Theatre Insights | Festival 2015

FESTIVAL 2015

THEATRE INSIGHTS

GREEK TRAGEDY Mark Fisher talks to Ivo van Hove about working with movie star Juliette Binoche

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verybody in the world knows Juliette Binoche,’ says director Ivo van Hove. ‘When I walk with her on the street, everybody looks.’

That’s no surprise, but in ordinary circumstances, the Belgian director would be regarded as a bit of a star himself. This is the mainstay of Toneelgroep Amsterdam who, 15 years ago, wowed audiences in the Edinburgh International Festival with his startling productions of Caligula, More Stately Mansions and India Song.

More recently, he’s become the talk of London thanks to his breathtaking stagings of The Roman Tragedies and A View from the Bridge.

Team him with the star of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient and Chocolat, however, and his level of fame is cut down to size. Not that he’s letting it bother him. Casting Binoche in the title role of Antigone, he can only work with her in the same collegiate spirit he would with any actor. ‘I just want to make a work with her on stage in the way that I do with my own company – it’s for me the same,’ he says.

In any case, the two of them have enough to contend with in the high drama of the Sophokles play (here translated by US poet Anne Carson) without worrying about stardom. The tragedy of Antigone, a woman who wants to give her brother a proper burial, and King Creon, the man who is determined to deny it, presents an irresolvable conundrum.

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‘Antigone is a very extreme character,’ says van Hove. ‘She is acting emotionally, impulsively, not driven by any ideology, just driven by a human impulse, namely to bury and pay respect to her brother.’

The dead soldier has become an enemy of the state, but that’s of no concern to Antigone when he was her flesh and blood. ‘It’s like a mother,’ says the director. ‘When a criminal is in prison, the mother will always go to the prison even if he killed people in a terrible way. A mother still cares for her son.’

The play’s central conflict comes about because Creon, played by Patrick O’Kane, is every bit as convinced he is in the right. ‘He wants a society that moves on into the future with new ideas, an open society with a clear set of rules. That’s a good goal, but both become stuck. The solution is not in a society purely driven by emotion nor in a society that is purely rational.’  Mark Fisher is a freelance journalist and critic

ANTIGONE Sat 8 – Sat 22 Aug 7.30pm (except Mon 10 & Mon 17 Aug); Sat 15 & Sat 22 Aug 2.30pm King’s Theatre Tickets £17–£48 eif.co.uk/antigone Supported by The Pirie Rankin Charitable Trust With additional support from

Image Jan Versweyveld

The Embassy of the Kingdom of The Netherlands and Institut français d’Ecosse

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Image Érick Labbé

887 Thu 13, Fri 14, Sat 15, Tue 18, Thu 20, Sun 23 Aug 7.30pm Sun 16, Wed 19, Fri 21, Sat 22 Aug 2.30pm Edinburgh International Conference Centre Tickets £32 eif.co.uk/887 Supported by Jo and Alison Elliot Supported by

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JOURNEY INTO MEMORY Visionary storyteller Robert Lepage takes a trip down memory lane

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’m sitting in the Bluma Appel Theatre in downtown Toronto waiting for Needles and Opium to start. Taking the seat in front of me is none other than Robert Lepage. Officially, the director is in town to oversee a revival by the Canadian Opera Company of Bluebeard’s Castle/ Erwartung, which he first staged at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1993.

For most directors, it’d be enough to focus on this expressionist double bill, but Lepage is not most directors.

Seeing as actor Marc Labrèche is in the same city starring in Needles and Opium, Lepage’s gravity-defying production about Jean Cocteau, Miles Davis and the allure of narcotics, it’s the perfect chance for him to check the show is still in good shape. As we watch the cuboid set seemingly float, twist and turn inside out, it’s clear the old Lepage magic is in perfect working order. At the end, the director joins with the rest of the audience in a thoroughly deserved standing ovation.

All this is while he’s getting on with his major work of the year. Back home in Quebec City, he is in the midst of developing 887 which, after its debut as part of the cultural programme of the Toronto 2015 Pan Am Games, heads

straight to Edinburgh for its European premiere. Like his other solo shows such as The Far Side of the Moon, The Andersen Project and Needles and Opium, all of which started life with Lepage in the central role, his new production is a one-man odyssey that combines his twin gifts for storytelling and visionary stagecraft.

The play takes its name from 887 Avenue Murray, the location of the apartment in Quebec City where he grew up during the 1960s. As he explores the fallibility of memory, he recalls not only the domestic details of his childhood in a poor working-class family, but also a politically volatile time in the life of French-speaking Canada.

This was the era when the movement for Quebec separatism was at its most violent and intense. It’s also when President Charles de Gaulle of France paraded along the top of the street, lending his support to the independence campaign as he did so.

By playing himself and not a character, Lepage aims to marry the personal and the political to reflect on the radicalism of the past and the amnesia of the present.  Mark Fisher

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LOST FOR WORDS Matt Trueman talks to avant-garde director Herbert Fritsch about staging the ‘unstageable’

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MURMEL MURMEL Fri 28 & Sat 29 Aug 8pm Sat 29 & Sun 30 Aug 3pm King’s Theatre Tickets £12–£32 eif.co.uk/murmel Supported by Edinburgh International Festival Friends and Patrons Supported by

Image Thomas Aurin

The Director’s Circle

hakespeare used 28,829 different words in his life’s work. Dieter Roth uses just one in Murmel Murmel: ‘murmel’ – German for mumble. Roth’s play, all 176 pages of it, consists of nothing but mumbles. ‘Murmel, murmel, murmel…’ and so on.

It was meant to be the most boring play imaginable, all but unstageable. The Swiss artist intended it as a conceptual piece: the script itself being the artwork.

It was laid out like any other playscript with characters, stage directions, acts and scenes, only no-one says anything except ‘murmel.’

How do you possibly stage that? Enter the German director Herbert Fritsch. ‘For me, it is not a joke’ Fritsch insists. ‘When I first suggested the piece to Frank Castof [then Artistic Director of the Volksbühne], his reaction was, ‘You won’t get the Volksbühne for some little joke.’ In reply, I very quietly repeated: ‘Mumble, mumble. Listen to these words. Listen to all that you can hear in these words.’ There is, he believes, an inherent mystery about the mumble.

Don’t think it’s dry, though. Fritsch’s staging is anything but monotone. Instead, it’s a full-blown extravaganza – comic, absurd, awful, cruel. ‘There’s a lot to see’ says Fritsch: music, dance, singing, colour, slapstick, scenogrpahy and, of course, mumbling.

‘Whether you see it as a comedy, tragedy, operetta, opera or musical – or as a picture – that’s all up to the audience.’  Matt Trueman is a freelance theatre critic and journalist

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Image Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

LIFE IMITATING ART Stewart Laing celebrates the life and work of a man who redefined Scottish theatre in the 1980s

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tewart Laing’s collaboration with actor George Anton and writer Pamela Carter charts the rise and fall of radical young theatre director Paul Bright’s attempt to mount a stage version of James Hogg’s iconic 1824 novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner.

According to Laing and co, Bright’s seminal piece of hidden history took place in the unreconstructed landscape of 1980s post-industrial Glasgow. Paul Bright’s Confessions itself seems like an enfant terrible of a show, mourning the marginalisation of maverick outsider artists even as it flirted with the mainstream.

In a key moment of Laing’s production, Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner is picked up by the Edinburgh International Festival and performed at The Queen’s Hall. As life imitates art in this way, Laing’s production becomes the ultimate piece of meta-theatre.

Laing has trodden his own wilfully individualistic path as a director and designer over the last twenty years that has seen him work extensively with the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow and on twentieth century European classics. He has also won a Tony award for his design of the 1997 musical, Titanic.

‘In the end,’ says Laing, ‘Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a show about how you make art, and I think anybody interested in theatremaking or the arts will find something of interest in it.’  Neil Cooper is Theatre Critic for The Herald

PAUL BRIGHT’S CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER Wed 19 – Sat 22 Aug 8pm Sat 22 Aug 4pm The Queen’s Hall Tickets £20 eif.co.uk/sinner

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A LIFE IN THREE ACTS Joyce McMillan talks to David Greig about adapting Alasdair Gray’s seminal novel Lanark for the stage

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t’s a large claim to make about a work of imaginative fiction. Yet all the same, there are many who would say that if Scotland is a different country now from what it was 50 years ago – more confident, more self-aware, increasingly able to imagine new futures, as well as to reflect on the past – then the mighty novel Lanark by Glasgowbased artist, muralist and writer Alasdair Gray, first published in 1981, played a vital role in inspiring and embodying that change.

In four brilliant strokes – books three, one, two and four, in that order – Gray’s book tells the tale both of his semi-autobiographical hero Duncan Thaw, an artist of humble origins striving for imaginative survival and achievement in postwar Glasgow, and, in the surreal first and last books, of Thaw’s alter ego Lanark, who inhabits a dystopian future city known as Unthank, a little like Glasgow, but then again utterly different. In the years following its publication, Lanark was hailed as the greatest Scottish novel of the century, and included in Anthony Burgess’s list of the 99 greatest Englishlanguage novels published since 1939. And now, the Edinburgh International Festival has joined with the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow to commission two Scottish-based artists who were profoundly influenced by Gray’s vision – the playwright David Greig, and the director Graham Eatough, founders of the late great theatre company Suspect Culture – to transform Lanark into a piece of theatre; not ‘a life in four books’, as Gray originally wrote, but ‘a life in three acts.’

‘Our aim,’ says Greig, ‘is to do in theatre what Lanark does to the novel – to play with the form, to combine the classic story of a young man growing

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into adulthood with that wild magic realism, and to create that same dizzying sense of just not knowing what’s going to happen next.’

‘When I first read this book at the age of 18,’ Greig adds, ‘it was like a great door opening in my mind, onto a different possible creative future. And now, I can see how it’s a lifetime’s work, that just grows deeper with each re-reading. To me, now, it seems like a novel about a man searching for connection; not a ‘love story’, exactly, but a great imaginative work about the dystopian nightmare that begins where connection fails – both for the individual, and for society. In that sense, it’s both very personal and very political; and it conjures up the possibility of a culture that is experimental and open and gutsy and odd and exciting – all the things Alasdair Gray has been as an artist, throughout his life, and that we hope this version of Lanark will be, when it reaches the stage.’  Joyce McMillan is Theatre Critic and columnist for The Scotsman

LANARK Sun 23 Aug 6pm; Mon 24 – Sun 30 Aug (except Wed 26 Aug) 7pm; Tue 25, Thu 27, Sat 29, Mon 31 Aug 1pm Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh Tickets £10–£32 eif.co.uk/lanark Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund

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Image Alasdair Gray

HERE BE DRAGONS

Image Drew Farrell

Herald Critic Mary Brennan introduces Dragon; a story for adults, teenagers and children with vivid imaginations

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ragons! Fire-breathing, treasure-guarding, supernatural, scary. In the West, we grow up with images of dragons as monsters that loom out of legend to threaten helpless villages, or beautiful princesses – we make heroes, even a saint, out of the dragon-slayers we read about in stories.

In China, however, they see dragons in a completely different light. In Chinese culture, a dragon symbolises deity, power and strength – if these dragons befriended you, and you were battling with all kinds of personal demons... maybe the dragons would slay the demons and free ‘you’ from the grip of unspoken fears and griefs. In fact, those dragons came to the rescue of Glasgowbased company, Vox Motus.

For months, the creative team had been puzzling over how to tell the story of a teenage boy, Tommy, who becomes totally locked away inside himself when his mother dies. The show had to be highly visual, strikingly theatrical – and, like Tommy himself, devoid of words. Enter the dragons!

When Vox Motus joined collaborative forces with Tianjin Children’s Art Theatre (from China) the whole project became an adventure in cross-cultural innovation. Skills were shared alongside ideas, and puppets – wonderful, detailed dragons of varying sizes – came into play like physical manifestations of Tommy’s moods and inner turmoils. On stage, Dragon unfolds with the impact and clarity of a genuinely exciting, potently moving graphic novel, wordless but easily followed by young or old thanks to the expressive performances and telling designs.

In a word: magic!  Mary Brennan is Dance/Performance Critic for The Herald

DRAGON Fri 14 & Sat 15 Aug 7pm, Sat 15 Aug 2pm, Sun 16 Aug 12noon & 4pm Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh Tickets £8–£20 eif.co.uk/dragon

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Image Chloe Courtney

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS The Herald Theatre Critic Neil Cooper explores Complicite’s new show, which takes audiences on a journey to the Amazon and the very limits of human consciousness

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imon McBurney has always been an explorer, with the writer, actor and director’s work with Complicite; pioneers in introducing visual-based, European-influenced and playfully off-kilter work to British audiences. When McBurney was given a copy of Amazon Beaming, Romanian writer Petru Popescu’s 1991 account of National Geographic photo-journalist Loren McIntyre’s 1969 trip to the Javari Valley, on the border between Brazil and Peru, its account of McIntyre’s three months with a rarely sighted Mayoruna tribe and his quest for the source of the Amazon opened McBurney up to an adventure of his own.

The result is The Encounter, a solo tour de force

by McBurney, which takes the audience on a journey of their own to discover an ever-shifting world of sound that charts the profound extremes of human consciousness, climate change and beyond.

All of which is as far away from the days when Complicitie won the Perrier Comedy Award during the 1985 Edinburgh Festival Fringe as it is from McBurney’s turns in the latest Mission Impossible movie as well as providing the voice of house-elf Kreacher in the seventh Harry Potter film.

The Encounter fuses Popescu’s source material with hi-tech storytelling. Where McIntyre claimed to have communicated with the Mayorunas through a form of telepathy known as ‘beaming’, McBurney’s audience don headphones for an intimate and potentially equally transformative experience.  Neil Cooper

THE ENCOUNTER Sat 8, Sun 9, Mon 10, Sun 16, Mon 17, Wed 19, Fri 21, Sat 22 Aug 7.30pm; Fri 14, Sat 15, Thu 20, Sun 23 Aug 2.30pm Edinburgh International Conference Centre Tickets £32 eif.co.uk/encounter Funded by Sir Ewan and Lady Brown through the Edinburgh International Festival Commissioning Fund

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Photo Clark James

FIERY FESTIVAL FINALE!

VIRGIN MONEY FIREWORKS CONCERT

Festival 2015 concludes with a spectacular concert, with fireworks launched from Edinburgh’s iconic Castle to music inspired by dance from Strauss, Brahms and Dvořák, performed live by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Monday 31 August 9.30pm eif.co.uk/virginmoneyfireworks Sponsored by

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Charity No SC004694. Front cover image: Jan Versweyveld