Shakespeare at the Edinburgh Festival

Abstract

The annual Edinburgh Festival and its unofficial Fringe constitute the largest arts event in the world, with well over seven thousand performances squeezed into three August weeks. Thus, as I've noted before, if only a tiny fraction of the more than one thousand separate productions are Shakespearean, that's still more than any Shakespeare company or festival manages in a year. In August 1985 Edinburgh offered more than a dozen Shakespeare productions, nine Shakespeare-related performances, and the usual collection of revue sketches and Shakespearean parodies. The official Festival's one Shakespearean production was Macbeth, translated into Japanese language and stage imagery by the Ninagawa Company of Tokyo. The design was sixteenth-century samurai and the staging conventions-sliding scrim panels instead of curtains, stylized action, heavy use of music (curiously, all Western: Bach, Brahms, Faure)-traditionally Japanese. The result inevitably raised memories of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, though this production had strengths and weaknesses of its own. Foremost among the strengths were the performances by Mikijiro Hira as Macbeth and Komaki Kurichara as Lady Macbeth. Hira was throughout the play a man acted on by forces larger than himself. Repeatedly a turn of events-the witches' prophecy, the greeting as Cawdor, Banquo's ghost-would stun him into a stylized portrait of frozen horror, and repeatedly the sheer weight of his guilt or fate or fear would leave him bent and staggering as if under a burden. As the play progressed, he drew further and further within himself, physically shrinking until the final act found him cowering within a circle of candles set out on the floor to keep the world away. Kurichara's Lady Macbeth was simpler and more fragile. In place of the usual steely strength of the early scenes was an almost girlish enthusiasm; she was sexually aroused by the idea of the murder, and lured Macbeth off to bed as a reward for his dedication to it. But this unthinking enthusiasm could not stay the course; by the night of the murder she needed the reinforcement of large quantities of wine, and her collapse into panicky indecision began almost immediately after, preparing us for her madness and death far earlier than most Lady Macbeths do. The translation into Japanese stage imagery was not wholly effective. Best were the use of falling cherry blossoms to suggest magic, madness, and doom in scenes that traced Macbeth's descent into inevitability, and the accompanying movie music, especially certain Faurd themes that linked the witches with other scenes that helped seal Macbeth's doom. Somewhat more awkward was the repeated opening and closing of the scrim screens just to allow a momentary visual effect that hardly seemed worth the effort. The two productions of King Lear were an excellent demonstration of the bounty and diversity of the Fringe. The professional Kick Theatre Company offered an uncut, fourhour modern dress version on an almost bare stage. The production was always intelligent and clear, and if it was rarely deeply moving, that was because it chose not to be. This Lear was not the expected cosmos-shaking patriarch, but a somewhat more life-sized man of lusty middle years and great personal charm who painfully found his way to the wisdom of age. First seen in military uniform and later in hunting clothes, Lear was a simple, energetic, good-natured man who clearly loved all his daughters and set up the love-declaration game as a way of letting them shine before company. His disappointment at Cordelia's poor performance was deep and sad more than enraged, but it grew by Act II into the self-pitying disagreeableness of an embittered and crochety man. Yet he was not wholly