"The line between sacred and profane, between a harvest-festival and a Nuremberg rally, is difficult to draw", cultural critic, George Steiner, said in his opening address to the 50th Edinburgh Festival. The event, the largest arts festival in the world, is a faithful reflection of the society from which it comes, in all its beauty, in all its commercialism, in all its brilliance, in all its stupidity.
Before the International Festival opened this year, it had taken £1.7 million at the box office, a 15 per cent increase on last year, and income from sponsors was up to £1.25 million. The Festival Fringe box office has already taken over £1 million, a 13 per cent increase on last year, and many Fringe tickets are sold at venues, rather than by the central box office. You don't get that level of ticket sales without selling to the whole world, and people flock to the mother and father of all arts jamborees for reasons honourable and lowly.
Vast buses bring in tourists to the International Festival, attracted, often mistakenly, by that very gloss of unimpeachably high culture which is routinely criticised. An infuriated American patriarch seemed to offer a healthy counterpoint to every experience I had.
"My wife picks these moments, like three in the morning, to ask me: `Do ya wanna hear some Scottish fiddle music?'." Outside Greyfriars Kirk, as the rain poured on the queue who had come to hear leading exponents of the Highlands fiddling tradition, he was all for selling the tickets to the many willing punters, and getting to shelter.
Highland fiddling is often staccato, full of those jagged rhythms known as the "Scot's snap", and for Irish listeners there is, of course, the delight of going back to the origins of much of the Donegal tradition.
Sweet Molly, played as a strathspey and as a reel by Bonnie Rideout, an American U.S. Scottish national fiddle champion, is similar in its great octave leaps, to Brenda Stubbert's, a Cape Breton reel played by Altan, and The Perrie Werrie, played in Edinburgh by the current darling of Scottish fiddling, Alasdair Fraser, appears as Pirrie Wirrie on Altan's album Island Angel.
Fascinating to Irish ears, too, is the mimicking of the bagpipes in which fiddling engaged when the bagpipes were banned under English law. Bonnie Rideout's Kindred Spirits is a long, mournful meditation composed almost within the pipes' narrow range, spiralling away from its "urlar" or base, into more intricate fancies; Rideout has called the pipe lament, or "piobaireachd': "an invitation to trance."
The festival immediately reflects the political tensions of its time, and the relatively strong showing of Scottish culture in the international festival programme this year reflects the growing hope that there will be a Labour government next year, and that they will inaugurate a Scottish assembly in Edinburgh. James McMillan, the 37-year-old Scottish composer whose first full opera, Ines de Castro, premiered at the festival, was being seen, as the Scotsman noted, "as a sort of musical Braveheart", and his decision to live and work in Scotland was emotionally mentioned in broadsheet after broadsheet.
BUT Ines de Castro is a real thistle, and hard for the nation to clasp to its bosom. Based on John Clifford's play of the same name, it tells the true, 14th century story of a Castilian noblewoman, Ines, who becomes the lover of Pedro, Prince of Portugal. As tension grows between Castile and Portugal and Pedro refuses to give up the woman who has been his lover for 10 years and borne him two children, her murder is ordered.
McMillan's music is lush and sweeping, pulling out all the stops of the Scottish Opera's orchestra and off-stage chorus, but it eschews melody for the sake of tension right from the beginning, apart from some moments when Ines declares her love. Though absolutely gripped by the drama, this listener still longed for the melody which counterpoints the dissonance in The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, which shot McMillan to fame at the London Proms in 1990, and Seven Last Words From The Cross, with its magnificent cry of: "Woman, behold thy Son!"
As the British press is fond of repeating, McMillan is a devout Catholic, and he seems to allow himself the full power of unworried melody more easily in a religious context. Still, Ines de Castro, conducted by Richard Armstrong, directed by Jonathan Moore, with the lead superbly sung and acted by Helen Field, seems to offer a strong challenge to the kind of Catholicism which supports murderous regimes in South America, as it did in Spain and Portugal in the time of Ines the place of the Virgin in the opening procession is taken at the end by the hideous image of Ines's skeleton, tricked out in the queen's crown which was denied her. The ghastly spectacle, which could have sprung from the imagination of Goya, is redeemed only by the piping voice of a young girl in white, to whom the ghost of Ines repeats that life can, indeed, be different.
Quite another Virgin Mary made a processional entrance in another Scottish feature of the international programme; an effigy of Margaret Thatcher was carried aloft as part of the mock religious ritual which opened John McGrath's A Satire of the Four Estaites. The play, produced by Wildcat, is a direct theatrical descendant of David Lyndsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites, a 16th century work first revived in modem times by Tyrone Guthrie at the Edinburgh Festival in 1948. McGrath has added the estate of the meeja - his Lord Merde, Fosters-swilling and bedecked with Skippy The Bush Kangaroo slippers, is highly recognisable.
This is a propagandist play, aimed at lampooning those McGrath sees as the enemies of a future Scottish democracy. Written in rhyming couplets, it uses the tradition of medieval miracle plays as Dario Fo has used early continental political and religious theatre. It is deliberately throw-away theatre, however, and it is a shame that Mc Grath, famous for his 7:84 play, The Stag, The Cheviot, and the Black, Black Oil, did not aspire to more for this festival.
SCOTTISH nationalism had a strong showing in the Fringe as well, but most of the biggest Fringe hits of the week were imports, among them one from Russia and one from Poland. If you think about it, the snow puts everyone into the traditional clown's dilemma - at the mercy of mighty forces we do not understand. So Slava Polunin's Snowshow, which is coming to the Dublin Theatre Festival, brings to clowning a specially Russian flavour, creating a character who is a hostage not just to his own humanity, but also to the elements. Polunin, a traditional white-faced, red-nosed clown, imbues his show with the absurd spirit of Gogol; as the audience clapped and roared at the end he opened the curtain slightly and stared silently back at them.
Performed under the glowering Edinburgh sky, in the university quad, Poland's Teatr Biuro in Podrozy's Carmen Funebre is a powerful, pyrotechnic anti-war statement, with specific references to Bosnia. It opens with huge, still-walking gods of war, cracking their whips to make the humans run but, brilliantly, they turn into wounded soldiers, hobbling on their stilts and asking for alms. The fact that it is humans who destroy themselves is never shirked, as a stylised rape scene ends with the soldiers pitifully showing to the audience their pocket pictures of the girls they left at home: "Marya, Maruska..." This was surely one for the talent-spotters from Galway Arts Festival to note.
How much easier it is for a Fringe show rather than an International Festival show to tell a story. It is obvious from the International Festival's programme that it has buckled under the strain of trying to mean something to everyone, and has bought into a kind of international super-culture, unspecific, expensive and universally palatable where pearls are worn (and tour buses can park).
Radical Graham, a programme of work by the great American choreographer, Martha Graham, was a typical example of this culture, and it was, for the most part, a futile disinterring of dated choreography. The sharp angles, reminiscent of Cubist painting which she allows her dancers, are no longer radical, and some of the pieces had that kind of drawing-room daring associated with Yeats's plays - Errand Into The Maze, for instance, featured a Minotaur with a set of horns which immediately made him ridiculous.
Virginia Woolf's Orlando, adapted for the stage by Darryl Pinckney and Robert Wilson, was another international super-culture show, and not even the astonishing performance of Miranda Richardson, and the feast of shifting light and shape that was Wilson's visual concept could distract from the fact that Orlando is based on the personality of Vita Sackville-West, as seen through the love of Woolf, and is as specific, limited and shallow as are most love letters. For once I agreed with the American patriarch: "A lotta play of light and dark, a lotta droning music, a lotta challenge to stay awake."
The sponsors who fuel this international super-culture may often support events for the wrong reasons, but sometimes there is a happy collision of self-interest and excellence, providing artistic experiences too often denied to the Irish-based punter. Velazquez in Seville, at the National Gallery of Scotland, puts the early, Sevillian work of the great 17th century painter into its real context: the religious, social and artistic framework of the city at that time. Instead of showing great works in splendid isolation, here they are shown with their influences and their copies: Kitchen Maid With The Supper At Emmaus, from our National Gallery, is here shown with an inferior copy, now in Chicago, either by Velazquez himself, or by his studio. The painter's ability to make of the most lowly scene a part of God's plan, luminous with significance, is extraordinary.
THIS was in the "sacred" part of Steiner's equation for festivals, and so too was Mark Morris's sublime production of Gluck's 18th century opera, Orfeo and Euridice, which is among the strongest artistic experiences I have ever had. Against huge rippling white curtains, with the black-clad chorus of the Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Christopher Hogwood, ranked on either side, Morris's brilliant choreography followed the delicate sweeps of the glorious baroque music. His technique was to unostentatiously loosen from their bonds traditional forms, like the pas-de-deux, the jete and the pirouette, to send his dancers flowing in gentle circles, which broke like clouds into soft leaps.
The story of what was written as a "reform opera", an opera for the Age of Reason, has a relevance rare in the form. Orfeo's trip to the underworld to bring back his wife, Euridice, is filled with domestic, recognisable grief and joy, and the power of love to conquer death is all the more moving in the opera for its contrast with life. A trustworthy score for the opera has only been extant for a little over 30 years, but another impediment to its production has been the fact that it was written for a castrato Orfeo. Michael Chance's high, yet rich tenor voice still could not win over the American patriarch, who wanted the hero to pack more power: "A baritone", he pronounced, "wudda had more balls."