Writing this column at this time of year
always seems to involve a combination of deep-level recollection and
outright imaginative exercise. Spending more or less the whole of
August in Edinburgh as I do, and in that hothouse atmosphere seeing
more than twice as many shows as are covered in this entire double
issue (including the late extras at the back!), tends to twist one’s
theatrical viewpoint into a different topology, at least for a
while. One of the most useful phrases I learned early in my
career was a London editor’s term for the inexplicable fever that seems
to descend on Festival critics: “the Edinburgh bends”.
Consequently, a significant degree of recalibration was required when I
took a brief trip down to Bath and Stratford to review the second
tranche of Peter Hall Company openings and the latest three in Michael
Boyd’s Histories project for the RSC. In theory, five shows in
two days ought to have been a walk in the park compared to my standard
Edinburgh regime of five a day; in practice, the abbreviated Fringe
attention span (few theatrical offerings there are now even as much as
90 minutes long) took some overcoming. My reviews reprinted later
in the issue may demonstrate as much. But it is always worthwhile
making connections with extrinsic matter that may illuminate the
subject at hand.
Victory at
Bath, for instance, was not the only Athol Fugard premiere of the
month; his
Exits And Entrances was
playing simultaneously at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh. And,
perfunctory and pessimistic as the Bath play may be, it was still more
substantial than the kind of Afrikaner version of
The Dresser offered to Fringe
audiences, in which the two characters speechified at each other far
more than they conversed.
Tokenism
A similar connection, slightly at an angle to the main topic but in the
event extremely telling, was made by my companion at
Carmen Jones just before I headed
north. Several reviewers have commented on the awkwardness of
placing the orchestra in a pit centre-stage, so that the vocal and
dramatic action takes place either behind them or on a narrow walkway
in front. But foregrounding the presence of the orchestra also
made something else visible. As my friend pointed out, the
all-black cast was in stark contrast to what, on the night we saw the
show, was an all-white orchestra (with the possible exception of one
Oriental player). Director Jude Kelly and designer Michael Vale
had inadvertently made conspicuous the principal issue surrounding the
work itself.
Whether Oscar Hammerstein’s modernisation of Bizet’s opera was
motivated by audacity or patronising exoticism, a staging that largely
keeps the black folk behind the whites and in a separate area really
does make the whole exercise look like the tokenism it is so easy to
interpret it as being. If, say, Sherry Boone as Cindy Lou had
gone for a rest to sit with the string section, it could almost have
been another Rosa Parks moment. I know that sounds flippant, but
once seen, that distinction of skin colour between singers and players
is impossible to ignore.