Mark Brown: Breaking the bank at Edinburgh International Festival

The National

7 days ago

A co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland, Dundee Rep and the EIF, it brings together an impressive array of theatrical talent.
Both Graham and director Andrew Panton (who is artistic director of the Rep) are award-winning theatre artists. Outstanding Scottish actors Brian Cox (as the ghost of Adam Smith) and Sandy Grierson (as the ruinous and disgraced banker Fred Goodwin) lead a cast that is peppered with A-list actors.
Grierson is utterly compelling as Goodwin, the working-class Paisley boy 'made good'. Steeped in the slash-and-burn Thatcherism of the 1980s, his dedication to voracious accumulation (including bloating the RBS with a hidden portfolio of toxic assets) is matched only by his ruthless approach to management.
Opposite him, Cox's Adam Smith is enthralling in his indignation when he discovers how his views on economics and society have been wilfully twisted to fit the agenda of neoliberalism. He is delightfully humorous, too, in his bewilderment in encountering 21st-century Edinburgh (even if a joke about a certain popular department store is extended beyond breaking point).
Excellent though the lead actors are, the production is riven with flaws. Panton likes a play with songs, and this, problematically, is one.
The musical dimension of the piece – which is comprised largely of uninspired snippets from pop songs, such as Keane's dreary Somewhere Only We Know – runs in frustrating parallel to the dramatic action. Indeed, so superfluous is the music that one cannot help but feel that the momentum of the play would be enhanced (and the two hours 40 minutes duration of the production reduced advantageously) by dispensing with it entirely.
Ironically – given that this is a story of a Scottish bank that overreached itself by seeking to be so much bigger than it needed to be – Panton's production often feels like it is trying too hard to meet the expectations of a large stage EIF show. Consequently, the sound, music and big-screen projections are often bombastic.
There are fine performances from such excellent actors as Andy Clark (who inhabits the role of Gordon Brown beautifully) and Hannah Donaldson (as the senior RBS officer with whom Goodwin has an affair). Too often, however, the supporting cast looks like a chorus from a stage musical that has inadvertently wandered into the wrong show.
It has long been a complaint from within the Scottish theatre community that the EIF puts our nation's live drama at a disadvantage. Whereas other countries bring tried-and-tested productions to the Edinburgh stage, Scotland's contribution is required to be a world premiere.
New work is the lifeblood of theatre, but it is also difficult and uncertain. Once again, the EIF's strictures have led to a disappointing Scottish contribution to the Festival.
Meanwhile, in the Fringe programme of Scotland's new writing theatre, the Traverse, there are a number of acclaimed productions from overseas. These include Rift (Traverse, until August 24), a taut two-hander by American writer Gabriel Jason Dean.
Given the drama's subject matter – the very occasional prison visits of a liberal novelist to his brother, a convicted murderer and leading neo-Nazi gang member – the 'rift' of the play's title is a massive understatement, akin to the description of the 30-year war in Northern Ireland as 'The Troubles'. The chasm between the siblings is, Dean explains, inspired by his relationship with his own half-brother.
The piece is set over a 21-year period, beginning with a visit four years into the prison sentence. The prisoner – played with chilling veracity and troubling humanity by Matt Monaco – is one of the neo-Nazis in US prisons who has not received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.
His brother (performed with sincere progressiveness by Blake Stadnik) graduates, in the course of the play, from alcoholic student to Ivy League academic and successful fiction writer. Dean's carefully balanced script is an exploration of moral complexity.
When we first encounter the prisoner, he is in a wheelchair and heavily bandaged after being badly beaten up in prison. When we meet him again, 12 years later, he insists that he is not an ideological Nazi, despite the huge swastika tattooed on his chest and the pair of SS flashes emblazoned on his arms.
Rather, he says, his attachment to the Aryan Brotherhood is, first and foremost, a matter of self-preservation. Being a Nazi gang member protects him, he argues, from physical and sexual assault.
Those who might be hoping that Rift would shed some light on the rise of the American far-right, and its capturing of the White House for the second time in eight years, should look elsewhere. The play does serve, however, as a resonating indictment of a prison system that fails to rehabilitate and, instead, institutionalises racial separation and gang membership.
Director Ari Laura Kreith's tight production engages meaningfully with such difficult and complex issues as education as a tool of moral improvement and recovered memory. Despite its many nuances, the play does put an emphasis on childhood trauma that threatens to become reductive at times.
If that is a shortcoming, it is a minor one in a thoughtful and affecting drama about an anguished intersection of family history and political morality.
If seen back-to-back – as they were at the Traverse on Friday – Dean's play and Red Like Fruit (Traverse, until August 24) by acclaimed Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch are bound to put you through the emotional wringer. In theatrical terms, Muscovitch's piece is the more ambitious, and the more emotionally powerful, of the two.
Constructed somewhat like a Russian doll, the work has a metatheatrical dimension that is simultaneously troubling and engaging. On-stage – sitting on a chair on a raised platform – is Lauren (played by Michelle Monteith), a journalist whose current story began with an investigation into a domestic violence scandal within the Liberal Party (the dominant force on the Canadian centre and centre-left).
However, the issues raised by the investigation confronted Lauren with a series of instances of predatory and opportunistic sexual abuse in her own life going back to her childhood and adolescence. Through remembering these experiences, she recalled how the prevailing ideas and social atmosphere tended to create guilt and confusion, rather than outrage, within her.
In the play, this painful personal history forms the basis of a text written by Lauren, but spoken – at her request – by a male actor, Luke (performed by David Patrick Flemming). In certain moments – sometimes due to Lauren's visible distress, at other times as a consequence of his own discomfort – Luke breaks from his narration to interact with the writer.
What emerges from this deliberately discomfiting set-up is a fictional testimony that rings horrifyingly true as a traumatic strand in one woman's life history. In certain moments Lauren realises that – such was (and, by implication, still very much is) the normalisation of abusive behaviours by men against women and girls – that she struggled (and still struggles) to differentiate abuse from healthy and consensual experiences in her sexual life.
The seemingly counter-intuitive choice to have this testimony read by a male actor is explained by Lauren in terms that carry a frightening and devastating social truth. Director Christian Barry gives the reverberating material the glass-sharp, perfectly wrought and superbly acted production it demands.Finally to the Summerhall venue, which always has the most diverse and fascinating offering of theatre and performance on the Fringe. With such a substantial programme, it is inevitable that a few disappointing productions will slip through the curatorial net.
Sad to say, Julia. 1984 (Summerhall, until August 11) fails to deliver on the promise of a piece that seeks to imagine the life of the titular heroine in the period immediately after the end of Orwell's famous novel. We meet Julia (played by Sofia Barysevich) – a rebel against the Big Brother dictatorship and lover of Orwell's protagonist Winston Smith – as she is being subjected to torture (both psychological and physical) and sexual abuse by the hideous state functionary O'Brien (Michael Tcherepashenets).
Julia endures, feigning compliance in her efforts to find out what happened to Winston. Sadly, however, this young company never succeeds in generating the atmosphere of Orwell's novel.
The blinking eye of Big Brother peers out from a triangular screen, but the scene it observes looks like an under-resourced student circus.
Creating a sequel to 1984 is either brave, foolhardy or both. Little surprise, then, that Karina Wiedman's text doesn't measure up to the demands of Orwell's novel, either in complexity or coherence.
Tcherepashenets's high-octane, microphone-grasping performance (which seems to borrow from Joaquin Phoenix's performance in the film Joker: Folie À Deux) has a certain charisma. Ultimately, however, although this production has its heart firmly in the right place, its attempt to complement Orwell's opus has all of the resonance of a cracked bell.