Edinburgh International Festival has built its reputation by taking risks. This year's pulled off some coups, reports Helen Meany
'Fusion" is not a word favoured by the Anglo-Asian choreographer Akram Khan. "It sounds like a menu in a dodgy dance diner," he said recently. He prefers to talk about "confusion", though this could be a bit misleading, especially in reference to his latest work, Ma, which had its UK première in Edinburgh last week. A stunning piece performed by seven dancers from his company, it juxtaposes contemporary Western dance and classical Indian Kathak forms with absolute clarity. Incorporating Khan's direct speech to the audience, a two-part narrative written by the novelist Hanif Kureishi, live performance of cello, Indian percussion and Sufic chanting composed by the Italian Riccardo Nova, it played to packed houses at the 3,000-seat Playhouse. Interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and collaborative, it embodies the spirit of this year's Edinburgh International Festival.
Forget fusion, what about alchemy? The festival's director of 13 years, Brian McMaster, has a gift for making lateral connections between artists and art forms and for taking risks, both in the work he presents and in the work he commissions. He is loyal to particular companies also: this year saw the return of festival regulars Companyia Carles Santos, from Catalonia, with a stylish but disappointing music-theatre piece based on the work of Rossini, The Composer, The Singer, The Cook And The Sinner, and the Catalan director Calixto Bieito, with two productions.
Although the Scottish-Catalan link has featured in the festival programme for a number of years, it's even more current because of the opening in a few weeks of Edinburgh's Scottish-parliament building, designed by the late Catalan architect Enric Miralles and his team. Its persistent attraction might be because Catalonia can be viewed as a model for Scotland: as a flourishing minority culture with a measure of self-government within a larger European state; it's also, demonstrably, a creative crucible.
There are other threads to follow that thicken as the days go by: Akram Khan is about to create a work with the young Flemish choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, whose latest dance-theatre piece, the intermittently dazzling but (ironically) overly long Tempus Fugit, was performed by the Belgian company Les Ballets C de la B, in one of the festival's late-night slots.
Larbi Cherkaoui also recently directed with the Schaubühne theatre company from Berlin, whose hour-long Andromache was a highlight of the festival. This was an austere interpretation, with a text by Luk and Peter Perceval that distilled both Racine's and Euripides's versions. Written in simple prose rather than verse, it was performed (with surtitles) in German, beautifully enunciated by the superb cast, led by Jutta Lampe, whose utterance of the words liebe and König carried the weight of centuries.
The five characters clad in black robes stood or sat motionless on a high, shining altar, surrounded by a carpet of broken glass. The absolute stillness of the group lent the impression that they had just stepped out of a classical frieze. Occasionally, one of them would lean down and smash a bottle against the altar. This was the only action, while they spoke of battles in Troy ("the empire of evil"), the cycle of violence they had inherited from their fathers, Achilles and Agamemnon, and, finally, the murders they now commit to escape from the bind of unrequited love.
Only their lips move, although occasionally Hermione is passed between the man she loves (Pyrrhus) and the man who loves her (Orestes). Meanwhile, Andromache, the captive Trojan princess, maintains marmoreal composure.
Some knowledge of the mythical background of these pained characters was assumed: the surtitles overlapped in a way that often made it difficult to know who was speaking. This was an intense reading of the play that captured the pitilessness of Racine. It demanded and, in my case, received rapt attention, the best staged version of a Greek-based tragedy I have seen.
One of the most impressive strands of this year's festival was the new Royal Bank Lates series. With tickets all at £5 (€7.50), the performances, mostly one-offs, were held in the larger festival venues at 10.30 p.m. each evening, with tickets on sale an hour before, for those willing to turn up on the spur of the moment. Whether the performances were of theatre, music or dance, they were consistently adventurous and technically accomplished. Although there was minimal information about them in the festival's printed programme, they were of such a high standard that word of mouth gradually began to entice audiences - although they were by no means packed out.
Saturday's music-theatre production from the German composer and director Heiner Goebbels was burdened with the title Eraritjaritjaka, apparently an Aboriginal word for "impossible yearning". So far, so off-putting, but it turned out to be a revelation. In seamless metamorphosis - from a live performance of excerpts from string quartets by the Mondriaan Quartet to a theatre piece performed by the French actor André Wilms quoting from the notebooks of Elias Canetti, to a reflective short film - it ended up as a combination of all three forms, using real-time video. There was a feeling of glee in experiencing the best of contemporary work from the upper circle of the Royal Lyceum Theatre - for less than half the price of most show fringe shows.
Whether Edinburgh Festival Fringe audiences are aware of these shows is another question. Increasingly, the two festivals seem to inhabit different spheres. They are not even in synch: the international festival continues for almost a week after the fringe (which ended yesterday). Given the overwhelming amount of cultural activity in the city during August - including the international book and film festivals and the jazz festival, with comedy on the fringe attracting a different audience again - it is, of course, essential to be selective. But the degree to which the two audiences seem mutually exclusive is dismaying, especially as so much of the work on the fringe is mediocre.
Seasoned visitors to the fringe know the only way to remain relatively sane is to focus on shows at a handful of venues, such as the Traverse Theatre and Aurora Nova at St Stephen's Church, which have evolved into tightly administered independent republics.
The person responsible for putting the Aurora Nova on the map in recent years, with an impressive programme of physical and visual theatre from Europe, is Wolfgang Hoffman, from Potsdam. The good news is that he is Dublin-bound in the autumn to become the next director of Dublin Fringe Festival. Perhaps we'll have our own aurora nova here.
Every year there's a tussle between the two festivals for public and critical rating - as well as the inevitable row. This year the director of the fringe, Paul Gudgeon, complained publicly about the disparity in funding between the two festivals. The fringe receives £25,000 (€37,500) a year from the Scottish Arts Council; the international festival's core funding for its expensive productions of opera, dance and theatre and its classical concerts is £1.1 million (€1.6 million), which is 35 per cent of its income. Another third comes from ticket sales, the rest from sponsorship and donations.
Whether this funding was distributed as fruitfully as it might have been this year is debatable. The decision to present three operas from Hanover State Opera, two for single performances, while presenting a series of Weber operas in concert performances, seemed a bit lopsided.
And while the three productions - Debussy's Pelléas Et Mélisande, Verdi's Il Trovatore and Luigi Nono's Al Gran Sole Carico D'Amore - demonstrated the range of styles of this huge ensemble company, we didn't see any of the new work thatis its specialism. It commissions an opera every year, as well as a series of Zeitopern - short contemporary pieces.
While its heavy presence is consistent with McMaster's tendency to focus in depth on particular companies, it might have been more imaginative to have commissioned a home-grown production or co-production.
Opera is a sensitive subject in Scotland. Anyone associated with the imperilled Scottish Opera company, currently dark, would weep to hear how much the Hanover State Opera receives in subsidy: €45 million.
The Scottish Executive's decision to cut half the full-time jobs at Scottish Opera and freeze its funding has created a furore, led by the outspoken Scottish composer James MacMillan. It remains to be seen whether the newly formed, year-long commission on culture, set up to overhaul arts policy and funding in Scotland, will come up with a rescue plan.
Whatever else the commission does, let's hope it doesn't tinker with Edinburgh International Festival. It's not standing still: as has often been said, the programme needs to expand to include the visual arts, and already a pilot scheme for a visual-arts festival is under way.
For the moment it's flourishing, making Edinburgh in August a cultural magnet. And, while it needs to improve its communication with the fringe festival, that shouldn't be beyond the capacity of an event that thrives on creative cross-fertilisation. Or alchemy.
Edinburgh International Festival runs until Sunday, www.eif.co.uk
Inflaming passions
"Come on, give me pleasure." The Catalan director Calixto Bieito coaxes rehearsing actors with these words, yet many of his audiences experience anything but. Since 1998 Bieito's work has been a recurring feature of Edinburgh International Festival. Also recurring, predictably, is the divided reaction. His four-hour co-production in 1999 with the Abbey and Edinburgh of del Valle-Inclán's Barbaric Comedies, translated by Frank McGuinness, gave Irish audiences a sense of his visceral style, which was followed by last year's compelling if one-dimensional Hamlet at Dublin Theatre Festival.
This year's production of John Clifford's version of Celestina, the 15th-century Spanish proto-novel by Fernando de Rojas, shared some of the tone of Barbaric Comedies: set in a nightclub-cum-brothel, it reflects a Spanish aesthetic that Bieito calls "expressionist grotesque" and links to Buñuel and Goya. Celestina, a ruthless procuress ("sex worker"), drug dealer and dabbler in black magic, is played as a trouser role by Kathryn Hunter. It's an extraordinary performance in which her gender becomes so indeterminate that when she briefly places a luxuriant wig on her shaved head she seems like a drag queen. Unfortunately, she dwarfs the other members of Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and the play, for all its debauchery and melancholic view of human venality, fails to fully engage.
The queue for last-minute tickets for the single performance of Bieito's production of Verdi's Il Trovatore for Hanover State Opera began four hours before curtain-up. The programme's warning that some scenes might disturb clearly wasn't a deterrent, but it was accurate.
With scenes of multiple rape, incineration and a torture sequence reminiscent of those in Abu Ghraib, it was, in some parts, highly unsettling. It was also relentless. But then Verdi's opera has a melodramatic and dark plot involving, well, incineration, abduction and torture. It's just that these things are usually described rather than shown, or if they are shown they don't seem real.
Bieito has put the worst aspects of our world on stage - in heightened form. He presents the violated body in so many forms that it becomes apparent that only a lapsed Catholic could be this profane and that his purpose is serious, not sensationalist. This is an instance where his insistence on showing us the most cruel, base urges of human beings jolts us into seeing this powerful work in a new way and, in the process, renders Verdi's music even more lushly expressive. The contrast seemed utterly conscious on Bieito's part, and the effect was exciting and curiously uplifting. Perhaps opera is his ideal form, after all.
Budding talent New writing at Edinburgh Festival Fringe
The Traverse Theatre didn't deliver quite as many goodies as usual, although it was a good year for the Irish director Lynne Parker, whose Rough Magic production of Gerald Murphy's Take Me Away won a Fringe First. Her regular collaborator Monica Frawley received great critical appreciation for her beautiful, translucent set for Shimmer, by Linda McLean - the other play directed by Parker.
Among the best plays I saw was a one-man show by the Palestinian author and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh, adapted and directed by the Scottish playwright David Grieg. When the Bulbul Stopped Singing took a while to become dramatically engaging but was a quiet, beautifully modulated piece that brought the reality of the Israelis' siege of Ramallah down to small domestic details.
More searing still, also on the theme of war, invasion and its aftermath that permeated both festivals, was Jonathan Lichtenstein's The Pull Of Negative Gravity. Urgently contemporary, it dramatised in lyrical language the impact of the return of a young Welsh soldier from Iraq, maimed for life in mind and body. Add to that the effects of foot-and-mouth disease on farming in Wales, male suicide and two brothers who love the same woman and the tragedy was overloaded. Somehow, though, Gregory Thompson's exceptional direction for Colchester's Mercury Theatre made it seem all too believable, with memorable performances from Joanne Howarth as the mother and Louise Collins as her daughter-in- law.
Closer to home, Macdara Vallely's intense Peacefire, brilliantly performed by the author, presented a young joyrider from Armagh who becomes an informer. An evocative, pulsing soundtrack helped overcome the limitations of the monologue form, and the bleakness was alleviated by bursts of black humour - he had a way of talking about "getting his knees done" that made knee-capping sound like a visit to a beauty salon. Deservedly winning a Fringe First, the production tours Ireland in the autumn.
