Theatre EIF 2013

KAFKA, BECKETT, BURTON AND MORE AT FESTIVAL 2013

MICHAEL GAMBON AND BARRY MCGOVERN STAR IN BECKETT TV, RADIO AND PROSE WORKS ADAPTED FOR THE STAGE HEAVY METAL AND SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA COMBINE IN A NEW VERSION OF CORIOLANUS THE WOOSTER GROUP RESURRECT RICHARD BURTON IN HAMLET

Transforming theatre Mark Fisher, theatre critic of The Guardian, hears from performer Wu Hsing-kuo how Kafka continues to speak to our times.

We are all Gregor Samsa.

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ast time Wu Hsing-kuo was in Edinburgh he was performing King Lear single-handed. It was a fascinating performance that owed as much to Peking opera, with its athleticism, grace and musicality, as it did to our western conception of Shakespeare. Now, this singular performer is back with Taiwan’s Contemporary Legend Theatre and a solo staging of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

This macabre story of a man who wakes up as a beetle is, he says, a pertinent metaphor about social pressure today. ‘People of our generation tend to be slaves of economic society,’ he says.

‘In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, he speaks out for helpless young people and reveals their inner voice. It also asks, “What is existence for?” I feel my predicament is not unlike that of Gregor Samsa, attending to his family duties.’

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In keeping with the arts and technology theme of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, Hsing-kuo has been collaborating with a multimedia programmer and the Quanta Institute of Technology to give the performance a high-tech edge. It’s an approach consistent with the totaltheatre spirit of Peking opera. ‘It is a form in which language, literature, dancing, and singing are united as a whole,’ he says. ‘They carry equal weight.’

Metamorphosis Saturday 10 & Sunday 11 August 8.00pm Monday 12 August 3.00pm King’s Theatre eif.co.uk/metamorphosis £12-£30 Supported by

Taipei Representative Office in the UK

Photo Andrew Ore

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Photo Paula Court

Ressurecting Richard Burton Neil Cooper, The Herald theatre critic, reports on The Wooster Group’s fan-boy homage to Richard Burton

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hen The Wooster Group decide to do a classic play one should always expect something different. This, after all, is New York’s premiere avantperformance troupe led for more than thirty years by director Elizabeth LeCompte. So it is with their unique take on Hamlet, in which long-term company member Scott Shepherd fulfils every actor’s dream of playing Shakespeare’s tortured Danish prince.

Except, Shepherd and his colleagues aren’t so much doing the original play, but recreating beat by beat, inflection by inflection, the grainily filmed events being beamed on screens behind him. The film is rare archive footage of Richard Burton, who in 1964 and at the peak of his acting powers, performed Hamlet on 4

Broadway in a production by John Gielgud. The production was filmed live from seventeen different camera angles, and for two days only was broadcast in 2000 cinemas across the USA in something somewhat fancifully styled ‘Electronovision.’

These days broadcasts of live theatre performances in cinemas are commonplace. Electronovision may be obsolete, yet The Wooster Group, who have always had pop culture and technology at the heart of their work, have recreated Gielgud’s production as a wittily multi-faceted affair that fastforwards, jump-cuts and puts threedimensional flesh. It is something that’s part multi-media collage, part fan-boy homage that rips things apart to make something new as only The Wooster Group can.

Hamlet Saturday 10 – Tuesday 13 August 7.30pm Royal Lyceum Theatre eif.co.uk/hamlet £10-£30 Supported by

Edinburgh International Festival Friends and Patrons

Selections from the Wooster Group Video Archive Saturday 10 – Tuesday 13 August 12 noon New Media Scotland eif.co.uk/woosterarchive £4

Out of This World As Grid Iron theatre company prepares to take us to another planet, Sunday Herald theatre critic Mark Brown asks some questions of Vela, the architect of New Earth.

Vela: I suppose history will judge if it was necessary, but I believe New Earth was created because of a need for exploration and progress. Old Earth had been run dry, it had nothing left to give us.

Q. They say you are obsessed by memories. What do you miss most about Old Earth?

Vela: I wouldn’t say I am obsessed; I engage with the past in healthy and structured bursts.

But on New Earth our focus is looking forward, and it is my job to facilitate that for people. If I was to say I missed anything, I would say Old Earth’s landscape.

Q. What are the greatest differences between the two planets? What will most surprise immigrants to New Earth?

Vela: All new arrivals are eased in very gently. We stagger things so as not to overwhelm people with the bright new space all around them. We always say, “We will show you everything, when you’re ready to see it.”

Leaving Planet Earth Saturday 10 – Monday 12 August, Wednesday 14 – Monday 19 August & Wednesday 21 – Saturday 24 August 8.00pm Edinburgh International Conference Centre and Edinburgh International Climbing Arena, Ratho eif.co.uk/leavingplanetearth £12.50, £25 Sponsored by

Image Douglas Chalmers

Q. Why was it necessary for you to create New Earth? What happened to Old Earth?

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Mind control With Histoire d’amour, Chile’s Teatrocinema turns its spectacular aesthetic to the very pertinent horrors of kidnap and abuse, writes Mark Brown of the Sunday Herald.

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Behind the headlines of such cases lies not only unimaginable suffering, but also the deeply disturbed, and disturbing, psychology of the captor. It is through the prism of such a mind that Jauffret’s fiction considers this extremely troubling subject.

Using its brilliantly creative blend of live theatre and highly developed cinematic projections, Teatrocinema aims, through image, music and word, to bring the psychological journey of the novel to the stage. An impressive and affecting theatre work is in prospect.

Histoire d’amour Thursday 15 – Saturday 17 August 8.00pm Saturday 17 August 2.30pm King’s Theatre eif.co.uk/histoire £12-£30

Photo Montserrat Antequerra

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n Régis Jauffret’s novel Histoire d’amour a woman finds herself imprisoned and abused by a male captor. Her ordeal is made possible by the outside world’s ignorance of her whereabouts and her kidnapper’s perverted sense of entitlement.

It is a story which carries powerful and terrible echoes of the case of Austrian woman Elisabeth Fritzl (who was imprisoned for 24 years by her own father in a purpose-built dungeon) and, more recently, the cases of Amanda Berry, Georgina DeJesus and Michelle Knight (the three Ohio women allegedly imprisoned for up to 11 years by Ariel Castro).

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Ecofriendly warrior

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Keith Bruce, The Herald arts editor, finds Meredith Monk taking her work where, perhaps, it was always meant to go – on a crusade for the environment.

Photos Julieta Cervantes

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efying categorisation is second nature to Meredith Monk, who last occupied the environment of the Royal Lyceum at the end of 2010’s Festival. Songs of Ascension, which deployed the Edinburgh University Singers in the auditorium as her choreography and visuallyenhanced score unfolded on the stage, went on to be an acclaimed album.

The sole surprise in her latest work, On Behalf of Nature, is that it has taken her until her seventies to make a piece that so clearly speaks out for the global environment. A practising Tibetan Buddhist since the mid-1980s – although her exposure to Eastern ideas dates back to the 1960s counterculture – Monk’s music is often spoken of as coming from some ancient common heritage and culture that we all share. Her vocabulary of movement suggests common ground with children’s games and tribal dance as much as a modern master like Merce Cunningham, while her vocal

writing eschews language in favour of a unique athletic wordless tonal palette. This new ecological chamber opera is itself an exercise in green composition, recycling music she wrote for the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Realm Variations, as well as other previous work both in the score and in the video projections.

Her concerns may be weighty, but Monk’s mood is usually infectiously up-beat. Rarely is performance so determinedly abstract also so immediately accessible.

Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble Friday 16 & Saturday 17 August 8.00pm, Sunday 18 August 2.30pm Royal Lyceum Theatre eif.co.uk/meredithmonk £12-£30 Supported by American Friends of the Edinburgh International Festival

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Guitar Hero

Photo Beijing People’s Art Theatre

Guardian critic, Mark Fisher, finds the Beijing People’s Art Theatre’s Coriolanus is less ruthless dictator and more noble warrior – backed by grinding rock bands

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he hero of Shakespeare’s tragedy is a fearless fighter who holds the people in contempt. His unyielding conviction, his refusal to be humble, his hatred of compromise, reminds us of dictators from left and right. In the recent Ralph Fiennes movie, he is a 21st-century military commander who orders the suspension of civil liberties. For that reason, the play is often seen as a metaphor for the perils of absolutism.

Not so in Lin Zhaohua’s crystal-clear production for the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. Played by Pu Cunxin, this Coriolanus is rather a genial sort, a man who can’t help being a peerless warrior and is embarrassed when the people remind him of his prowess.

He’s pleased to win the battle, but is only

doing his job. ‘Whether flawed or not, his nobility is justified because he is a great man,’ says the actor. ‘When he enters into society there is a problem, but if he is by himself there is no problem at all. He has earned the right to despise others.’

With over 30 extras thronging the stage, two Chinese rock bands grinding out the live score and a directorial style characterised by clarity and directness, this is a Coriolanus with drive, intensity and freshness.

The Tragedy of Coriolanus Tuesday 20 – Wednesday 21 August 7.30pm The Edinburgh Playhouse eif.co.uk/coriolanus £10-£30 Supported by The Ministry of Culture, People’s Republic of China

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Photo Anthony Woods

Beckett at the Festival Beckett’s genius was not confined simply to the stage. On radio and television, too, writes Joyce McMillan, theatre critic for The Scotsman, his imagination took flight

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f the 2013 Edinburgh International Festival is partly about exploring the links between art and technology, then the week-long celebration of the work of Samuel Beckett that lies at the heart of the theatre programme should offer a particularly rich insight into how changing technical possibilities inspire the imaginations of some of the world’s greatest artists. Beckett is best known as a theatre writer, of course. Yet at a time when many dramatists were still writing three-act plays set in rooms with French windows, Beckett’s imagination was already ranging across all the possibilities of human expression and perception, stripped down to bare, minimalist essentials; and so he seized the opportunities offered by radio and television to focus on sound, or to experiment with abstracted close-up images, in ways that strongly influenced the great theatre fragments of his later years.

So in Edinburgh, the Gate Theatre of Dublin will present Atom Egoyan’s acclaimed production of Beckett’s first television play, Eh Joe, starring Michael Gambon, which combines live performance with a huge close-up image of the actor’s face; while Pan Pan Theatre will present two plays originally written for radio, including All That Fall, the play that helped inspire the creation of the BBC’s legendary Radiophonic Workshop. And there’s also an opportunity, on Saturday 31 August, to experience the great sequence of films of Beckett’s work commissioned by the Gate Theatre a decade ago; a project which involved directors like Richard Eyre and David Mamet, and legendary performances from John Hurt and Sian Phillips, among many other great actors of our time.

Eh Joe Gate Theatre Dublin

Embers Pan Pan Theatre

All That Fall Pan Pan Theatre

Friday 23 & Tuesday 27 August 9.00pm; Thursday 29 August 7.00pm; Saturday 31 August 5.00pm Royal Lyceum Theatre eif.co.uk/ehjoe £8-£20

Saturday 24 & Sunday 25 August 7.00pm; Sunday 25 August 2.00pm King’s Theatre, Edinburgh eif.co.uk/embers £10-£20

Sunday 25 & Monday 26 August 11.00am, 2.30pm, 5.00pm & 7.30pm The Hub eif.co.uk/allthatfall £15

Supported by Léan Scully EIF Fund

Supported by Léan Scully EIF Fund

Supported by Harold Mitchell Esq, AC

Beckett on Film Saturday 31 August 9 screenings throughout the day 10.00am – 10.30pm The Hub eif.co.uk/beckettonfilm £4 per screening

Beckett at the Festival supported by

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Beckett’s Prose The Scotsman theatre critic Joyce McMillan reports on the slugfest of putting Beckett’s prose on the stage

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espite his fame as a dramatist, Samuel Beckett began a career as an aspiring novelist and prose writer, following in the footsteps of his friend James Joyce; and over the last 30 years, theatre-makers have become ever more aware of the huge dramatic potential of Beckett’s prose, full of sharp wit, strange, distinctive voices, and a rich sense both of tragedy and of the absurd. Last year, the great Irish actor Barry McGovern delighted Edinburgh audiences with his own version of Beckett’s novel Watt; and this year, he returns with his magnificent solo show I’ll Go On, based on Beckett’s three novels of the early 1950s, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. The Gate Theatre will also present a stage version of Beckett’s 1946 novella First Love with British actor Peter Egan; and Barry McGovern makes it clear that transforming Beckett’s great prose into theatre is no easy option. ‘Beckett is a heavyweight, you know, you have to be

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at your absolute best to tackle him. It’s a tremendous challenge, a real slugfest.

Do I enjoy it? I enjoy having done it. But when you’re on stage, with Beckett’s words, you have to be absolutely focused; and it’s both terrifying, and exhilarating.’

I’ll Go On Sunday 25, Monday 26, Wednesday 28 & Saturday 31 August 9.00pm Royal Lyceum Theatre eif.co.uk/igoon £8 – £20 First Love Wednesday 28 & Saturday 31 August 7.00pm, Thursday 29 & Friday 30 August 9.00pm Royal Lyceum Theatre eif.co.uk/firstlove £8 – £20 Supported by Harold Mitchell Esq, AC

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Photo Amelia Stein

Fiery Festival Finale!

Festival 2013 ends with a spectacular concert. Dazzling fireworks are launched from Edinburgh’s iconic castle as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra plays Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition complete with barnstorming brass fanfares.

Virgin Money Fireworks Concert Sunday 1 September 9.00pm eif.co.uk/virginmoneyfireworks

Photo Rob McDougall

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