The Edinburgh Festival of 2023 wraps up
All this week, Edinburgh has had the slightly poignant feel that the aftermath of a party usually brings. The epicentres of the Festival and Fringe have been full of people in high viz jackets - many of them not the kind you usually see using heavy machinery or stacking together things that don’t seem to naturally fit. Heavy freight trucks and wee caterpillars beep importantly as they reverse to pick up loads of wood and steel as the various pop-up venues pop down. Others puzzle over what to do with discarded costumes, broken props and leftover gallons of chip oil.
Walking around the Meadows yesterday, secondary pupils on lunch break from St Tams and a primary school class doing PE jinked about amid the end-of-festival crews and last-day cast picnics. Two women chatted as they strolled behind me on Middle Meadow Walk, about restoring order to their flat after hosting what sounded like many guests: “It was so amazing to walk in and see the living room floor - and you actually sitting on the sofa!”
The Italians have a word for people who enjoy watching others work and giving unwanted advice - Umari. By the rule that absolutely everything now seems like a Fringe show, the deconstruction is pretty good and as an apprentice Umarel, I give it four stars.
I didn’t see all that many actual performances this year - I was lying low due to my recent bereavement. But on the last weekend, I managed to see three things and I loved them all.
My uncle, David Kemp, has been unwell and it seemed unlikely that he would make it to his top pick, which we had booked on the day booking opened in May, Mahler’s First Symphony played by the Simon Bolivar Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. But in the event, he rallied and was keen to go. The concert was an absolute blast. Mahler’s First is the most accessible of his ten symphonies - with tonnes of percussion and a section that draws on the music of Mahler’s childhood, including creating the effect of the Klezmer using orchestral instruments. Dudamel is one of a long list of great and famous conductors we have been able to see at the EIF - and the event was definitely up there with the best ever. The conductor and the orchestra seemed to share a strong rapport and there was tremendous verve and brio in their playing.
I managed to change our seats for wheelchair ones. It seems EIF tickets are sold like a discount airline - early prices are half the later ones - but the booking office exchanged our seats at the original May prices and we got a better view. I collected David by car from Glasgow and returned him afterwards - so it was a wee epic. The staff, from booking office to ushers, my son William who came with us and daughter Mary who joined us for a pizza at L”Artigiano beforehand, the waiters there, and the folk at the bus stop on Lothian Road (who returned the wheelchair) were all really helpful.
The International Festival is very special to David. He is one of a diminishing band who was there at the first-ever Festival, in 1947. Aged 10, he attended the premier of his father Robert Kemp’s adaptation of ‘The Satire of the Three Estates’. David's lifelong love of opera was triggered at the 1952 Edinburgh Festival, aged 15, when he was smitten by two glamorous opera stars, Anneliese Rothenberger who sang Papagina in the Magic Flute, and Lisa della Casa who sang Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier, both by the Hamburg State Opera . “I can still see them both as if it was yesterday,” he said when I interviewed him in 2017 for a blog about 70 years of the Festival.
The second of the three shows I saw was “Club Life” at Summerhall, by someone I remember from my youth, Fred Deakin. The show was constructed around the clubs he ran in Edinburgh, and featured six short cameos where he shared a bit about his life - for example, teenage parties where he found a role by playing his 7-inch singles, his experience of getting leukemia in his mid-20s. Each cameo was followed by a DJ set that was a homage to the club. I remember some of them - a club called ‘Misery’, in a dingy basement where people wandered around with hoovers and mops.
The other one I remember was ‘Going Places’ in the late 90s. In those days, cool people wore black and were judgy about what music you liked. But ‘Going Places’ played easy listening - US TV theme tunes and Barry Manilow - that were fun to dance to. Everyone used to dress up and I had friends for whom this was the highlight of their month - they would trawl the vintage and charity shops for just the right ironic outfit. During each ‘Club Life’ set the audience hit the dance floor and could go to the bar. The show was a five-star hit, deservedly. At the close, Fred spoke earnestly about the importance of holding space, community and love. I had the sense that in another era, he might have been a vicar.
The last show was “Blizzard” by actor Emily Woof, also at Summerhall. They seemed to have a lot of good shows - probably by dint of having a team of actual programmers, rather than selecting them according to which cast is willing to pay the most, as it seems some venues do.
‘Blizzard’, a one-woman play written by Woof, was funny, touching and at times, baffling. It is about a ditsy woman married to a professor of neuroscience, who both call each other Dotty. She ends up heading to Switzerland to deliver his lecture on neural avalanches; meets a circus performer who makes animal noises and sells Nietzsche merch; dons a glittery dress (with a mind of its own) and performs the lecture instead of delivering it, and in consequence gets dumped by her husband. Then she is caught up in a real avalanche and finds her way to the abandoned asylum where Nietzsche spent his last days. She realises that you can dance and think at the same time and rushes back in the form of energy to share this with her husband. He also may have died, and the play ends with her taking the shape of a tree in a pot that has been left outside their house. It was incredibly silly and yet as the lights came up in the anatomy lecture theatre at Summerhall, I had to wipe away tears.
These seemed like three perfect Festival/ Fringe shows to me - I can’t imagine seeing them anywhere else. The cultural circus has packed up now for another year, but some sparkle remains in the memory.