Turn East for Culture 09.

At weekend spent a couple of days over at Ed Fringe Fest for mish-mash of artistic performances. City very busy and usual chaos at bigger venues with overpriced bevvy - Tattoo was also on this time. But ticketing system worked very well compared to last year. My tip would be to anyone - buy all your tickets online even for wee venues (maybe especially for that).

Anyway breaking it down into artistic form

Theatre: Ended up seeing two double header plays - ie with just two actors: David Mamet's Oleanna and Tennessee William;s Auto -da - Fe. Both in pretty small venues but both sold out.
Never seen Oleanna before although I had heard about it. It centres around accusations of sexual harassment/misogyny(!) against an arrogant University lecturer (!!)from female student. It was very good and quite intense over a continual 90 minutes - same set of his office for 3 Acts. Partially it was about a study of language, power and lack of empathy/understanding for other people. It has a very polarised dynamic as a piece - male lecturer dominates in one part then female student. It asks a lot of the cast - it was probably a wee bit too much for the female lead -who was quite young: not entirely convincing though the guy was very good though both in his smugness and the crumbling of his position and the undercurrent of violence. Another interesting factor was that the production came from Zimbabwe and each actor was a different race- this was not fully developed (wasnt issue in original production) but obviously an undercurrent throughout. They were Pumpkin Pie Productions - an engrossing 90 mins - worth a look.

The Williams piece was a one act play from late in his career. Set in the South, where else, it covers a fairly tense conversation between man and his mother on the porch of their Southern villa. Covers all TW's usual themes: sex, repressed homosexuality, heat, fire and a bit more heat and a little more sex. This was excellent - 30 minutes flew by - both actors here (Americans) delved completely into the piece: showed themselves as very experienced. Although short for the theatre - not slight - a bit like a good poem, he added pompously! Poor flyer for the show though but apart from that highly recommended Location wise, it was just a wee room in the Radisson Hotel - a thing i like about the Fringe is the imagination given to venues - just converted into a studio theatre for the month.

Visual Art: Checked out a free show at the Ingleby Gallery - nice venue never been there before - good lighting. Show of Calum Innes an abstract expressionist was pretty disappointing though.
It was basically a set of large coloured squares halved with different colours in each and sort of blended together in the middle. All "Untitled" - sparked debate about whether u can get away with using untitled in any other artistic media. So not a lot to it - looked like he had developed a new artistic technique and was just experimenting with it over and over: so not really an exhibition at all.

Comedy: I'm always a little selective with the comedy i choose to see in Edinburgh there is so much garbage with identikit posters for identikit boys in suits telling anecdotes about moving in with their girlfriend - desperately searching for a place on a panel show on Men and motors or something. But hit the jackpot twice here - Andrew Maxwell an Irish guy who I had only seen wee bits of on tv - he won a channel 4 reality show couple years ago where comedians had to live together and perform a completely different show a night. Good funny relaxed show - master of his craft. Material is not ground breaking but hits the spot and at least takes time to remark about the specifics of Scottish culture. Ridiculously small bar for venue though - there's a bit of Scottish culture for you :-).

Tim Key was a poet who I had spotted on the Charlie Brooker show though apparently he has a big Cambridge Footlights fringe background. Show really good - combination of comedy, poems (again sparked debate whether they were real poems or not) and short films. Bit different and very engaged with audience in a distant way! Annoying heckling woman though - surprisingly little of that at Andrew Maxwell.

Funnily enough both acts finished with two physical displays (different to the preceding shows)- wont give it away by saying what they were.

Misc: Couldnt get into a couple of shows - neither the one on the Mafia nor Eric Morecombe. Had a cheap cocktail at top of Leith Walk. And watched the Celts first game of the season in Haymarket pub - usually a Jambo haunt.

So to finish this indepth analysis Ill revert to type and place an East coast stereotype at top of blog..

Peer Gynt: National Theatre of Scotland

 A rare trip to the Theatre last night - the Royal no less to see the NTS' excellent adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt.

This is quite a complex piece of work - Ibsen wrote it in verse as a saga and so didnt envisage how it would be staged.  In fact it was not put on in a theatre in Norway until 10 years after it was published.  It was then that the fellow Norwegian composer Grieg added his music - the  famous Hall of the Mountain King - well known to Manic miner Fans! or those Slater Hogg and Howison adverts in the 80s.

It's no surprise why some have said it is "unperformable". It involves  a long trippy journey about a outsider's life  - bit of a pisshead and womaniser  - via trolls,  a group of monkeys, bad wedding parties, the desert, an asylum and that just scrapes the surface.

It is also pretty long but you wouldnt notice it from this production which has an amazing energy.  This is personified by the two guys (Keith Fleming and Gerry Mulgrew) who play the young and old Peer who bounce around the full time dragging the whole thing with them.  Keith Fleming reminded me a bit of Rik Mayall in Bottom which I would say is a good thing! Helped by excellent music   - which eschews the classical  to something much more modern and folky - including a well placed cameo for the Pet Shop Boys "Go West".  The support is also uniformly excellent  they are more or less literally support as the play is pretty much focussed on Peer Gynt - the other characters are never fleshed out in the text.

The work also focuses on the nature of self - Who is Peer Gynt? what makes a man different from a troll(!) and  the divorcing of celebrity self from reality.  Also the nature of man - is he always dragged down by his baser side - shown here in two bacchanalian scenes at a small town wedding (reminded me of a few I had been at) and in the troll( King Bastard)'s  lair.  

One element which was very prevalent in the translation I read which is more or less taken out completely is regarding Norway which at the time of writing was part of a union with Sweden as the weaker partner.  One reading of Ibsen's work is that Peer keeps getting dragged down because of the folk tales he's obsessed with (the trolls in particular) and the small town mentality of his village - which could be seen as Norway as a whole.  So it was a critique of Norwegian society - Ibsen wrote it when abroad in Italy.  Greig and Ibsen were both involved in maintaining a separate Norwegian culture.  There's a pretty complicated scene where 4 people symbolise Sweden, Germany, France and the USA - that's gone replaced with a brilliant sort of    chat show format!

I  thought that there could have been interesting parallels with Scotland - part of union, sentimental aspects to  culture but there weren't  really any drawn.  It would have been difficult to integrate that in though as there was so much else going on. 

You can see there's reference to topical things for Ibsen at the time - Darwin's theories, slavery and obliquely the American Civil War. I guess the celebrity culture/mythologising aspect which actually is quite implicit in the piece written in the 1860s is a message for our times.

So really loved it - energetic, funny, loud, fast moving and a bit bonkers.