Highland Fling: Edinburgh, Scotland

Highland Fling Edinburgh, Scotland Glenn Loney It was Rudolf Bing who had the first vision of an international festival, preferably located in some small city of immense charm and incredibly historic architecture. To pull postwar Britain out of the cultural and economic doldrums, Bing believed such a festival, possibly in Oxford or Cambridge, would be exciting for the English, stimulating for foreign culture-seekers, and finally, profitable for the festival city. Edinburgh, the historic and charming capital city of Scotland, was receptive, so it was there that Bing founded what is today one of the best-known and most eclectic of summer festivals. In Edinburgh this past August, the first thing a critic might see-after marveling at the spectacle of the medieval city's "Royal Mile," stretched out along a mountainous incline from Holyrood Palace to the lofty Edinburgh Castle-was a fact-sheet outlining some of the Festival superlatives. There were to be 164 performances, the sheet noted, with 15 of them opera, 24 dance, 54 theatre, and 23 musical, plus some specialties. World premieres and British premieres were promised-one of them the Birmingham Repertory's pleasant production of Candide. Some 22 nations were represented by 25 troupes. With the Festival itself, plus the popular military drills of the Edinburgh Tattoo, the Fringe Festival, and the International Film Festival, Edinburgh expected over 100,000 tourists. Aesthetic arguments in favor of the Edinburgh Festival were mainly the foreign productions, visible proofs of excellence. One of the guest ensembles, though not always the objects of raves at home, was an Edinburgh sensation. This was the San Francisco Ballet, with several programs of ballet, notably Michael Smuin's unconventional Romeo and Juliet, in which street-corner prostitutes join in the men's sword-play. The Cologne Opera's new staging of Rossini's I Barbiere di Siviglia was much admired, and Musgrave's The Voice of Ariadne also excited interest. The single most impressive staging in the Festival, however, was the Britannicus of France's Th6stre de la Salamandre, which has already toured widely on the continent. Not only is it acted in costumes and an architectural en133 Theatre de la Salamandre's BRITANNICUS vironment of cold, classic splendor, but it Is also very exciting theatre, considering the rigid restraint of Racine's neo-classic text. The Salamandre players appear, not in one of those ambiguous, abstract stairs-and-pillars settings, but in a highly detailed corner of an elegant apartment In Versailles . Britannicus may indeed parallel power struggles in the court of Racine's own monarch, but it may be even more contemporary than that. Rather less recondite than neo-classic tragedy are the comedies of Terence. The National Theatre of Rumania brought to Edinburgh a staging of The Girl from Andros which was a delight from beginning to end, though not a syllable was understandable. Director Grigore Gonta borrowed from Peter Brook and others the circus devises of entries made by sliding down ropes, of juggling and acrobatics, and from Jim Dale and Frank Dunlop, the merry, Scapino-like interaction with the audience. This is a very young company , full of verve and Innocent charm, and the production seemed a lineal descendant of Tom O'Horgan's first work at La Mama E.T.C. Unfortunately, even with simultaneous translation, Greece's Festival presentation, an eighteenth-century Greek comedy, Petros Katsaitis' Iphigenia in Lixourion, couldn't compel interest. The play itself is the work of a Greek writer who managed to rework the Iphigenla legend In happier terms than did the ancients. Originally conceived for a fairly uneducated audience , the play, In the conception of director Spyros Evangelatos, was also performed by the same kind of people, the villagers of Lixourlon, Including a slightly demented girl as lphigenia. The members of Athens' AmphI-Theatre 134 ensemble are energetic, attractive, and agreeable, but the style of the production was "coarse-acting." Far better had the Greek company presented a play worthy of their talents-the Medea or the Lysistrata perhaps-and shown their mettle, rather than pretending to be bad actors. Some excellent acting was shown by the Brighton Theatre, a troupe of four young men (Bruce Alexander, Alan...