“Look at the size of it,” says
actor Sandy Grierson in the top floor rehearsal room of the Citizens
Theatre in Glasgow after dropping a telephone directory size document
onto the floor with a thump. Grierson is in the midst of the massive
undertaking of bringing Alasdair Gray's epic novel, Lanark, to the
Edinburgh International Festival stage in a new dramatisation by
David Greig contained in the script which Grierson has just sent on a
downward trajectory.
Under the guidance of director Graham Eatough, and in the shadow of a city which has been reimagined enormously since Gray first mythologised it as a grim dystopia he called Unthank, Grierson and a cast of largely familiar faces from Scotland's acting scene have just been running through the play's opening moments.
Grierson plays Lanark's eponymous hero, who, on arriving in Unthank with no memory of his past and unaware of who he is, embarks on a voyage of discovery en route to becoming an artist in a collapsing society. Spread out over four books that move between magical realist future fiction and more familiar social realist terrain and written over thirty years, Gray's book is a kind of imagined auto-biography that charts his own struggles to be an artist as well as an ever changing post World War Two Glasgow.
Such a description doesn't even come close to summing up the sheer scale and vision of what is now regarded as a post-modern masterpiece. For something like Lanark to come out of Glasgow at all was considered startling to some at the time. To take it off the page and bring it to flesh and blood life is something else again.
“There's this idea of a life,” says Greig, still tweaking the script as he goes. “It's a big book, but underneath it all it's a life story, and it's partly a fictional life story, but it's also got a great deal in it of the life of this very particular artist called Alasdair Gray and the times he was living through. So there's a very human story at its heart, partly because of the auto-biographical element, although it's by no means a normal autobiography, but this story of someone who is an artist in Glasgow and their struggles to find their place in the world is really important. Instead of it being like when the book first came out and people wondering what on earth it was, we've got some time and distance from it now, and there is a sense of it being a complete piece.”
Like Greig, Eatough first read Gray's novel more than twenty years ago.
“I first read it in about 1990 or 1991 when I first came to Scotland,” says Eatough, “and it was a really massive book for me. It tied in with the whole magic realist movement in literature that we were interested in at uni. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children came out the same year as Lanark, and we were reading Italo Calvino and people like that. At the same time it had this big emotional resonance, because I was moving to Glasgow, and Lanark did act as a bit of a weird emotional guidebook to the city.”
With such a sprawl of material to contend with, the novel's sub-title, 'A Life in Four Books,' has been rendered here as 'A Life in Three Acts'.
“Because it's a whole life,” says Eatough, “we've had to find an appropriate theatrical language, which is a bit more narrated. Ironically, the realistic bit, which makes up the second act, has felt like the more adventurous process in terms of how we tell that story, whereas the fantasy bits are more scene-based and straight-ahead.
“ It's a very odd book. It's very awkward and full of contradictions, and the main character in it isn't a massively likeable character. He's angular, and he keeps getting things wrong, and it's interesting to explore how you get that over on the stage.”
While Lanark is a co-production between the Citizens and EIF, it is also notable for reuniting the core artistic team of Suspect Culture, the theatre company formed by Greig, Eatough and composer Nick Powell while at Bristol University. Relocating to Glasgow, Suspect Culture went on to become one of the most significant companies of the 1990s and early noughties with defining works such as Timeless, which premiered at EIF in 1997.
As with that show, music plays a significant part in Lanark, with Powell, no stranger to the alt-pop scene from his tenures in Strangelove and the Blue Aeroplanes, drafting in a disparate array of contemporary talent for his soundtrack. String players Lucy Wilkins and Sarah Wilson are long-time associates of Powell, both with his band Oskar, and with Suspect Culture dating right back to the live soundtracks for Timeless and Candide 2000. While Wilson has worked with Belle and Sebastian, Wilkins played with Brian Ferry and Roxy Music, and both have toured with noir-based moodists Tindersticks. Also involved in Lanark are Nick McCarthy of Franz Ferdinand and saxophone player Ted Milton of punk/jazz trio Blurt.
“I'm trying to approach the soundtrack a bit differently to how I'd normally do something,” Powell says, “and I thought I's bring in specific people to work separately on it. The book's such a sprawling, eclectic post-modern monster that it invites that, so now the music feels like more of a collage than a coherent soundtrack from one brain.
“Because the book was written over thirty years it's got a very specific set of vibes to it in different parts. Unthank when you first see it is this nightmarish version of a beatnik cafe, so Ted did something really atonal for that, then you've got this 1960s retro sci-fi thing going on like something from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and then a Prog thing and a dirty guitar sort of atmosphere, so there's all these contradictions going on.”
Given Franz Ferdinand's connections with Glasgow School of Art, where both Gray and his alter-ego in Lanark studied, McCarthy's presence is crucial.
“Franz Ferdinand know Alasdair,” says Powell, “and they happen to be managed by the old manager of Strangelove, so it all seemed to fit. Nick and I ended up spending two days in the studio with all these analog synths, and we came up with something very different from what I would've done on my own. We went a bit Kraftwerk with it all.”
Greig and Eatough's take on Lanark isn't the first time Gray's novel has been staged at EIF. In 1995,the Citizens' Theatre's theatre in education wing, TAG, presented a version by Alastair Cording seen in a production by TAG's then artistic director Tony Graham.
The roots of this new version stem from Eatough's ongoing collaborations with visual artists, including Scotland's current representative at this year's Venice Biennale, Graham Fagen. Eatough came into contact with curator Sorcha Dallas, who represents Gray and heads up The Alasdair Gray Foundation. Dallas was in the midst of putting together the extensive programme of Gray's artwork to tie in with his eightieth birthday, and which featured a series of major exhibitions in Glasgow, including shows at Kelvingrove Museum, GOMA and Glasgow School of Art.
“We were talking about how there could be a theatre element to this,” Eatough says, “and I foolishly said that to have a go at Lanark would be like the holy grail of Alasdair's work.”
Eatough met Gray, who was enthusiastic enough to give the project his blessing. With Greig on board, the pair approached the Citizens Theatre's artistic director Dominic Hill to see if they would be interested in taking on what Eatough describes as a collaborative adaptation.
“The Citizens seemed like an ideal home for it,” he says, “partly to do with the scale of the piece, but also because of its history and the cultural role its played in the city. It's a place I know Alasdair feel an affinity with, and also since Dominic came in, its approach to story-telling, putting on big stories with epic sweeps of narrative also seemed to fit.”
With EIF also coming on board, thirty-four years after it was first published, Lanark might just have found its time.
“The importance of it now,” says Greig, “is to do with Alasdair's eightieth birthday and everything that's come out of that, but one thing we have noticed going through the book is that there is a contemporary resonance in every bit of it. There's a bit in the book which has just ended up as one line in our version, really, but which speaks of protesters on the cathedral steps protesting against the capitalist machine.
“On the other side of it, there's a lot going on that makes you think more emotionally about things. It might take forty years for a book to become itself, and to separate itself from the surprise that it existed at all, but it does seem to have that very human core to it that speaks beyond its moment.”
Lanark, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Aug 22, 7pm, Aug 23, 6pm, Aug 24-25 and 27-30, 7pm, Aug 25, 27, 29, 31, 1pm. Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, Aug 14-17, September 3-19.
www.eif.co.uk/lanark
www.citz.co.uk
Edinburgh International Festival Theatre Programme in Miniature
Fergus Linehan's first theatre programme as EIF director is an enticingly starry series of events that sees the return of several Festival favourites of old as well as voices making their EIF debut. Flemish director Ivan van Hove returns for the first time since the late 1990s with a production of Antigone starring French acting legend Juliet Binoche in the title role of Sophocles' tragic heroine trying to do what's right in a war-torn country. Quebecois auteur Robert Lepage also makes a prodigal's return with the very personal 887, which looks back to his childhood growing up as a French speaker during a politically turbulent period in his country's history.
Making their EIF debut is Complicite, whose guiding light of this most playfully exploratory of companies, Simon McBurney, presents The Encounter, a solo meditation inspired by a photographer who loses himself among a lost Peruvian tribe. By having his entire audience wearing headphones, McBurney conjures up a sound-led voyage into human consciousness.
A new strand initiated by Linehan gives already acclaimed Scottish productions further exposure on a world stage, with both Paul Bright's Confessions of A Justified Sinner and Dragon welcome inclusions to this. Paul Bright is Untitled Projects' 'reconstruction' of a radical young theatre director's 1980s staging of James Hogg's seminal novel, Confessions of A Justified Sinner. Actor George Anton may technically be performing solo in Stewart Laing's production of Pamela Carter's script, but the meticulously observed 'archive' material that goes with it is a crucial component of a show that has already been seen in Ireland and Sweden following its initial outing in Glasgow in 2013.
Like Paul Bright, Vox Motus' Dragon is co-produced with the National Theatre of Scotland, with Vox Motus' directors Jamie Harrison and Candice Edmunds also joining forces with the Tianjin People's Arts Theatre for this epic piece for young people that uses puppetry and music in fantastical fashion.
Finally, Murmel Murmel is German director Herbert Fritsch's outrageous staging of Swiss iconoclast's avant-garde play, which consists of 176 pages of dialogue featuring a solitary word – 'Murmel.' The end result has already caused a sensation in Berlin, and, as it ends EIF's theatre programme, looks set to be the last word in Dadaist inspired slapstick here too.
Under the guidance of director Graham Eatough, and in the shadow of a city which has been reimagined enormously since Gray first mythologised it as a grim dystopia he called Unthank, Grierson and a cast of largely familiar faces from Scotland's acting scene have just been running through the play's opening moments.
Grierson plays Lanark's eponymous hero, who, on arriving in Unthank with no memory of his past and unaware of who he is, embarks on a voyage of discovery en route to becoming an artist in a collapsing society. Spread out over four books that move between magical realist future fiction and more familiar social realist terrain and written over thirty years, Gray's book is a kind of imagined auto-biography that charts his own struggles to be an artist as well as an ever changing post World War Two Glasgow.
Such a description doesn't even come close to summing up the sheer scale and vision of what is now regarded as a post-modern masterpiece. For something like Lanark to come out of Glasgow at all was considered startling to some at the time. To take it off the page and bring it to flesh and blood life is something else again.
“There's this idea of a life,” says Greig, still tweaking the script as he goes. “It's a big book, but underneath it all it's a life story, and it's partly a fictional life story, but it's also got a great deal in it of the life of this very particular artist called Alasdair Gray and the times he was living through. So there's a very human story at its heart, partly because of the auto-biographical element, although it's by no means a normal autobiography, but this story of someone who is an artist in Glasgow and their struggles to find their place in the world is really important. Instead of it being like when the book first came out and people wondering what on earth it was, we've got some time and distance from it now, and there is a sense of it being a complete piece.”
Like Greig, Eatough first read Gray's novel more than twenty years ago.
“I first read it in about 1990 or 1991 when I first came to Scotland,” says Eatough, “and it was a really massive book for me. It tied in with the whole magic realist movement in literature that we were interested in at uni. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children came out the same year as Lanark, and we were reading Italo Calvino and people like that. At the same time it had this big emotional resonance, because I was moving to Glasgow, and Lanark did act as a bit of a weird emotional guidebook to the city.”
With such a sprawl of material to contend with, the novel's sub-title, 'A Life in Four Books,' has been rendered here as 'A Life in Three Acts'.
“Because it's a whole life,” says Eatough, “we've had to find an appropriate theatrical language, which is a bit more narrated. Ironically, the realistic bit, which makes up the second act, has felt like the more adventurous process in terms of how we tell that story, whereas the fantasy bits are more scene-based and straight-ahead.
“ It's a very odd book. It's very awkward and full of contradictions, and the main character in it isn't a massively likeable character. He's angular, and he keeps getting things wrong, and it's interesting to explore how you get that over on the stage.”
While Lanark is a co-production between the Citizens and EIF, it is also notable for reuniting the core artistic team of Suspect Culture, the theatre company formed by Greig, Eatough and composer Nick Powell while at Bristol University. Relocating to Glasgow, Suspect Culture went on to become one of the most significant companies of the 1990s and early noughties with defining works such as Timeless, which premiered at EIF in 1997.
As with that show, music plays a significant part in Lanark, with Powell, no stranger to the alt-pop scene from his tenures in Strangelove and the Blue Aeroplanes, drafting in a disparate array of contemporary talent for his soundtrack. String players Lucy Wilkins and Sarah Wilson are long-time associates of Powell, both with his band Oskar, and with Suspect Culture dating right back to the live soundtracks for Timeless and Candide 2000. While Wilson has worked with Belle and Sebastian, Wilkins played with Brian Ferry and Roxy Music, and both have toured with noir-based moodists Tindersticks. Also involved in Lanark are Nick McCarthy of Franz Ferdinand and saxophone player Ted Milton of punk/jazz trio Blurt.
“I'm trying to approach the soundtrack a bit differently to how I'd normally do something,” Powell says, “and I thought I's bring in specific people to work separately on it. The book's such a sprawling, eclectic post-modern monster that it invites that, so now the music feels like more of a collage than a coherent soundtrack from one brain.
“Because the book was written over thirty years it's got a very specific set of vibes to it in different parts. Unthank when you first see it is this nightmarish version of a beatnik cafe, so Ted did something really atonal for that, then you've got this 1960s retro sci-fi thing going on like something from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and then a Prog thing and a dirty guitar sort of atmosphere, so there's all these contradictions going on.”
Given Franz Ferdinand's connections with Glasgow School of Art, where both Gray and his alter-ego in Lanark studied, McCarthy's presence is crucial.
“Franz Ferdinand know Alasdair,” says Powell, “and they happen to be managed by the old manager of Strangelove, so it all seemed to fit. Nick and I ended up spending two days in the studio with all these analog synths, and we came up with something very different from what I would've done on my own. We went a bit Kraftwerk with it all.”
Greig and Eatough's take on Lanark isn't the first time Gray's novel has been staged at EIF. In 1995,the Citizens' Theatre's theatre in education wing, TAG, presented a version by Alastair Cording seen in a production by TAG's then artistic director Tony Graham.
The roots of this new version stem from Eatough's ongoing collaborations with visual artists, including Scotland's current representative at this year's Venice Biennale, Graham Fagen. Eatough came into contact with curator Sorcha Dallas, who represents Gray and heads up The Alasdair Gray Foundation. Dallas was in the midst of putting together the extensive programme of Gray's artwork to tie in with his eightieth birthday, and which featured a series of major exhibitions in Glasgow, including shows at Kelvingrove Museum, GOMA and Glasgow School of Art.
“We were talking about how there could be a theatre element to this,” Eatough says, “and I foolishly said that to have a go at Lanark would be like the holy grail of Alasdair's work.”
Eatough met Gray, who was enthusiastic enough to give the project his blessing. With Greig on board, the pair approached the Citizens Theatre's artistic director Dominic Hill to see if they would be interested in taking on what Eatough describes as a collaborative adaptation.
“The Citizens seemed like an ideal home for it,” he says, “partly to do with the scale of the piece, but also because of its history and the cultural role its played in the city. It's a place I know Alasdair feel an affinity with, and also since Dominic came in, its approach to story-telling, putting on big stories with epic sweeps of narrative also seemed to fit.”
With EIF also coming on board, thirty-four years after it was first published, Lanark might just have found its time.
“The importance of it now,” says Greig, “is to do with Alasdair's eightieth birthday and everything that's come out of that, but one thing we have noticed going through the book is that there is a contemporary resonance in every bit of it. There's a bit in the book which has just ended up as one line in our version, really, but which speaks of protesters on the cathedral steps protesting against the capitalist machine.
“On the other side of it, there's a lot going on that makes you think more emotionally about things. It might take forty years for a book to become itself, and to separate itself from the surprise that it existed at all, but it does seem to have that very human core to it that speaks beyond its moment.”
Lanark, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Aug 22, 7pm, Aug 23, 6pm, Aug 24-25 and 27-30, 7pm, Aug 25, 27, 29, 31, 1pm. Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, Aug 14-17, September 3-19.
www.eif.co.uk/lanark
www.citz.co.uk
Edinburgh International Festival Theatre Programme in Miniature
Fergus Linehan's first theatre programme as EIF director is an enticingly starry series of events that sees the return of several Festival favourites of old as well as voices making their EIF debut. Flemish director Ivan van Hove returns for the first time since the late 1990s with a production of Antigone starring French acting legend Juliet Binoche in the title role of Sophocles' tragic heroine trying to do what's right in a war-torn country. Quebecois auteur Robert Lepage also makes a prodigal's return with the very personal 887, which looks back to his childhood growing up as a French speaker during a politically turbulent period in his country's history.
Making their EIF debut is Complicite, whose guiding light of this most playfully exploratory of companies, Simon McBurney, presents The Encounter, a solo meditation inspired by a photographer who loses himself among a lost Peruvian tribe. By having his entire audience wearing headphones, McBurney conjures up a sound-led voyage into human consciousness.
A new strand initiated by Linehan gives already acclaimed Scottish productions further exposure on a world stage, with both Paul Bright's Confessions of A Justified Sinner and Dragon welcome inclusions to this. Paul Bright is Untitled Projects' 'reconstruction' of a radical young theatre director's 1980s staging of James Hogg's seminal novel, Confessions of A Justified Sinner. Actor George Anton may technically be performing solo in Stewart Laing's production of Pamela Carter's script, but the meticulously observed 'archive' material that goes with it is a crucial component of a show that has already been seen in Ireland and Sweden following its initial outing in Glasgow in 2013.
Like Paul Bright, Vox Motus' Dragon is co-produced with the National Theatre of Scotland, with Vox Motus' directors Jamie Harrison and Candice Edmunds also joining forces with the Tianjin People's Arts Theatre for this epic piece for young people that uses puppetry and music in fantastical fashion.
Finally, Murmel Murmel is German director Herbert Fritsch's outrageous staging of Swiss iconoclast's avant-garde play, which consists of 176 pages of dialogue featuring a solitary word – 'Murmel.' The end result has already caused a sensation in Berlin, and, as it ends EIF's theatre programme, looks set to be the last word in Dadaist inspired slapstick here too.
Antigone, King's Theatre until Aug 22;
The Encounter, Edinburgh International Conference Centre until Aug
23; 887, Edinburgh International Conference Centre, Aug 13-22;
Dragon, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Aug 14-16; Paul Bright's Confessions of
A Justified Sinner, Queen's Hall, Aug 19-22; Murmel Murmel, Aug
28-30.
www.eif.co.uk
The Herald, August 8th 2015
ends
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