WHIST

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars

Freudian slips are showing all over the place in this new melding of physical theatre and virtual reality, played out in the top floor foyer of the Festival Theatre by Ashford based dance company, AOE. With the room adorned with a series of geometric sculptures, the audience are kitted out with a VR headset. This advises the wearer to stand over an approximation of a wormhole before signalling them to move to one or another of the sculptures in turn. Once here, the viewer is thrust into the centre of a 360 degree filmed dream sequence which, dependent on your reactions, takes you on one of 76 possible journeys drawn from Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams.

Over the next fifty minutes, this dreamer had his internal urges exposed by way of a series of films involving assorted mini psycho-dramas. Backdrops included a dinner party, a library and a very Ibsenesque birdcage. Others will have had a completely different experience.

Co-produced with Gulbenkian Canterbury and tanzhaus nrw Dusseldorf, AOE's production by the company's artistic directors, Esteban Fourmi and Aoi Nakamura, fuses the hi-tech with the primal to create a series of bite-size narratives open to interpretation. Onscreen performers Robert Hayden, Tomislav English, Yen-Ching Lin, Nina Brown and Steve Rimmer deliver their wordless imaginings with studied gusto. And if such extrapolations of the unconscious aren't easily dissected, fret not. At the end of the show, the audience are given a download code to receive an instant online analysis that provides a potentially illuminating personality study. Those in search of enlightenment have all this week and next to face up to their darkest thoughts.

 

The Herald, July 25th 2017

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Peter Principle obituary

Peter Principle

Born 1954; died July 17, 2017

Peter Principle, who has died suddenly in Brussels aged 63, was the rhythmic pulse of Tuxedomoon, the San Francisco sired electronic avant classical ensemble he joined in 1979, forming the core of the group with saxophonist Steven Brown and violinist Blaine L Reininger. This was the case throughout a wilfully singular anti-career involving various exiles and hiatuses. Alongside fellow collaborators in video and performance, the trio constructed a back catalogue of nouveau primitive punk modernist cabaret that sound-tracked the ruins of an imagined Europe's past, present and futures. When Tuxedomoon played their first ever concert in Scotland in 2016 as part of a tour that saw them recreate their 1980 Half-Mute album in full, the choice of Edinburgh's multi-arts space Summerhall sat perfectly with the group's underground experimental aesthetic.

Such sensibilities were evident too on Principle's four solo albums, which fused electronic beats and off-kilter exotica to beguiling and sometimes troubling effect. Principle's bass playing was muscular, minimalist and insistent, and formed the bedrock of a form of art-rock that demanded its audience's attention.

Originally named Peter Dachert, the name Principle was inspired by the so-called 'Peter principle' management theory formulated by Laurence J Peter in his 1969 book, The Peter principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. Here, Peter observed how many corporate managers “rise to the level of their incompetence.”

Dachert was born in Queens, New York City, and started his musical career by taking drum lessons while still in the sixth grade of Andrew Jackson High School. Aged fourteen, he joined psychedelic garage band Zod, and played a winter residency with them at the Cafe Bizarre in Greenwich Village. After being gifted an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, he made experimental sound collages using guitars and found objects in a way that set down a template for his future recordings. Following a performance by Zod, his high school dean advised him that his future was probably in music rather than academia, and he dropped out. Moving to San Francisco, he took up bass, and, as Peter Carcinogenic, performed with a group called the Doctors.

After joining Tuxedomoon, following the release of Half-Mute on Ralph Records, Principle relocated with the band to New York, before they decamped to Brussels the following year in response to the election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. President. As Americans abroad in classic literary fashion, Tuxedomoon signed to Crammed Discs, who also released Principle's first two solo records, Sedimental Journey, in 1986, and Tone Poems in 1988/9. In 1990, LTM released Principle's third album, Conjunction, which saw in a decade in which he and the other members of Tuxedomoon would go their separate ways, before reconvening eight years later. Principle's fourth album, Idyllatry, appeared in 2005, and, with stints living in New York and Virginia, he continued to work with Tuxedomoon on all projects since then .

Principle's passing was announced by Reininger on Facebook after he was found in his room at Les Ateliers in Brussels, where Tuxedomoon had convened to prepare new music for a tour which was due to take in London's Jazz Cafe in August. All dates have now been cancelled. The cause of death appears to have been a heart attack or stroke. Following the passing of Tuxedomoon's film-maker and visual co-ordinator Bruce Geduldig in 2016, Principle's loss leaves a huge void, and has left the band devastated. YouTube footage of what has turned out to be Principle's last live appearance with Tuxedomoon in Lublin, Poland, reveals a form of driving avant-disco way ahead of its time, and which put Principle's contributions at the music's heart,.

The Herald, July 22nd 2017

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Martin Creed - Words and Music

Life is up and down for Martin Creed. The most tangible manifestations of the Turner Prize winner's seemingly structured world-view can be seen in his public restoration of the Scotsman Steps in Edinburgh in 104 different types of marble. It's there too just across the road from the Steps in the lift of the Fruitmarket Gallery, who commissioned the restoration. In 2010, the gallery showed Down Over Up, an exhibition in which the gallery stairs were transformed into a synthesiser, with each step playing a different musical note. The lift did something similar, as a whooshing chorale moved up and down the scale depending on which way you were going.

Creed released albums of spindly minimalist ditties whose words went back and forth as they reduced an idea to its bare bones. He did something similar with ballet when he appeared alongside dancers from Sadlers Wells, who performed the most basic of steps. The programme also featured Creed singing songs and screening films featuring people vomiting, as well as one charting the rise and fall of his own penis.

This year, on the back of digitally released single, What the Fuck Am I Doing?, Creed has joined Edinburgh International Festival's theatre programme, with a three week late night run of a show called Martin Creed's Words and Music. The show forms part of EIF and the British Council's Spirit of '47 season to commemorate the Festival's 70^th anniversary. For what sounds part art cabaret and part show and tell, Creed's approach remains singularly contrary.

“Part of the point of it is to try and think out loud,” he says, sitting in a neat little office space in the Fruitmarket, and dressed like a technicolour Victorian hipster. “Whenever I've done things like talks, where I've prepared stuff beforehand, as soon as I get up there, it all suddenly doesn't feel relevant. It's the same as well for exhibiting works in galleries. So I'm bringing songs that are pre-written, and I suppose I'm bringing ideas that I've been working on to talk about as well, but it's not a show in the sense of, erm...”

Creed checks himself like this a lot, his speech patterns going back and forth as he considers every word. A sing-song Glasgow accent acquired when his Quaker parents moved to the city from Wakefield when he was three sounds consistently surprised by what comes out of his mouth. It's the perfect illustration too of his resistance to apply any clear structure to his Words and Music show.

“In a way, the point of it isn't clear either,” he says. “If there is any point to it, it's a matter of trying to get through the day. Trying to live your life. The other idea behind is is that onstage is the same as offstage. So when I'm onstage, I might be just as disorganised as I am when I'm offstage.”

This willingness to fly blind in both life and what he's been consistently reluctant to call art is telling of everything he does.

“I've been trying to work on words,” he says, “to work on talking as much as working on other things. I try to work on the noises I make in my life just as much as I try and work on the movements I make. I'm just trying to live my life, and that includes making noises, because I find myself here in this world, with other people, and I feel lonely and want to talk to them.”

Creed did a similar show in New York last year, where a “terrible” thing happened.

“The first night, I felt on quite a high afterwards,” he says, “and then the next night, I started talking about the same thing that I started talking about the night before, and immediately I felt that it wasn't alive, because I was just trying to repeat myself.”

There is an obsessiveness to Creed's work that suggests a serious level of control freakery.

“I think that's what's wrong with my work,” he says, laughing, as he does throughout the conversation, “but I look at it and it's too controlled. That's what I'm always fighting against, the tendency to try and control everything. I'll end up with everything just all being neat and clean and nice, nice colours in a little box, or the song equivalent of that. You pare it down and pare it down till you're in danger of it being too controlled, and you take the life out of it.

“But I think I try and control things because I'm scared of losing control, and if I think about that, I think what I need to do is get the fact that I'm scared into the work, so people going to see the bit where I'm controlling things also get to see the bit where I'm scared.”

Is Creed trying to make chaos out of order, then?

“Well, I dunno,” he says. “I just think I'm trying to fight against my inclination to try and control things, and kill things. I want to feel better, so I feel safer if things are under control, but then that'll lead to killing things. Doing a show like I'm doing here, it's one hour, so it's a little microcosm of life. Getting through the show is like getting through the day.”

Why push himself in this way? Wouldn't it be easier to hone a few routines and bluff his way through the gig?

“Aye,” he says, “except I just think I can't do that, and I feel shit if I'm repeating myself. It doesn't feel alive, and it's not exciting. Or maybe I just think I'm not a good enough actor, for want of a better way of putting it. On the other hand, I don't know how actors do it, but I don't think that they maybe do it in the way that I think that they do it. Maybe what I'm talking about is not that different from the way actors try to be fresh every time.”

Being in the moment?

“Aye. Exactly, aye.”

Where did the desire to do that come from?

“I think it's come from frustration,” he says, “and not being happy with my work, thinking that, although I might like some of the things I've done, maybe I'm just not really happy with them.”

Creed talks about his work as “a sort of soup. Everything's joined together, and there are some things in the soup, floating around, but it's mostly a purée. But if you're having an exhibition or making an album, then what you're doing is picking things out of that soup and then displaying them, so these are selected from the soup. But there's always something missing, and that's the soup. It's always artificial that you've taken bits out, and that's why the individual works are never good enough.

“But in a live show like this, it's possibly more possible to show different bits and pieces, so there's the possibility as well to display the soup. The point of that to me is that it's more like life, so then I don't feel that it's fake, or some weird, artificial, tidied up version of life. To me, that's more exciting. I think one of the worst feelings in life I find is trying to keep up a false pretence about something.”

Creed talks about theatres and galleries as “a safe place to be chaotic. Because there's a framework, it's like a safe place where you can hopefully enjoy either the difficulty of life, or the kind of crazy mixed-upness of a life. It's like having a fence with a rigid structure in front of a garden that's got wild animals in it. The fence basically allows you to enjoy it, and you're not in danger from it.”

Creed may not know what his new show is yet, but he knows what it's not.

“It's definitely not a display of what I've achieved,” says Creed.

What does he think he has achieved?

“That's the point,” he says. “I don't think I've achieved anything. The idea of achievement just seems really pompous, anyway. Basically, if you think you've achieved something, you're a dick. Because it means you haven't.”

Is that a fear of success?

“Aye, definitely,” he says, before he checks himself again. “I think so. Well, it could be something like that. It depends what you call success.”

Martin Creed's Words and Music, The Studio, Edinburgh International Festival, August 4-27, 10.30pm

www.eif.co.uk

The Herald, July 21st 2017

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Richard Findlay obituary

Born November 5 1943; died July 8 2017.

Richard Findlay, who has died after a short illness aged 73, was a rare breed in the boardrooms of the numerous arts organisations he chaired. Unlike some of the familiar merry go round of Scottish establishment patricians looking to up their status by taking on such a role, Findlay cared deeply about the arts. This was the case whether as the inaugural chair of the newly set up National Theatre of Scotland in 2003, or stepping in to steer Creative Scotland out of a mess of the organisation's own making in 2015. The latter followed a period when Scotland's arts funding body had become mired in a culture of managerialism that lost the faith of the artistic community the organisation was there to serve. Such a culture was counter to everything that Findlay stood for.

As an actor, Findlay played small parts in several TV dramas. It was behind the scenes in broadcast media where Findlay would excel, however, particularly in local radio, where he proved to be a pioneering and steady hand. It was an interest Findlay retained throughout his life, latterly through New Wave Media, run by his son, Paul.

Richard Findlay was born Dietrich Rudolf Barth in Berlin. His father was presumed to be killed in action while fighting on the Russian front. His mother Inge was working as a translator with the British Occupation force in Germany when she met Captain Ian Findlay, and the pair married. The Captain returned to Edinburgh with Inge, Rudolf and his older sister Linde, where, in his new Scottish home, Rudolf became Richard.

The children had to learn English quickly, which they did through the pages of comics the Dandy and the Beano. Perhaps it was here that Findlay developed his sense of humour that he retained throughout his life along with a twinkle in his eye that co-existed alongside his ability as a shrewd boardroom operator. With his mother speaking English in an American accent, and with post-war anti German sentiments rife, Findlay was smart enough to cover his tracks by pretending she actually was American.

This acumen for play-acting led to Findlay enrolling in what was then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) in Glasgow, where he later sat on the Board of Governors between 2000 and 2004, after which he became chair of the RSAMD Trusts until April 2008. As a student, Findlay studied the Diploma in Dramatic Art from 1960 to 1963. Before his first year was out, he had taken the title role, albeit with seven others, in a production of Peer Gynt, Ibsen's rollicking fantasia about a wide-eyed young man's travails throughout the world.

Findlay also appeared in the likes of Twelfth Night, Three Sisters and Hobson's Choice. He was a one man Chorus in Antigone, and played Camillo in The Winter's Tale. In his final year, Findlay won second prize in a BBC competition, which came with a six month contract. Findlay made his small screen debut as a monk in a version of The Brothers Karamazov, before playing three separate roles in This Man Craig, the secondary school set drama that starred John Cairney as an upbeat science teacher, and which gave early roles to a host of now well known actors, including Alex Norton and David Hayman. Findlay also appeared in another drama series, The Revenue Men.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, Findlay flirted with pirate radio, working on marketing for Radio Scotland (not BBC Radio Scotland, which wouldn't begin broadcasting until over a decade later) and Radio London. With the demise of the pirates, Findlay worked as a continuity announcer on the BBC, before spending a year in Saudi Arabia setting up an English language radio station. On his return to Edinburgh he met Elspeth Menzies. The pair married in 1971, and he spent the rest of his life with her. In 1972, Findlay joined the Central Office of Information's radio division in London, and he and Elspeth moved to East Sussex, where they converted a fourteenth century tithebarn.

In 1973, Findlay joined the newsroom of the newly established Capital Radio, and also formed Waverley Radio to compete for the east of Scotland license won by Radio Forth. Findlay joined Forth as programme controller, and his voice was the first to be heard on the fledgling station. After a false start, a shake up saw Findlay appointed chief executive of the station, and he was instrumental in helping regulations to be relaxed in a way that allowed Radio Forth and Radio Clyde to merge in 1991 as Scottish Radio Holdings.

In the early 1990s Findlay became chair of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, where Kenny Ireland was appointed as artistic director. Over the next decade, Ireland's tenure gave the theatre an extra swagger. Findlay operated with similar boldness in 2003 when he was appointed founding Chair of the National Theatre of Scotland, and Vicky Featherstone became inaugural artistic director. The new company's radical Theatre Without Walls model allowed the company to make its mark in a different way than might have been expected by long-term campaigners for a national theatre. The early runaway success with John Tiffany's production of the Gregory Burke scripted Black Watch put the company on a global stage.

In 2007, Findlay became chair of a then floundering STV, and in 2009 was made a Fellow of his old alma mater, now the RCS. Other appointments included chair of Lothian Health Board and Rector of Heriot Watt University. In 2013, Findlay was made a CBE for services to the arts and creative industries.

When he was drafted in to sort out Creative Scotland in 2015, his wisdom and calm expertise was welcomed by an artistic community who had been driven to despair by the quango's disastrous and alienating propensity for behaving as if it were a private enterprise. One suspects his work to change the toxic managerialist culture within the organisation had barely begun before he took ill, and he will be a seriously tough act to follow.

For all his boardroom skills, friends of Findlay talked of his brilliance at spotting talent, and of his over-riding sense of joy with the world. They talked too of Findlay as an innocent who never expected to find himself occupying the positions within the worlds of arts, media and business that he did with such quiet diligence and care.

For any arts organisation to thrive, it takes a boardroom visionary to have faith and confidence enough in the artists creating the work to allow them to take risks. This was something Findlay understood with a sense of empathy and understanding of how art works in relation to other factors, and which gave them confidence to thrive. All of this was done with a selflessness that many arts bureaucrats could learn from. Findlay never wanted anything from his achievements, one friend said. He just gave.

Findlay is survived by his wife, Elspeth, their sons Adam and Paul, daughter Hannah and six grand-children.

The Herald, July 19th 2017

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Zinnie Harris - Oresteia, Rhinoceros and Meet Me at Dawn

Zinnie Harris may have three plays on at this year's Edinburgh International Festival, but as she wishes to make clear from the off, it's not a retrospective. The fact that one of them is a speedy revival of a work originally presented as a trilogy, one a new adaptation of a twentieth century classic, and one a brand new work, seems to validate the increasingly prolific Edinburgh based writer and director's claim. The three productions also see Harris and EIF teaming up with three of Scotland's major producing houses as well as enabling an international collaboration with a company from Turkey.

First out the traps for the Harris season, if we can call it that, is Rhinoceros, a new version of the 1959 play by Romanian absurdist and contemporary of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, in which the population of a small French town turn into rhinoceroses. Often read as a warning about the rise of Nazi-ism before World War Two, director Murat Daltaban's co-production between the Royal Lyceum Edinburgh and the Istanbul-based DOT Theatre should be given new relevance by recent events in Turkey and elsewhere.

The day after Rhinoceros opens, the Traverse presents the first preview of Meet Me At Dawn, a brand new play by Harris, which uses the Orpheus and Eurydice myth as a starting point for an exploration of loss and grief. Traverse artistic head Orla O'Loughlin will direct.

The Citizens Theatre's revival of Oresteia: This Restless House, Harris' epic reimagining of Aeschylus' ancient trilogy of tragedies continues Harris' drawing from Greek roots. Dominic Hill's mighty production duly won him the 2016 Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland Best Director award, while it was also named as Best Play. Harris followed this up by scooping this year's Best Director award for her own Lyceum production of Caryl Churchill's play, A Number.

The latter point is telling, because, while all three of Harris' EIF plays come from classical roots, as with Churchill's work, they all deal with both the personal and the political in ways that play with narrative form. Despite Harris' experience writing for television on shows such as Spooks, all three are steeped in various forms of theatricality which wouldn't translate easily to the small screen.

“They are all very different pieces of work,” says Harris. “People are going to see a range of my writing, but hopefully they'll also see where my writing overlaps, and what it is I've been trying to do with each of them. This Restless House feels like something that's been tried and tested, whereas Meet Me At Dawn and Rhinoceros are going to be evolving in the rehearsal room.

“What's nice about revisiting a piece of work is that you get a second chance to fine-tune. That's a completely different level of interaction and process to Rhinoceros, which I'm working on in a much more muscular way. Then, because Meet Me At Dawn is brand new, it feels like a completely different proposition, and one feels a certain level of nervousness as one puts it out there. It's quite close to me in some ways. It's much more an exploration of a set of emotions, and a quieter tale that feels closer to my experience and the experience of others, maybe, than that big Greek epic story.”

A little Greek can still be found in Meet Me At Dawn, however, which Harris describes as “a story of a woman's journey through grief. My inspiration was Orpheus and Eurydice, but in fact it parts from that almost straight away. What I think is interesting about Orpheus and Eurydice is the obsession to see their loved one one more time, and I just took that as a jumping off point, really. Orpheus was allowed to walk out of the Underworld in the belief that Eurydice was following him, providing he never actually saw her, and what I suppose is my sort of thought experiment, is what if you did actually get to see the departed person, but it was in a very time limited way, so you literally got a day. What would that day feel like, what would it be like?

“I think the thing about Greek is that it can comes from a place of magical thinking, because you can get lost in the what if of things. What if this had played out differently? What if that accident hadn't have happened? What if these events had turned out another way? I think we can collectively do that sometimes when a political event goes the wrong way. You spend weeks going, what if that hadn't happened, and those processes of denial and self delusion almost happen in those moments too.”

Harris was writing Meet Me At Dawn in the wake of the result of the Brexit referendum, “when there was probably a lot of collective denial and disbelief and lack of acceptance in lots of different ways. Not just personally, but also politically, and I suppose I felt that exploring the what ifs and the land of Never-Never seemed like a fruitful place for a play.”

In a post-Brexit world, Rhinoceros heightens such notions even more, particularly given the current state of political affairs in Turkey.

“There was always a sense that we had to get this on quickly,” Harris says of the play, “because the world is changing so fast. People often say that Rhinoceros is a play about the rise of the right. To some degree it is, but I actually think it's a play about a crowd mentality suddenly coming up with a way of looking at the world that feels completely at odds with something that they would've thought a few months before. It's about that moment where there's a sort of collective turning on their head of upheld principles, and how there's something scary and unstoppable about that. Once that starts, there's a momentum and an energy to it that you can't really stand up against, and that I think is utterly timeless, because we don't know what's going to happen.”

The umbilical threads that bind each of Harris' EIF plays may not be obvious, but, again, as with Caryl Churchill's work, the meeting of the personal and the political are at their heart.

“I think they are all stories that combine a kind of personal moment of crisis against a backdrop that's either political,” says Harris, “or else they have to work their way out of something that's constraining them. In Meet Me At Dawn, there is the moment of crisis, which is the understanding that these two people have lost each other, and somehow work out a way to contain that and cope with it. In a sense, the whole play is about coming to terms with those things, and dealing with the hand that'd been dealt. In all three plays I think there is something about the personal experience, and looking at that in a contemporary context against a backdrop of constraint.”

Rhinoceros, The Lyceum, Edinburgh, August 3-12, 7.30-9.40pm; Meet Me At Dawn, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, August 4-27, various times; Oresteia: This Restless House, The Lyceum, Edinburgh, August 22-27, 6-10.25pm.

 

The Herald, July 18th 2017

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Queen Lear

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow
Four stars

“When the mind is free,” says the terrified old lady at the centre of Jennifer Dick's female reworking of Shakespeare's mightiest tragedy, “the body is delicate.” With Janette Foggo's matriarchal Lear having alienated her entire brood both from herself and each other, there's a double edged sword to such a proclamation, that is a cry for help as much as attention. In Dick's Bard in the Botanics production, however, Lear sees as much or as little as she wants to.

There are hints that the ageing Queen is losing her senses from the off, as she attempts emotional blackmail on her three kids, only to set off the ultimate family feud. It is telling too that, while her two daughters Regan and Goneril are at each other's throats, Lear dotes on her youngest, who here has been transformed from Cordelia into a geeky boy called Cornelius. He would rather play the fool than be molly-coddled, and when he disguises himself in clown make up as Poor Tom, his mother latches on to his new persona as a surrogate to stave off her son's seeming rejection.

All of this is played out on designer Gillian Argo's rustic shack, decorated with stags skulls that suggest any lingering male influence has been dealt with good and proper. Wearing jumpers and jodhpurs, the six actors onstage look like they've stepped out of a James Cowie painting. Composer Sally Simpson's underscore mixes cracked folk mournfulness with a storm that seems to have erupted from a BBC Radiophonic Workshop out-take. It is a mother's fear of being deserted by her offspring, however, that leads to her saddest of downfalls.

The Herald, July 17, 2017

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Measure For Measure

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow
Four stars

Temptation is everywhere in Gordon Barr's stripped down adaptation of Shakespeare's negotiation of power and justice, which for his Bard in the Botanics production becomes a simmering treatise on male privilege. Here, Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, is a Mad Men style boss who goes on sabbatical so he can keep an eye on the little guys beneath him. In true locker room fashion, he hands the keys to high office over to pious young pup Angelo, whose uptight manner can't resist falling into bad habits. This comes in the shape of trainee nun Isabella, who, in a bid to save her wild child sister Claudia from execution, is prepared to give away every virtue she has.

With only four actors to play with, and with Claudia a female composite of Shakespeare's male original, Barr's production cuts to the play's patriarchal heart. As church and state conspire to save their male skins, Vincentio's Machiavellian tendencies look almost filmic in Kirk Bage's tightly focused delivery of an establishment figurehead who looks after his own.

The production also contains a quartet of some of the finest performances you're likely to see on a stage for some time. As well as Bage, Adam Donaldson's Angelo is a self-flagellating adolescent, whose growing pains of sexual repression make him look like he's about to burst into tears or else soil his trousers. Isabella's difficult choices are captured by Nicole Cooper with a glance. It is Esme Bayley as both Claudia and Vincentio's compromised secretary Escalus, however, who expresses every complex distillation of personal politics the play is loaded with in its knowing nod to the normalisation of everyday misogyny.

 

The Herald, July 17th 2017

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