Scottish Culture at the Edinburgh Festival

The other night I was invited to a reception at the Lyceum Theatre to hear artistic director David Greig talk about the Lyceum’s plans for the Festival. I decided to do a little research and read about the Festival’s theatre programme. As a music critic I didn’t pay too much attention to the theatre programme at the festival launch, but on closer enquiry I was confused. I thought I had picked up the programme for the Adelaide Arts Festival instead! It is full of Australian productions from Adelaide and Sydney and there is very little Scottish theatre. Now I know the Adelaide Arts Festival it is probably the second best arts festival in the world after Edinburgh and I know Sydney theatre too and I’m sure their works will be of a good standard. I also note that the Australian theme is part of a larger cultural exchange between Australia and Britain and no doubt the Edinburgh Festival benefits from some funding from this source. I am also aware that this is festival director Fergus Linehan’s last festival and he has not only worked in Australia previously, but he is moving to Australia after the festival and will no doubt do some important arts job in Australia in future. I also am a big fan of Australia and know Australian culture well. (I was a visiting lecturer at the University of South Australia in the 1980s and visited arts festivals round the country.) I was chair of the Australian delegation of the European Parliament when I was an MEP in 1994-99 and helped negotiate cultural agreements with the Australian government and supported Aboriginal rights! After I left the European Parliament, I bought a small hotel in the Clare Valley and represented the Clare Valley on South Australia’s Arts Council. So I’m not opposed to Australian theatre; I’m just amazed at the lack of Scottish theatre in the official festival programme.

The only Scottish theatre I can find in the official programme is Liz Lochhead’s adaptation of ‘Medea’ but I do believe Euripides had a bit to do with it too, and this of course was first performed in 2000 so it’s not exactly new. It is also the National Theatre of Scotland’s contribution to the festival. I must say the National Theatre output continues to disappoint. The other Scottish show is Alan Cummings’ one man interpretation of Scotland’s National bard, Robert Burns, called ‘Burn’, which promises to be “dance-theatre“. Now Alan Cummings is a talented actor and as we have seen in ‘Cabaret’ he can sing and dance a bit, so I await with interest his interpretation. It promises “to go beyond the ‘biscuit tin’ image and deal with his mental health issues, his poverty and his tragedy”. Can we expect a savage critique of Burn’s rather like Liz Lochhead gave him in recent years for his treatment of women? In any case these two items hardly amount to a substantial contribution of Scottish theatre, surrounded as they are by Australian, Dutch and Canadian theatre. Fortunately, David Greig of the Lyceum has a healthy Scottish programme, but of course it is on the Fringe. Meanwhile the Lyceum Theatre, the most beautiful theatre in Edinburgh, is full of international work and has nothing Scottish in it.

How Scottish should the Edinburgh Festival be? This is an argument I used to have with Fergus Linehan’s predecessor as director Sir Jonathan Mills, knighted for his services to the union, no doubt because he very rarely put anything Scottish in the Festival and during the debate over the referendum put on a festival reminding us of our past as the British Empire. This is something that I hoped would disappear with the new director Fergus Linehan, who, although he wasn’t a Scot, was Irish and knew Edinburgh well. Incidentally, Nicola Benedetti will be the first ever Scottish director of the Edinburgh Festival in its 75 years of existence and I’m sure she will do a good job, particularly in bringing a younger audience to the festival.

When I raised the question of where the Scottish culture was, Sir Jonathan Mills would respond airily, “this is an international festival”. I had to remind him that part of the mission statement of the Edinburgh Festival is to bring the best of Scottish culture to an international audience. He of course largely ignored this; indeed, during the Burns bicentennial year, I asked where Burns was in the programme and his response was “everyone will be bored with Burns by August”. I replied so “Beethoven, Brahms and Mendelssohn thought Burns was important but Edinburgh where he made his name ignores him”! Now Fergus Linehan has been much better at bringing Scottish culture to the festival and last year we had an excellent series of concerts of Scots traditional music which is a really important part of Scottish culture. Sadly, this year, a bit like Scottish theatre, it has largely disappeared. When I asked Fergus about this at the festival launch in March, he said there had been objections from established traditional music festivals, but I could find no evidence of this. As for classical music this is of course international but there are good Scottish composers from the past and of course contemporary composers like Jimmy Macmillan. Sadly no Scottish composers are part of the classical programme at the Usher Hall or the Queens Hall. As for opera sadly it is a very small part of the festival with only one staged opera and that comes from England: Garsington’ s ‘Rusalka’, although it does have a Scottish conductor in Douglas Boyd. The others are concert performances of ‘Fidelio’ (also with a Scottish conductor, Donald Runnicles), and ‘Salome’ from Bergen with Ed Gardener as conductor. To quote the Guardian’s opera critic Tim Ashley from some years ago “I’m afraid the Edinburgh Festival is no longer of international quality as far as opera is concerned”. Also missing is Scottish Opera who last year were the stars of the Festival with their staged production of ‘Falstaff’. I asked Fergus about their absence and he said it wasn’t possible this year, but he hoped he it would be possible in future.

Of course there are Scottish companies like the BBC Scottish Symphony, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra taking part in the festival, but significantly not playing Scottish music. To be truthful this festival could be staged in Australia or Europe without anyone blinking indeed it would be much more at home in Australia than Edinburgh. I only hope that Nicola Benedetti our first ever Scottish director of the Edinburgh Festival makes the festival meet its mission statement “to bring the best of Scottish culture to an international audience”. Scotland has a rich cultural heritage in music and theatre. It has one of the leading Conservatoires in the world in Glasgow, and it has a rich stream of traditional music which resonates round the world. It does have much to show the world. Yes Edinburgh is an international festival, but it is based in Scotland. Let us encourage our international audience to get to know Scottish culture. They may be pleasantly surprised.