up the already substantial support available for international visitors, particularly those working in other languages, in order to overcome what seem to be ever-higher cultural barriers between them and Fringe audiences.

And if the Scotsman Fringe Firsts – which celebrated their 40th anniversary this year – have been outstandingly successful in encouraging the presentation of new work on the Fringe, then perhaps this would be the moment for some imaginative sponsor to step forward with a new award; one that would celebrate the best non-English-language show on the Fringe, for reaching out to audiences over a growing barrier of linguistic resistance and indifference, and making the kind of vital connection that opens minds, and sometimes changes lives.

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A Day In Damascus: Who Speaks For The Ordinary People Of Syria, In This Horrific Conflict? – Column 30.8.13.

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 30.8.13
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ONCE, IN THE spring of 2009, I spent a day in Damascus. I had arrived in Syria’s ancient capital the night before, without my bag, which was lost in transit. In a middle-class suburb called Dummar, at a concrete municipal theatre, there had been a controversial performance of David Greig’s play called Damascus, a Scotsman’s attempt to understand modern Syria through three contrasting characters encountered on a business trip. And the next day, before we left for Beirut, there would be a British Council seminar, designed to tease out some of the issues arising from it.

On this day, though, I was free, from 11 o’clock untl early evening. So I ordered up a taxi, and went to the beating heart of the city, the old bazaar; and at its centre, the mighty Umayyad Mosque, perhaps the oldest religious site in the world, around which any tourist can wander, so long as the shoes are shed, and the body swathed in a modest gown.

It was a Friday, Muslim holy day, and the mosque was packed with families enjoying their day off. In the great open courtyard, men stood chatting on one side of the space, and women on the other, much as men and women might have done at a British church social half a century ago; and across the courtyard sped dozens of small children on rollerblades, encouraged to play, and smiled on with great tolerance. I went inside, along the spacious back area of the huge prayer hall, where the women worship; there were digital displays showing the time in Damascus and Mecca, an imam somewhere leading the prayers, and, among the crowd, a mother and grandmother instructing a tiny tot in how to kneel, bow and pray.

The women wore the small half veils common among religious women in modern Syria; the Ba’athist or Arab Socialist government of Bashir Al-Assad does not permit full veils, which it sees as backward-looking. The tiny tot, though, was dressed in full western style, with a vivid yellow ra-ra skirt and headband; and her mum and grandmother smiled broadly at her, and then at me, as she tried to put her chubby hands together, and imitate their movements.

And of course I cannot help thinking of that bustling, peaceful scene now, as Syria tears itself apart in an ever more brutal and complex civil war, and the west threatens military action. I hope that the little girl in the ra-ra skirt is safe, with her family; and I also hope that she will continue to live in a society where women can choose whether to be veiled, or to sport the big hair and vivid lipstick favoured by many professional women in Damascus, when I was there. In the city I visited, there was no mistaking the anger and despair of some young intellectuals and graduates against an authoritarian and highly conservative regime which offered few opportunities for the young, retained a fierce monopoly of power and infuence, and had little regard for civic or personal freedoms.

Yet the majority of those who first came out into the streets in 2011, to demonstrate against the Assad regime and in favour of democracy and freedom, could never have dreamed of the violent chaos that would follow their peaceful protests, or of the fierce range of competing rebel groups which would enter the struggle over the spoils of rebellion. And it seems fairly obvious, now, that the pressing political need is to build regional alliances, backed by the UN, which can hold the ring and press these warring parties to the conference table, while the west – with its questionable colonial history in the region – stands well clear; that way, the little girl in the Umayyad mosque has a chance of growing up in peace, rather than in a Middle East hopelessly polarised between an ever more violent Islamic fundamentalism, and a new breed of “modernising” leaders who are little more than stooges for western power.

Meanwhile, though, the people of Syria suffer; from a civil war most of them never sought, and from a power-struggle among groups none of whom truly represent their interests. After I left the mosque, that Friday afternoon, I set off for the airport to reclaim the lost bag, along a dual carriageway lined with families enjoying Friday-afternoon picnics under the dusty roadside trees, one of the few public woodlands left around Damascus. It took us hours to get to the airport and back, so packed were the roads with little pick-up trucks full of children and grannies and plastic chairs and paraffin stoves; in atmosphere, it felt like Britain in the 1950’s, when working-class people first acquired a family car, and would head out on a Sunday for a drive, and a picnic by the roadside.

And I would feel less despairing, as Syria begins to dominate our news headlines, if I felt there was any single voice of power, in this struggle, truly speaking for these people, and the hopes they may have been cherishing on that peaceful Friday afternoon, four years ago. At the end of my day in Damascus, after three long, haggling conversations with three chain-smoking men in grubby airport offices, I found my bag, resting with two others on a patch of concrete beside the taxiway, silhouetted against a Damascus sunset. The bureaucracy was ridiculous, and possibly corrupt; I thought it needed reform, dialogue, education, agitation, exchange, transparency, democracy, all the forces that traditionally cleanse and change regimes that have been in power too long.

It never occurred to me, though, that it needed, or would suffer, the kind of cruel devastation now sweeping too many parts of Syria, and threatened by the Assad regime, the rebel groups, and the western powers alike. For that kind of destruction too often claims to be in the interests of the people; while in fact it reduces them to mere collateral damage, lying dead or wounded on the airport road to some strategic goal which they do not share, and which – once the war is over – will doubtless prove to have been largely irrelevant to them and their loved ones, and to their best hopes for a life of freedom, security, and peace.

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Gerard Murphy Obituary

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on GERARD MURPHY for Scotsman Obituaries, 28 August 2013
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Gerard Murphy, actor and director.
Born in Newry , Co. Down, 14 October 1948
Died in Cambridge, 26 August 2013

THE ACTOR Gerard Murphy, who has died at home in Cambridge at the age of 64, after a two-year struggle with cancer, was one of the leading members of the great Citizens’ Theatre Company of the 1970’s and 1980’s, a warm and brilliant stage performer who went on to forge a hugely successful career as an actor, director and translator, becoming an associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and playing “heavy” villains in films such as Waterworld and Batman Begins.

Gerard Murphy was born in Newry, Co. Down, the eldest son of a marine engineer who first went to sea at the age of 12, and a mother who was very much involved in the amateur arts scene in the town. He began to perform at an early age; at five or six years old, he became a leading light of recitals staged by the local elocution teacher, Ethel Fitzpatrick, and he remained interested in theatre, music and the arts throughout his secondary education at the Christian Brothers-run Abbey Grammar School in Newry, becoming a fine pianist as well as an actor in school productions. He was a brilliant student, and in 1966 moved on to Queen’s University, Belfast, where he studied English, Psychology and Social Anthropology, and became closely involved in the work of the city’s Lyric Theatre.

After he graduated, though, he decided to seek his fortune as an actor in London; and in 1974, he was cast for the first time in a production at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, at a time when Giles Havergal’s company – co-directed with Philip Prowse and Robert David McDonald – was becoming a Europe-wide sensation for its brilliant, radical, and visually stunning productions of a dazzling series of European classics. Murphy played Macbeth opposite David Hayman’s Lady Macbeth in Havergal’s famous cross-dressing production of the 1970’s, and gave an outstanding performance, still remembered by thousands who saw it, as Diaghilev in Robert David McDonald’s 1977 play Chinchilla, in which the Citizens’ triumvirate used the story of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, stranded on the Venice Lido in the 1920’s, to set out their powerful artistic creed. “What I remember about Gerard,” says Giles Havergal, “is this sense of huge animal energy, and a terrific hunger for life and for knowledge, matched with a great, sharp mind. He was a very emotional actor, with a great ability to express emotion on stage, but also a thinking man, with tremendous stage technique. And he was a vital part of that company, not only a great performer, but such a warm person, full of fun and generosity, and all the joys of life.”

After 1977, Gerard Murphy appeared less regularly in Glasgow, and moved on to develop his relationship with the Royal Shakespeare Company and other major British companies, becoming an RSC associate artist; he played opposite Judi Dench in a 1980 production of Juno And The Paycock, and also directed for the company, in London and Stratford. He was also a master of other media. His radio credits include the superb narration for the famous BBC Radio version of Lord Of The Rings, and on television he appeared in classic adaptations and series including Vanity Fair, Waking The Dead, Trial And Retribution, and Spooks. His film career – which once, to his surprise, led to a whole year’s residence in Hollywood and Hawaii – saw him play the Nord in Waterworld, and the corrupt judge Faden in Batman Begins.

In recent years – despite taking substantial breaks to help care for his increasingly frail mother, who died in 2006 – Gerard Murphy gave some memorable final stage performances, replacing the great Richard Griffiths in a 2010 touring production of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, about an ageing grammar-school teacher whose relationship with his pupils oversteps the bounds of propriety; and in 2012, despite his illness, he made a last appearance at his beloved Citizens’ Theatre, in a magnificent performance of the Samuel Beckett monologue Krapp’s Last Tape, which won him a Critics’ Award For Theatre In Scotland nomination for Best Male Performance of the year. He attended the CATS award ceremony in Edinburgh in June of this year, and said afterwards that the event had been a glorious day for him, a kind of homecoming.

“Everyone knows that Gerard was a wonderful actor,” says his agent Lynda Ronan, who became a close friend. “What people don’t always know, though, is what a wonderful, warm friend he was, such fun, so modest about his own achievements, so supportive of other people. When he was on tour with The History Boys, many of the young members of that company told me how much it had meant to them to work with him, how generous he was with his time and his knowledge.”

And his sister Deirdre, now a head teacher in Cambridge, adds her tribute. “He was a brilliant man and a wonderful brother, and in a way he didn’t know it, he was so modest about his own gifts. But I know the difference he made to my life, giving me so much support to fulfil my potential. And I know that he did that for many others, too.”

Gerard Murphy is survived by his beloved sister and brother, Deirdre and Brian, and by five nieces and nephews; and also by an army of loving colleagues and friends, who will miss his brilliance, his warmth, his wit, his love of language and his relish for life, but above all his friendship, which he gave without stint, and which perhaps forms as significant a legacy as his great body of creative work, on film, television and radio, and across the world of British theatre.

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First Love

EIF THEATRE

First Love
4 stars ****
Royal Lyceum Theatre

After the fierce vaudeville comedy and dark poetry of Barry McGovern’s I’ll Go On, the great English actor Peter Egan steps onto the same stage, as part of the same Beckett season, and demonstrates that a softer, more ruminative approach to Beckett’s powerful prose can also pay dividends. In the 1946 short story First Love, a man who lives rough recalls a time in his mid-20’s when – one evening, on a canal-side bench – he met a woman called Lulu, or maybe Anna, with whom he struck up a relationship; only to abandon her and walk away, as she gave birth to his child.

In a sense, First Love is a more clearly purposeful piece of work than most of Beckett’s prose. It offers a searing critical portrait of a young man incapable of intimacy or love; his attitude to Lulu is tainted with a cruel misogynistic disgust. Yet the story blazes with a painful truthfulness about men’s fear of women, along with the inimitable snap of Beckett’s wit, and – sometimes – a stunning bleak lyricism. “I did not know, then, how tender the earth can be, to those who have only her,” says the speaker, of his life on the road. And if Peter Egan sometimes seems slightly uncomfortable with the wicked bite of Beckett’s humour, he captures that lonely lyricism with a force as moving as it is memorable.

Joyce McMillan
Until 31
EIF p.32

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I’ll Go On

THEATRE

I’ll Go On
5 stars *****
Royal Lyceum Theatre

IT’S A STRANGE fact about Samuel Beckett that although he gazes more relentlessly at death than any other writer in the canon, he is also memorably and hilariously funny about life and mortality. His best-known play, Waiting For Godot, is famously inspired by some of the music-hall double-acts he saw as a young man. And now the magnificent Barry McGovern returns to the Royal Lyceum with his superb solo adaptation of Beckett’s three novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, presented with a dark comic flair, and a pure joy in Beckett’s wicked way with language, that often has the audience shouting with laughter, and bursting into spontaneous applause.

There’s more than humour, of course, to the long arc of Beckett’s trilogy, which begins with the sheer absurdity of the life of the peg-legged Molloy, on an ill-starred journey around Dublin, and ends with a brief, bare-chested near-death monologue based on The Unnamable. It’s a measure of Beckett’s greatness, though, that he drew so much of the strength of his writing from the gritty stuff of popular entertainment, its dark humour and instinctive theatricality; and McGovern is a great actor who might have been born to make that greatness visible to us, in a performance to be celebrated, cherished, and cheered to the echo.

Joyce McMillan
Until 31
EIF p.31

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All That Fall

THEATRE

All That Fall
4 stars ****
The Hub

THE SKULL reappears, in Pan Pan of Dublin’s second EIF staging of a Samuel Beckett text originally written for radio; but now, it appears only as a subdued motif on the cushions of the rocking chairs on which the audience sits, in the darkened great hall at The Hub. All That Fall is an earlier and perhaps less perfect play than its companion piece Embers, the story of a very fat elderly woman, Mrs Rooney, who sets out for the local station in a small Irish town, to meet her husband; and then returns again with him, amid all the comedy, self-disgust and utter tragedy of advancing old age.

The aim of Gavin Quinn’s production is to turn this recorded text into an experience of collective listening, as we gather under an array of hanging bulbs that turn the whole space into a great installation, in front of a wall of lights that conjures up oncoming life and death. In fact, though, we spend so much time in darkness that the rest of the audience is often invisible; and it takes time to grow accustomed to the abstract, fragmentary quality of the soundscape. Like Embers, though, All That Fall features two stunning vocal performances from Aine Ni Mhuiri and Andrew Bennett. And when the two finally break into wild laughter at the idea, from Psalm 145, that God will help and lift up all that fall, we hear again how Samuel Beckett is the playwright who spoke definitively for the 20th century; who cast a cold eye on life and death, and refused the comfort of faith.

Joyce McMillan
Until 26
EIF p.33

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Embers/Eh Joe

THEATRE

Embers
5 stars *****
King’s Theatre
Eh Joe
4 stars ****
Royal Lyceum Theatre

ON THE GREAT, darkened stage at the King’s Theatre – all raked with shingle, and hung with glittering strands of silver and stone like old-fashioned hanging microphones – a huge skull sits and stares out towards us. It is far higher than a man, like a great coastal rock; and in its implacable stillness and horror, it captures something of the man, Henry, who speaks in Samuel Beckett’s great 1959 radio play Embers, now staged by Pan Pan Theatre of Dublin as part of this year’s EIF Samuel Beckett season.

In transferring this powerful poem for voice and sound to the stage, Pan Pan’s director Gavin Quinn – with sculptor Andrew Clancy, lighting designer Aedin Cosgrove and sound designer Jimmy Eadie – has not sought to dramatise the tale in any conventional sense. The two actors playing Henry and his long-dead wife Ada remain caught throughout within the great skull, their faces barely glimpsed as they tell the story of a man haunted and paralysed by the apparent suicide of his father, who one day sat looking at the sea on this coast, and then walked into it, never to return.

The drama of the piece though, comes not only from the superb vocal performances by Andrew Bennett and Aine Ni Mhuiri, but from the stunning, ever-shifting washes of light and sound across the strange, stark surfaces of the skull. Samuel Beckett can always be relied on to push our ideas about theatre to their limit; and in responding to his genius, Pan Pan have created a marriage of theatre and installation that seems to capture the hard, loving and implacable soul of the work, while giving it a new theatrical life.

Beckett’s 1965 play Eh Joe, by contrast, is his first-ever piece for television, a brief 28-minute journey into the mind of an ageing man in a bleak bedroom, haunted, like Henry, by the voice of the woman who was once his wife. In approaching television as a form, Beckett simply divides the voice from the image, so that we hear the voice of the woman – strong, affectionate, reproachful – but see the face of the man, reacting to what may be a final judgment on all he has been and done. Atom Egoyan’s legendary 2006 stage production, with a magnificent recording of the monologue by Penelope Wilton, shows us not only the huge close-up image of Joe’s face, projected on a gauze, but also the live actor, the great Michael Gambon, sitting on the edge of the bed in his dressing-gown, listening, reflecting, suffering; and if a matching live performance of the monologue would have made this show absolutely perfect, It is still a breathtaking performance, worth travelling across continents to see.

Joyce McMillan
Until 25, 31
EIF pp. 32, 31.

Tejas Verdes

THEATRE

Tejas Verdes
3 stars ***
Just Festival at St. John’s (Venue 127)

There’s an admirable intensity and complexity about Firmin Cabal’s monologue Tejas Verdes, which takes its title from a notorious military base near the Chilean capital Santiago where left-wing suspects were held and tortured following the military coup in 1973. Over an hour, in front of a screen showing subtle images of the building, the single speaker takes on a series of identies, all looking back at the act of torture from different angles. There’s the disappeared woman, her friend, a military doctor, a gravedigger, an informer, a lawyer defending the torturers, and a soul in torment, waiting for release; and as we begin to realise that the friend and the informer are the same person, the sheer horror of torture, and way it destroys morality and personality, becomes ever clearer to us.

In truth, though, this is a story that has often been told, 40 years on. And although Madeleine Potter gives it a heartfelt and highly emotional performance, at the Just Festival at St. John’s, I was left with a slight feeling that emotion is no longer enough; and that somewhere in this text there is a snap and drive of political and psychological analysis that needs a rawer voice, and a tougher, less yielding performance style.

Joyce McMillan
Until 26
p. 328

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Voices Made Night

THEATRE

Voices Made Night
2 stars **
Assembly Hall (Venue 35)

Rarely in the history of the Fringe can so many fine actors have worked so hard, to so little effect, as in this impressive-looking but misconceived show staged by Assembly with Magnet Theatre, and the Baxter Theatre of Cape Town. Based on two books of short stories by the acclaimed Mozambican writer Mia Couto, Voices Made Night adopts an insistently magic-realist style – all feast-of-the-dead face-paint, and bodies draped across the aisle – to tell a series of five or six tales about people poised between life and death, living out their days with varying degrees of madness and eccentricity.

That there is plenty of potential in Couto’s stories seems clear, and the eight-strong South African cast contains at least four truly brilliant performers. In the end, though, Mark Fleishmann’s production seems to misunderstand the nature of magic realism, which is not about the grotesque and the weird, but about the asolutely human and normal, just slightly twisted towards magic. In Fleishmann’s production, the style becomes tiresome, the stories ever less easy to grasp; and there’s a sense of important material being lost, in an overwrought production that will not let the words speak for themselves, through recognisable human voices.

Joyce McMillan
Until 26
p. 334.

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Threeway

THEATRE

Threeway
3 stars ***
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33)

As the author of award-winning comedies like The Wall and My Romantic History, Scottish playwright D.C. Jackson has a high reputation to defend, and a flair for dramatising contemporary twentysomething life in slick one-liners with plenty of heart. In this latest play, though, he somehow comes seriously unstuck, in trying to explore the plight of a 30-ish couple, Andrew and Julie, who try to enliven their sex lives by inviting a male “escort” called Mark to spend the night with them, only to find that in the morning, they have all switched bodies, with Andy now stuck in Julie’s body, Julie in Mark’s, and Mark in Andy’s.

There’s something about this striking idea, though, that just fails to work as theatre; in the end, it’s just too confusing, as if some vital rule about the theatrical marriage between the visual and the verbal was being painfully broken. And to add to the chaos, Jackson seems uncertain whether he wants to write just another slick, potty-mouthed Fringe comedy about the joys of anal and oral sex; or whether he’s trying to say something deeper about sex, love and commitment, which even the finest cast – Gabriel Quigley, Brian Ferguson and Joe Dixon – cannot conjure up convincingly, out of a text so fraught with confusion and mixed messages.

Joyce McMillan
Until 26
p. 329

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