Edinburgh Festival

First of all, there is no actual Edinburgh Festival. What people call the Festival for convenience sake is actually several festivals put together, perhaps most notably the Edinburgh International Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which is the largest arts festival in the world and in 2009 was comprised of 34,265 individual performances, spread out over nearly a month. Its just out and out impossible to 'do' the entire festival, and I didn't even give it a good try, since I was only in Edinburgh for about 4 days and the whole festival was something of an afterthought. Still, Lucia, Allan and I went to see two shows - a drama, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, as well as an opera, Montezuma. Both were part of the Edinburgh International Festival... or so they claimed.

Well. The Sun Also Rises was just fine. I basically wanted to go because it is the story that made Pamplona famous, and it seemed almost like fate that it was playing on a day we would be in town. I'm not a fan of Hemingway in general, and the play was very Hemingway, and very long, but still well worth watching, especially for Allan and I. The second part was much more interesting than the first, but all of it was done pretty well and made far more interesting and funny by repetitive reminders of the limitations of the theatre. Since these touches were unexpected I did feel that they cheapened the seriousness of the play, but I was also grateful to them for keeping me awake during slower scenes - waiters had a habit of doing crazy juggling tricks with cups and bottles of wine, much fun was made of the way the sound effects were prerecorded and not always in perfect sync with the action, etc. My favourite part were the table animals - during a fishing scene, a guy shows off his catch in the form of two large tables, which we are to imagine are fish. Well, its a way for them to save on their scenery costs, right? But the best is when he shows off his little fish, which is a miniature table. XD Defeated the purpose, of course, and brought laughs from all around. Tables (with mounted horns) were also used for the bulls in the bullfighting sequences, and this worked surprisingly well but was still amusing especially after the fish scene. All in all it wasn't my favourite but it was well worth the time.

Then, Montezuma. Lucia was really looking forward to this one, poor dear. She hadn't liked The Sun Also Rises too much and was looking forward to some classical opera. Things started out as expected - Montezuma singing about his empire and conducting a sacrifice to the sun god. His voice was a bit high pitched but that might have been a statement about his personal weakness for better or for worse, or something. But things devolved quickly. I knew the plot, at least the historical one, and yet I was constantly confused. Little was explained, the supertitles were often terrible, and that was only the basics of the mediocrity. Soon the Spaniards, who also sang like women, were throwing coke cans and taking off their pants. One of the Spaniards sang with a dog, who was maybe supposed to represent chaos and aggression, but the dog just sort of seemed random, dragged about, poorly trained. Then it started to look as if they were trying to make the whole thing political - a random microscene in which they switched from Italian singing to Spanish shouting and showed a Mexican flag - 'chaining' Montezuma in a poncho and a sombrero, etc. When the curtain fell for intermission, we thought we were about 2/3 of the way through the performance and made the decision to slip out while it wasn't too late to eat at a restaurant. Looking up the play today, it seems as though we made the right decision.

Excerpts from the Guardian review and comments from others:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/aug/15/montezuma-edinburgh-opera

"Director Claudio Valdés Kuri's vision of Montezuma is a surreal train wreck of a production, like a B-movie so awful it becomes rather watchable."

"I'm glad I went, even though I can still hardly believe that this was the Festival proper, not some student production in the Fringe. It was a life-changing experience. I now realise I could be an international opera director."

"The performance was riveting in its awfulness. All the basics of opera were forgotten: diction; intonation; ensemble; expressive, narrative and dramatic shaping. The directorial decisions were baffling."

I think I'm just going to pretend it WAS a Fringe production - not so embarrassingly bad, then - and I can say I've tasted both sides of the Festival.