The Sun Also Rises
Royal Lyceum
The Cage
Pleasance
Borderline Racist
The Canons’ Gait
The Edinburgh International Festival, respectable elder brother of the drop-out Fringe, takes its art very seriously indeed and expects the audience to do the same. It gives us the exotic, the challenging, the eclectic, the mesmeric. It gives us, in a word, the Mickey Finns. Usually we get Palestinian ghost-lore or Slovakian puppet-theatre or sub-Saharan tribal epic or Lesotho revenge drama or Apache creation myth. Sometimes we get all five, in Finnish, with subtitles and video projections, and an on-stage bongo squadron to keep us from our slumbers. But this year, in a stunning reversal of tradition, we’ve got a straight play adaptated from a bestseller by a well-known author. It’s even in English.
The Sun Also Rises doesn’t readily lend itself to the stage unless you decide to keep the narrator and most of the characters and choose to reproduce faithfully every scene in the book in the correct lineal sequence. The director, John Collins, has settled on this artless scheme and the show comes in at just under four hours. The 1920s setting has been abandoned in favour of somewhere-anywhere-and-nowhere.
We’re in a generic bar which looks like a Swedish chalet varnished in brown and scattered with chairs from a 1970s canteen. The actors wear modern high-street clothes. Utterly barmy! Period costumes effortlessly and emphatically conjure a vanished age but if you ditch that potent amenity, you dump the audience in a mixed-message neverland where word and gesture are antique but suitings and furnishings are up to date.
Lady Brett Ashley (nicely played by Lucy Taylor) is done up as a hard-faced bottle blonde in an H&M coat-dress. Scarcely the toast of Europe, more a single mum at a speed-dating night. Jake Barnes — Hemingway’s hunting-and-shooting alter ego — lounges around reciting chunks of the text in a crumpled Hugo Boss business suit. Couldn’t Papa look more dapper? And anyone expecting a grizzly existentialist he-man will be disappointed. Mike Iveson plays him as a squeaky-clean yuppie who’d have trouble catching a duck at a fairground. The doomed romance between Barnes and Ashley — an heiress without a fortune and a fisherman without a rod — feels pretty creaky in the book and is revealed on stage as perfectly incredible, a spasm of convenient fantasy born out of Hemingway’s self-regard. Having said all that, this show works surprisingly well. The material overcomes every shortcoming. Hemingway’s narrative voice, always beguiling, is often acutely funny too, and his stark and potent tale of dissolute youth tormented by unattainable longings has an enduring fascination. It’s a Great War Withnail. Against all the odds, I loved this show.
Fresh off the train, I bumbled into the first Fringe play I could find. The Cage opens with a wedding gone wrong. A groom has secretly learnt that his best man has been involved with his fiancée. Six months later he arrives at her house for a reckoning. By claiming to know nothing of the affair he catches her in tangles of embarrassed concealment. A neat start. The best man, now her lover, arrives, and the lying wretch has to pretend they’re ‘just friends’ and he popped over by accident. The web of deceit is cunningly elaborated but the play wants to be more than a love triangle. It wants blood. The groom has armed himself with a Colt 45 which sets the power balance too heavily in his favour and spoils the climax with silly violence.
There are other pretentious detours. The play opens with a Pirandello-esque sequence in which an audience member (who is actually one of the cast) is hauled from his seat and forced to answer humiliating questions at gunpoint. That this character was named Lloyd, and was feared to be a critic in disguise, added very little to my enjoyment of the scene. But the play, though flawed, is richly entertaining because of the groom’s starry performance. Dugald Bruce Lockhart is an actor who summons up all kinds of bygone associations. Stiff upper lip. Jolly good show. Terribly British and all that. He could be Kenneth More but with tons more energy and passion. He has grip, he has attack. He burns with furious concentration. He launches himself at every role like a prize-fighter who wants to go the full 12 rather than raze his opponent in the first. Physically he’s compact, straight-backed, full-haired, attractive without being drop-dead gorgeous. He is limited, in terms of casting, which isn’t always a disaster. Quite definitely he should be a star but he’s probably guessed that this isn’t the show to propel him beyond the earth’s gravitational tug. At the curtain-call his smile wore a regretful, almost apologetic, curl. He knew he’d stuffed the wrong turkey.
Borderline Racist, performed by Paul Kerensa, is a dazzlingly funny global tour of ethnic tension. He finds an Australian in the audience. ‘Welcome back, mate. You’ve done your time.’ An Albanian airline uses the slogan: ‘Travel to Albania. Your car is already here.’ He’s one of numerous turns performing at the Canons’ Gait on the Royal Mile. The comedy is free. The beer, though annoyingly expensive, is at least optional. Edinburgh has no better venue. It’s my first stop when I arrive, my one-for-the-road before I leave. I’m off there now.
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