Locating Theatre: Regionalism and Interculturalism at Edinburgh

Locating Theatre Regionalism and Interculturalism atEdinburgh David Graverand Loren Kruger THE PLAGUE AND promise of contemporary European affairs stems in large part from the tensions between regionalism and internationalism. The identity of this continental peninsula and associated islands is now more contested than ever and its future will depend on how it balances the anxieties of life on a local level with the opportunities and threats of international connections. The need for a proper balance between the local and global in Europe and across the world, and the rich possibilities latent in a cultural exchange between regions, was aptly demonstrated at the 1992 Edinburgh International Festival and its accompanying Fringe. Where some productions sank into a crude parochialism and others evaporated into bland multicultural mist, the truly memorable performances enriched aesthetic skills honed upon the particularities of stage and community with judicious borrowings from abroad. The groups responsible for these successful ifntegrations of regional and international concerns recognized their specific locality (both theatrical and social), not as an isolating fortress but as a forum where local interests can meet foreign influences on an equitable footing. The official Festival and the Fringe offered two quite different methods of drawing together the diverse local colors of the individual productions. The Fringe Society welcomed with its coordinating services over 550 companies, virtually anyone with the £210 entrance fee, leaving aesthetic discrimination to the venues and audiences. The Traverse, Demarco Gal71 lery, and Theatre Workshop were noteworthy for the high caliber of their international offerings, while the Assembly Rooms offered the best of regional theatre from Britain and Ireland. In contrast to the carnivalesque range of the Fringe, the offerings of the official International Festival were decidedly provincial; 14 out of 19 theatre and dance productions were British. The bulk of the official offerings consisted of performances and readings of plays by two Britons, Harley Granville Barker (1877-1946) and C. P. Taylor (1929-1981), little-known in Britain and hardly at all anywhere else. local identitiesand internationalrelations If the Taylor revival ended up by burying the playwright under the weight of his own verbosity, the Barker retrospective proved his worth. Barker's drama, indeed, displays a distinctly English synthesis of turn-ofthe -century European social drama and the double-edged society wit of Wilde that demonstrates the advantages ofmolding influences from a variety of sources to the aesthetic and social issues of a particular place and time. The successes and failures of the Barker productions also underscore the advantages of theatre that is rooted in a community and a history of close ensemble work. The dated material of His Majesty (1928), a naive appeal to the stability of constitutional monarchy in a disintegrating Europe, was impressively counterbalanced by the gestic precision of the production by Richmond's 21-year-old Orange Tree Theatre. However, the surprising topicality of trust fund investment fraud in The Voysey Inheritance(1905) was somewhat vitiated by the too well-upholstered, almost antiquarian production put together by the official Festival and the Royal Lyceum Theatre. Free from the often stultifying constraints of the official Festival's programing choices, the Fringe offered several conceptually imaginative combinations of local and transnational issues. Dublin's Passion Machine juxtaposed the international appeal and liberating promise of soccer with the cultural and financial constraints of life in North Dublin in Studs (written and directed by Paul Mercier). Combining wittily choreographed wins and losses with rapid-fire dialogue, and monologues that mixed irony and bravado in equal measure, the play avoided the pitfall of idealizing soccer as a man's way out of the grim realities of the inner city while giving that dream its due. Clyde Unity Theatre's resident playwright John Binnie provided an even more nuanced meditation on the tensions between celebrity and com72 munity in his Beyond The Rainbow Pivoting upon an encounter between Judy Garland (on tour in Glasgow in 1951) and a local, latent-homosexual waiter and taking in aspects of life in present-day working class Glasgow, the play affirms the value of Glaswegian culture while acknowledging and defending its otherness, generally ignored by conventional brands of Scottish nationalism. In contrast to the local drama mentioned so far...