28/8/10, Kings Theatre (Edinburgh Festival)
A combination of cinema and theatre. A fascinating idea which turned out to be profoundly disappointing in practice. See Guardian review, with which I largely agree:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/aug/31/the-man-who-fed-butterflies-review
It seemed pointless, alienating to no good effect, the actors locked into a mechanical presentation with no room for interpretation or to respond to audience reaction. Also the lighting was poor, presumably because bright lights would show through the front screen or wash out the back projection.
And the story, such as it was, was a farrago of Latin American magic realism which required a good deal of patience to take seriously.
Showing posts with label edinburgh festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label edinburgh festival. Show all posts
Sunday, 5 September 2010
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
ADMETO
29/8/09, Festival Theatre (Edinburgh Festival)
3 hrs 45 mins. Handel's opera in a production for the Gottingen Festival directed by Doris Dorrie, who is apparently a well-known German novelist and film-maker and (these days) opera director, conducted from the harpsichord by Nicholas McGegan with around 30 musicians ranged all round him in the Festival Theatre's shallow pit.
Sheep, deer, naked dancers, Japanese costumes, shadow play, lighting that threw washes of colour over a white stage with black cloth wings: visually ravishing.
Admeto is dying. His wife Alceste volunteers to die in his place. He recovers and sends Ercole (Hercules) to bring her back from the Underworld. Meanwhile Antigona, who is loved by Admeto's brother Trasimede, makes a play for Admeto and he finds himself torn between love for her and for Alceste. Alceste returns in disguise, there is a predictable mix-up, until all is resolved and Antigona is paired up with T.
The singing had its ups and downs. Tim Mead as Admeto had the most beautiful counter-tenor; David Bates as Trasimede sounded totally out of his depth. Kirsten Blaise as the naughty temptress Antigona was a fine singer and entertaining actor (slapping away at her spurned lover Trasimede's horizontal sword as it rose towards the perpendicular while he sang "a ha ha"). Marie Arnet as Alceste had a lovely voice but lacked power (from where I sat somewhere round to the side at the front of the circle). Her dying aria was especially beautiful, sung in a huge white kimono, before she went behind a screen to expire; it rose to reveal spreading blood, represented by a red carpet gradually pulled outwards across the stage, and her spirit rising slowly from her body.
The spirt in question was the veteran butoh dancer Tadashi Endo, in long wig and white weeds, who also supplied the choreography. I'm beginning to get the hang of butoh, which seems to involve a lot of stylised and grotesque movement, white body paint, few if any clothes and much grimacing. This is the Wikipedia definition: "It typically involves playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and is traditionally "performed" in white-body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion, with or without an audience. But there is no set style, and it may be purely conceptual with no movement at all."
At the very start the ten dancers played furies, tormenting the dying Admeto: they looked for all the world like a bunch of Gollums. Later they attacked Hercules (William Berger, dressed in a fat suit to resemble a sumo wrestler) as he freed Alceste from Hell: he shouldered them, threw them and bellied them aside. Then he was tempted by naked dancers, thrusting them too aside with superhuman effort. Before that we'd seen them dressed as sheep in silly woolly costumes accompanying Antigona, a princess masquerading (for reasons never made clear) as a shepherdess. Later they played deer in a hunting scene, the men with magnificent antlers on their heads.
At the end of Act 1 I decided this production was definitely camp, but respectful, and the Japanese setting was plausible.
In Act 2 Admeto laments that he loves two women while two dancers, one dressed in white and one in black, drift across the stage behind him: they used at this point the whole stage, right to the back, and very impressive it is too, reputedly the largest in Britain. The act ends with showpiece arias for the two sopranos; Alceste's is accompanied by half a dozen naked dancers in see-through chiffon kimonos tempting him/her (for she is now dressed as a samurai warrior). That seemed inappropriate since what she is singing has to do with discovering whether he husband (not she) is faithful or not; but maybe the director's aim was just to plant a suggstion of "temptation" generally.
Act 3 concludes with a solo dance for Alceste's spirit. I never felt the production fully integrated the spirit (unlike the rest of the dancers, who were fine). Before that there was an ensemble song, and before that a beautiful duet for Admeto and Alceste as the lovers are reconciled; but it was undermined by some silly business as Trasimede flits around surreptitiously with a drawn sword plotting to murder his brother.
This was also the only act in which the prevailing Japanese aesthetic was undermined for some reason with European baroque elements: a painted backdrop of a garden, then two drops of baroque palace interiors with windows and arched doorways. They flew up suddenly and disappeared just before the triumphal conclusion. I couldn't see the point, though one reviewer suggested it may have been a way of highlighting the forced, artificial, "stagey" nature of the proceedings at this point.
Plausibility, as so often, wasn't one of the librettist's strong points. Antigona has been obsessively in love throughout with Admeto, at one stage wrapping herself in a giant cloth portrait of him hanging from the flies (she is dressed only in a black swimsuit affair at this point). At the very end she is suddenly, instantly persuaded to switch her affections to Trasimede, the man she has energetically spurned throughout. Bizarre.
It was a delight, after a succession of 50 minute fringe productions, to have something really meaty and substantial to get one's teeth into.
3 hrs 45 mins. Handel's opera in a production for the Gottingen Festival directed by Doris Dorrie, who is apparently a well-known German novelist and film-maker and (these days) opera director, conducted from the harpsichord by Nicholas McGegan with around 30 musicians ranged all round him in the Festival Theatre's shallow pit.
Sheep, deer, naked dancers, Japanese costumes, shadow play, lighting that threw washes of colour over a white stage with black cloth wings: visually ravishing.
Admeto is dying. His wife Alceste volunteers to die in his place. He recovers and sends Ercole (Hercules) to bring her back from the Underworld. Meanwhile Antigona, who is loved by Admeto's brother Trasimede, makes a play for Admeto and he finds himself torn between love for her and for Alceste. Alceste returns in disguise, there is a predictable mix-up, until all is resolved and Antigona is paired up with T.
The singing had its ups and downs. Tim Mead as Admeto had the most beautiful counter-tenor; David Bates as Trasimede sounded totally out of his depth. Kirsten Blaise as the naughty temptress Antigona was a fine singer and entertaining actor (slapping away at her spurned lover Trasimede's horizontal sword as it rose towards the perpendicular while he sang "a ha ha"). Marie Arnet as Alceste had a lovely voice but lacked power (from where I sat somewhere round to the side at the front of the circle). Her dying aria was especially beautiful, sung in a huge white kimono, before she went behind a screen to expire; it rose to reveal spreading blood, represented by a red carpet gradually pulled outwards across the stage, and her spirit rising slowly from her body.
The spirt in question was the veteran butoh dancer Tadashi Endo, in long wig and white weeds, who also supplied the choreography. I'm beginning to get the hang of butoh, which seems to involve a lot of stylised and grotesque movement, white body paint, few if any clothes and much grimacing. This is the Wikipedia definition: "It typically involves playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and is traditionally "performed" in white-body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion, with or without an audience. But there is no set style, and it may be purely conceptual with no movement at all."
At the very start the ten dancers played furies, tormenting the dying Admeto: they looked for all the world like a bunch of Gollums. Later they attacked Hercules (William Berger, dressed in a fat suit to resemble a sumo wrestler) as he freed Alceste from Hell: he shouldered them, threw them and bellied them aside. Then he was tempted by naked dancers, thrusting them too aside with superhuman effort. Before that we'd seen them dressed as sheep in silly woolly costumes accompanying Antigona, a princess masquerading (for reasons never made clear) as a shepherdess. Later they played deer in a hunting scene, the men with magnificent antlers on their heads.
At the end of Act 1 I decided this production was definitely camp, but respectful, and the Japanese setting was plausible.
In Act 2 Admeto laments that he loves two women while two dancers, one dressed in white and one in black, drift across the stage behind him: they used at this point the whole stage, right to the back, and very impressive it is too, reputedly the largest in Britain. The act ends with showpiece arias for the two sopranos; Alceste's is accompanied by half a dozen naked dancers in see-through chiffon kimonos tempting him/her (for she is now dressed as a samurai warrior). That seemed inappropriate since what she is singing has to do with discovering whether he husband (not she) is faithful or not; but maybe the director's aim was just to plant a suggstion of "temptation" generally.
Act 3 concludes with a solo dance for Alceste's spirit. I never felt the production fully integrated the spirit (unlike the rest of the dancers, who were fine). Before that there was an ensemble song, and before that a beautiful duet for Admeto and Alceste as the lovers are reconciled; but it was undermined by some silly business as Trasimede flits around surreptitiously with a drawn sword plotting to murder his brother.
This was also the only act in which the prevailing Japanese aesthetic was undermined for some reason with European baroque elements: a painted backdrop of a garden, then two drops of baroque palace interiors with windows and arched doorways. They flew up suddenly and disappeared just before the triumphal conclusion. I couldn't see the point, though one reviewer suggested it may have been a way of highlighting the forced, artificial, "stagey" nature of the proceedings at this point.
Plausibility, as so often, wasn't one of the librettist's strong points. Antigona has been obsessively in love throughout with Admeto, at one stage wrapping herself in a giant cloth portrait of him hanging from the flies (she is dressed only in a black swimsuit affair at this point). At the very end she is suddenly, instantly persuaded to switch her affections to Trasimede, the man she has energetically spurned throughout. Bizarre.
It was a delight, after a succession of 50 minute fringe productions, to have something really meaty and substantial to get one's teeth into.
Friday, 21 August 2009
THE CALEDONIA SESSIONS
20/8/09, The Hub (Edinburgh Festival)
Billed as "triplepipes, lust and spilt blood" it appeared to have none of the latter two and only a little of the first, at the very beginning, when the piper Barnaby Brown and the singer (and harpist) Patsy Seddon came on singing a Gaelic son. Later he played the bagpipes. D complained she'd been short-changed and I was inclined to agree.
A concert by Concerto Caledonia, a Scottish early music group (harpsichord, viol, flute, harp and pipes -- the flautist came from Nova Scotia and the harpist, judging by his accent, from somewhere equidistant between Glasgow, Dublin and Brunswick). With them they had Seddon, a Glasgow folk singer and guitarist called Alasdair Roberts and, an unexpected delight, Martin Carthy, who hadn't been named in the original Festial brochure and who we've never seen live.
And though his voice is reedy his stage presence put him head and shoulders above the rest of 'em.
He and Roberts sang different versions of the same song (called Lord Randall in Carthy's version, Lord Ronald in Roberts's) with recongisably similar words but set to quite different tunes.
There was a fine version of Sir Patrick Spens (which I've never heard sung) by Seddon, a medieval Welsh harp piece (essentially ten verses, each a variation on a very simple theme, with a common refrain) and an utterly impenetrable 17th century pipe song which reminded one of quite how tuneless traditional Scottish pipe music is.
The Hub is an unforgiving venue, made less forgiving by a decision to keep the house lights up. An evening for the most part of academic interest, though one can imagine in the right setting it might have been quite engrossing and involving. We emerged into a cold evening to mingle with the crowds leaving the Tattoo.
Billed as "triplepipes, lust and spilt blood" it appeared to have none of the latter two and only a little of the first, at the very beginning, when the piper Barnaby Brown and the singer (and harpist) Patsy Seddon came on singing a Gaelic son. Later he played the bagpipes. D complained she'd been short-changed and I was inclined to agree.
A concert by Concerto Caledonia, a Scottish early music group (harpsichord, viol, flute, harp and pipes -- the flautist came from Nova Scotia and the harpist, judging by his accent, from somewhere equidistant between Glasgow, Dublin and Brunswick). With them they had Seddon, a Glasgow folk singer and guitarist called Alasdair Roberts and, an unexpected delight, Martin Carthy, who hadn't been named in the original Festial brochure and who we've never seen live.
And though his voice is reedy his stage presence put him head and shoulders above the rest of 'em.
He and Roberts sang different versions of the same song (called Lord Randall in Carthy's version, Lord Ronald in Roberts's) with recongisably similar words but set to quite different tunes.
There was a fine version of Sir Patrick Spens (which I've never heard sung) by Seddon, a medieval Welsh harp piece (essentially ten verses, each a variation on a very simple theme, with a common refrain) and an utterly impenetrable 17th century pipe song which reminded one of quite how tuneless traditional Scottish pipe music is.
The Hub is an unforgiving venue, made less forgiving by a decision to keep the house lights up. An evening for the most part of academic interest, though one can imagine in the right setting it might have been quite engrossing and involving. We emerged into a cold evening to mingle with the crowds leaving the Tattoo.
SUICIDE NOTE
On Tuesday there was a suicide sandwich: Beachy Head (all about suicide) and Daniel Kitson's The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church (all about suicide indefinitely postponed) either side of comedy, laughter and song from Adams and Rae, who had little to say about perpetrating one's own death.
On Wednesday Faust began with our hero contemplating suicide.
On Thursday the most powerful scene in Chronicles of Long Kesh featured the prison officer contemplating suicide.
I'm looking out for Friday's dose, though somehow I doubt that Long Island Iced Tea will provide it.
On Wednesday Faust began with our hero contemplating suicide.
On Thursday the most powerful scene in Chronicles of Long Kesh featured the prison officer contemplating suicide.
I'm looking out for Friday's dose, though somehow I doubt that Long Island Iced Tea will provide it.
FAUST
19/8/09, Lowland Hall, Ingliston (Edinburgh Festival)
We took the airport bus from Waverley Bridge to the Hilton and hiked from the bus stop to the Royal Highland Showground, and at the end we hiked back in pouring rain, though we had, purely by chance, contrived to be sitting right by the exit so were the first of the thousands to get to the bus, with A powering ahead leaving the rest of us trailing.
Beforehand we'd prepared by visiting M&S and stocking up on salads, fruit and what not, which we ate in a corner of the hall before the show started and on the bus on the way back. A lot of planning went into that trip. I'm not sure it was worth it.
A man we met in a fringe queue, who said he was a theatre director in Dublin, called it the best piece of theatre he'd ever seen. We beg to differ. Undoubtedly spectacular, it was also ridiculously overblown, shed little light on the Faust legend and was very noisy.
It was staged in a vast hangar, directed by the Romanian Silviu Purcarete, which meant you seemed to be miles away from the action even when the set split in half and we all trooped through and round it for a traverse staging of Walpurgisnacht. Poorly translated subtitles didn't help, though the rain on the roof and the sounds of seagulls and of aircraft taking off overhead added to the atmosphere.
The Mephistopheles was the best thing in it: an actress with an extraordinary voice, who spent much of the time naked or partially so, twisting her body into shapes, effortlessly dominating Faust, an elderly and deeply unsympathetic cove.
This is Charlie Spencer's review in The Telegraph. I agree with every word:
Wednesday, 19 August 2009
BEJUN MEHTA, JULIUS DRAKE
19/8/09, Queen's Hall (Edinburgh Festival)
American counter-tenor and highly accomplished Brit accompanist in a programme of (mainly) English song, plus some Haydn settings of English words and a Beethoven cycle. Mehta has a lovely voice, though some of the Purcell at the start seemed to lie a little low for him. I was grateful for the words in the programme, not just for the translation from the German but also for the English since he's not hot on letting you hear the words.
Leider used to be one of the two things I automatically turned off when it came on Radio 3 (the other was jazz) but I'm starting to get the picture. Listen with sufficient care (and with the words to hand) and the whole thing becomes engrossing: the combination of musical effects and poetry, the singer's interpretation. A lot of the words, frankly, are pretty rubbish. But the Haydn included a positively brilliant setting of Shakespeare's "She never told her love" (which includes the phrases "worm in the bud" and "like Patience on a monument") from Twelfth Night: how odd that a comedy, in the hands of a composer like Haydn, should produce something so dramatic and dark and moving. On the other hand the words to Beethoven's "Auf dem Hugel sitz ich, spahend", by someone called Alois Jeitteles, seemed like the worst sort of derivative, self-indulgent romantic rubbish, though that didn't stop Ludwig producing something of great dramatic force and seductiveness.
The 20th century composers tended to choose lyrics of considerable quality in their own right. I'm not sure Vaughan Williams's Linden Lea qualifies (words by William Barnes, though English'd from the original dreadful Dorset dialect) but Lennox Berkeley's setting of de la Mare's The Horseman fits the description; so does Stanford's setting (also electrifyingly dramatic) of Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci; and Ivor Gurney's of Yeats's Down by the Salley Gardens.
There were a couple of very fast Peter Warlocks which I didn't "get"; and Vaughan Williams's Silent Noon (lyric by Dante Rossetti) which left me cold.
Otherwise it was a stunner.
Observations. Mobile phones are a curse: one rang out during the Gurney; and then again during Silent Noon which followed it, and Mehta stopped and started again, not unreasonably. The Queen's Hall audience is very elderly: we were about the youngest there. And though respectful and almost as quiet as the Wigmore Hall tribe, they are going deaf: the coughs started before the last dying note of Linden Lea had faded away; ditto the page turning after Herbert Howells' The Widow Bird. Whoever printed the programme had decided to transpose two lines in La Belle Dame... "She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept, and sigh'd full sore. And there I shut her wild wild eyes And made sweet moan" it read: it should be "With kisses four", with "And made sweet moan" at the end of an earlier stanza, but you can see why they did it.
American counter-tenor and highly accomplished Brit accompanist in a programme of (mainly) English song, plus some Haydn settings of English words and a Beethoven cycle. Mehta has a lovely voice, though some of the Purcell at the start seemed to lie a little low for him. I was grateful for the words in the programme, not just for the translation from the German but also for the English since he's not hot on letting you hear the words.
Leider used to be one of the two things I automatically turned off when it came on Radio 3 (the other was jazz) but I'm starting to get the picture. Listen with sufficient care (and with the words to hand) and the whole thing becomes engrossing: the combination of musical effects and poetry, the singer's interpretation. A lot of the words, frankly, are pretty rubbish. But the Haydn included a positively brilliant setting of Shakespeare's "She never told her love" (which includes the phrases "worm in the bud" and "like Patience on a monument") from Twelfth Night: how odd that a comedy, in the hands of a composer like Haydn, should produce something so dramatic and dark and moving. On the other hand the words to Beethoven's "Auf dem Hugel sitz ich, spahend", by someone called Alois Jeitteles, seemed like the worst sort of derivative, self-indulgent romantic rubbish, though that didn't stop Ludwig producing something of great dramatic force and seductiveness.
The 20th century composers tended to choose lyrics of considerable quality in their own right. I'm not sure Vaughan Williams's Linden Lea qualifies (words by William Barnes, though English'd from the original dreadful Dorset dialect) but Lennox Berkeley's setting of de la Mare's The Horseman fits the description; so does Stanford's setting (also electrifyingly dramatic) of Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci; and Ivor Gurney's of Yeats's Down by the Salley Gardens.
There were a couple of very fast Peter Warlocks which I didn't "get"; and Vaughan Williams's Silent Noon (lyric by Dante Rossetti) which left me cold.
Otherwise it was a stunner.
Observations. Mobile phones are a curse: one rang out during the Gurney; and then again during Silent Noon which followed it, and Mehta stopped and started again, not unreasonably. The Queen's Hall audience is very elderly: we were about the youngest there. And though respectful and almost as quiet as the Wigmore Hall tribe, they are going deaf: the coughs started before the last dying note of Linden Lea had faded away; ditto the page turning after Herbert Howells' The Widow Bird. Whoever printed the programme had decided to transpose two lines in La Belle Dame... "She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept, and sigh'd full sore. And there I shut her wild wild eyes And made sweet moan" it read: it should be "With kisses four", with "And made sweet moan" at the end of an earlier stanza, but you can see why they did it.
Monday, 17 August 2009
MADE IN SCOTLAND
16/8/09, Usher Hall (Edinburgh Festival)
Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Paul Daniel, in a programme of works by Peter Maxwell Davies and James MacMillan. We only stayed for the first (Maxwell Davies) half because we'd managed to double book (sorry, James).
The hall barely half full which seemed a pity. Even so they'd run out of programmes: had to borrow one from a neighbour to remind myself what we were hearing.
Maxwell Davies's Symphony No 5 (written in 1994) is a lot more accessible than much of his music: alternating loud and soft, working up to a succession of climaxes full of brass and percussion (seven of the former, six of the latter, out of a total of 92); starts very quietly with a flute solo; ends very quietly with the double basses and a kettledrum. The solo flute (sometimes curiously flattened) is according to the composer reminiscent of the seabirds on Orkney, and the whole piece could be a reflection of the islands' turbulent weather.
The connections are absolutely explicit in the second piece, An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, which is a real crowd-pleaser. Traditional Scottish dance melodies (reminiscent of an American hoe-down), winding down towards the end of the night into a string quartet, which gradually collapses into drunken discord (cue blaring trumpets) until sunrise comes (cue more brass and percussion) and the main melody is reprised with the addition of a solo bagpipe, entering through the audience. Lots of onomatopoeic effects (including, S thought, the happy couple departing in a horse-drawn carriage to the sound of clip-clopping hooves). We all thought it marvellous.
Why can't more modern music make this kind of direct connection with an audience? Maxwell Davies can do it sometimes (though he's been accused of selling out for writing pieces like Orkney Wedding and Stromness); so many composers just don't seem interested.
Royal Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Paul Daniel, in a programme of works by Peter Maxwell Davies and James MacMillan. We only stayed for the first (Maxwell Davies) half because we'd managed to double book (sorry, James).
The hall barely half full which seemed a pity. Even so they'd run out of programmes: had to borrow one from a neighbour to remind myself what we were hearing.
Maxwell Davies's Symphony No 5 (written in 1994) is a lot more accessible than much of his music: alternating loud and soft, working up to a succession of climaxes full of brass and percussion (seven of the former, six of the latter, out of a total of 92); starts very quietly with a flute solo; ends very quietly with the double basses and a kettledrum. The solo flute (sometimes curiously flattened) is according to the composer reminiscent of the seabirds on Orkney, and the whole piece could be a reflection of the islands' turbulent weather.
The connections are absolutely explicit in the second piece, An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, which is a real crowd-pleaser. Traditional Scottish dance melodies (reminiscent of an American hoe-down), winding down towards the end of the night into a string quartet, which gradually collapses into drunken discord (cue blaring trumpets) until sunrise comes (cue more brass and percussion) and the main melody is reprised with the addition of a solo bagpipe, entering through the audience. Lots of onomatopoeic effects (including, S thought, the happy couple departing in a horse-drawn carriage to the sound of clip-clopping hooves). We all thought it marvellous.
Why can't more modern music make this kind of direct connection with an audience? Maxwell Davies can do it sometimes (though he's been accused of selling out for writing pieces like Orkney Wedding and Stromness); so many composers just don't seem interested.
OPTIMISM
6/8/09, Royal Lyceum Theatre (Edinburgh Festival)
Australian version of Candide. Frank Woodley, one half of Lano and Woodley (and so an erstwhile Perrier winner) as Candide in a pierrot costume, interspersing the action with a front of curtain stand-up routine: very useful, because if he hadn't done you'd have had no idea what was going on (even having seen the opera twice I was stumped).
Modern pop songs, modern dress; the Lisbon earthquake became a plane crash and terrorist outrage (I think). There were air hostesses and wind fans. Plastic curtains were drawn across the stage to signify changes of scene, along with an illuminated sign up under the proscenium. The whole thing interspersed with great bleeding chunks of undigested Voltaire , especially the lady with one buttock's interminable monologue.
It was noisy, structureless, under-rehearsed, poorly-conceived , poorly acted and wouldn't have been great as a fringe show: for the International Festival it was definitely below par. Much rather have had an hour of Woodley, an engaging performer, doing stand-up.
A, D and I left at the half. S stayed and said it got no better.
Australian version of Candide. Frank Woodley, one half of Lano and Woodley (and so an erstwhile Perrier winner) as Candide in a pierrot costume, interspersing the action with a front of curtain stand-up routine: very useful, because if he hadn't done you'd have had no idea what was going on (even having seen the opera twice I was stumped).
Modern pop songs, modern dress; the Lisbon earthquake became a plane crash and terrorist outrage (I think). There were air hostesses and wind fans. Plastic curtains were drawn across the stage to signify changes of scene, along with an illuminated sign up under the proscenium. The whole thing interspersed with great bleeding chunks of undigested Voltaire , especially the lady with one buttock's interminable monologue.
It was noisy, structureless, under-rehearsed, poorly-conceived , poorly acted and wouldn't have been great as a fringe show: for the International Festival it was definitely below par. Much rather have had an hour of Woodley, an engaging performer, doing stand-up.
A, D and I left at the half. S stayed and said it got no better.
Sunday, 16 August 2009
ST KILDA: ISLAND OF THE BIRDMEN
15/8/09, Festival Theatre (Edinburgh International Festival)
1hr 30 mins. Described as "an opera in three acts", performed in Gaelic, French and English (though I thought I caught snatches of Flemish as well), with choir, acrobats, aerialists, extensive video inserts and a five-strong band (piano, cello, trombone, accordion, percussion, plus conductor).
It had two composers (David P Graham, born in Stratford, based in Germany for Act I; Jean-Paul Dessy, Belgian, who also conducted, for Acts II and II). The original concept was by a Frenchman. The writer (Iain Finlay Macleod) was from Lewis; the choreographer (Juha-Pekka Marsalo) from Finland; the director (Thierry Poquet) from France. The two leading on-stage performers were a francophone Belgian (Alain Eloy) as a narrator speaking accented English and a singer (Alyth McCormack) from Lewis who sang Gaelic songs in a beautiful, high, bell-like voice.
The film, directed by Finlay Macleod and Poquet, featured an all-Scottish cast with "cliff dancers" from the Compagnie Retouramont, which sounds Belgian or French (presumably French: do they have cliffs in Belgium?).
The programme lists four co-producers (all francophone organisations) "in partnership with" the Gaelic Arts Agency and two French (?) organisations, "with the participation of" an Italian outfit, "and the support of" two French regional arts bodies.
A spectacular Europudding in other words, and like so many Europuddings it ended up an ambitious, intriguing but ultimately disappointing mish-mash, less than the sum of its parts.
The starting point was the island of St Kilda, abandoned by its people in the 1930s. Some of the best bits were the film clips shot at the time of a primitive, isolated community, swaddled in tweed against the Atlantic winds, whose economy revolved around birds. There was a story of sorts: a young couple; he goes off with others bird-hunting to a nearby island; the boat slips its knot and they are stranded for some days, perhaps many; when a rescue boat arrives he falls to his death from the cliff. But I would not have known that unless I'd read the synopsis.
The story is told simultaneously by the narrator and the singers on stage; on video; and by the activities of the aerialists, both on stage and (rather breathtaking this) on the cliffs of St Kilda itself.
The music was spiky but inoffensive. At the end the musicians joined the exodus, abandoning their instruments to walk up on stage and into the wings, leaving the cellist alone to reach a dying fall. My chief objections: every time Alyth McCormack came on, singing a Gaelic lament unaccompanied, after a few stanzas the band would strike up with something which seemed to come from a quite different sound world and gradually drowned her out; and the dirge-like quality of much of the music made it hard to stay awake (we were tired: we'd only just arrived from London).
The singing and narration were amplified. The stage was bare but for one huge screen at the back and another, smaller one hanging to one side of the proscenium. There were occasional moments of visual beauty: a woman in a white dress swinging from a rope from side to side; two aerialists behind a great plastic sheet, swinging into and away from it, like great sea birds on the cliff face (the sheet fell to the floor when they'd finished and was later rolled up and carried by the cast to the front of the stage, like a giant version of the bundles the islanders carried when they finally left).
The audience seemed appreciative, except for one couple just in front of us who chose to leave just as the islanders were preparing to do the same, the video screens showing pictures of the book of Exodus in a Gaelic bible.
At the end I was left wondering what the point was: a powerful story, and powerful imagery and powerful Gaelic music, muddied and obscured by the modern musical overlay and Belgian touches.
1hr 30 mins. Described as "an opera in three acts", performed in Gaelic, French and English (though I thought I caught snatches of Flemish as well), with choir, acrobats, aerialists, extensive video inserts and a five-strong band (piano, cello, trombone, accordion, percussion, plus conductor).
It had two composers (David P Graham, born in Stratford, based in Germany for Act I; Jean-Paul Dessy, Belgian, who also conducted, for Acts II and II). The original concept was by a Frenchman. The writer (Iain Finlay Macleod) was from Lewis; the choreographer (Juha-Pekka Marsalo) from Finland; the director (Thierry Poquet) from France. The two leading on-stage performers were a francophone Belgian (Alain Eloy) as a narrator speaking accented English and a singer (Alyth McCormack) from Lewis who sang Gaelic songs in a beautiful, high, bell-like voice.
The film, directed by Finlay Macleod and Poquet, featured an all-Scottish cast with "cliff dancers" from the Compagnie Retouramont, which sounds Belgian or French (presumably French: do they have cliffs in Belgium?).
The programme lists four co-producers (all francophone organisations) "in partnership with" the Gaelic Arts Agency and two French (?) organisations, "with the participation of" an Italian outfit, "and the support of" two French regional arts bodies.
A spectacular Europudding in other words, and like so many Europuddings it ended up an ambitious, intriguing but ultimately disappointing mish-mash, less than the sum of its parts.
The starting point was the island of St Kilda, abandoned by its people in the 1930s. Some of the best bits were the film clips shot at the time of a primitive, isolated community, swaddled in tweed against the Atlantic winds, whose economy revolved around birds. There was a story of sorts: a young couple; he goes off with others bird-hunting to a nearby island; the boat slips its knot and they are stranded for some days, perhaps many; when a rescue boat arrives he falls to his death from the cliff. But I would not have known that unless I'd read the synopsis.
The story is told simultaneously by the narrator and the singers on stage; on video; and by the activities of the aerialists, both on stage and (rather breathtaking this) on the cliffs of St Kilda itself.
The music was spiky but inoffensive. At the end the musicians joined the exodus, abandoning their instruments to walk up on stage and into the wings, leaving the cellist alone to reach a dying fall. My chief objections: every time Alyth McCormack came on, singing a Gaelic lament unaccompanied, after a few stanzas the band would strike up with something which seemed to come from a quite different sound world and gradually drowned her out; and the dirge-like quality of much of the music made it hard to stay awake (we were tired: we'd only just arrived from London).
The singing and narration were amplified. The stage was bare but for one huge screen at the back and another, smaller one hanging to one side of the proscenium. There were occasional moments of visual beauty: a woman in a white dress swinging from a rope from side to side; two aerialists behind a great plastic sheet, swinging into and away from it, like great sea birds on the cliff face (the sheet fell to the floor when they'd finished and was later rolled up and carried by the cast to the front of the stage, like a giant version of the bundles the islanders carried when they finally left).
The audience seemed appreciative, except for one couple just in front of us who chose to leave just as the islanders were preparing to do the same, the video screens showing pictures of the book of Exodus in a Gaelic bible.
At the end I was left wondering what the point was: a powerful story, and powerful imagery and powerful Gaelic music, muddied and obscured by the modern musical overlay and Belgian touches.
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