The Stage

Causing a commotion - Brian McMaster

Published Wednesday 4 August 2004 at 12:00

Edinburgh International Festival director Brian McMaster argues that ground-breaking and radical productions are not the exclusive domain of the Fringe, writes Thom Dibdin

Conventional wisdom says that controversial and cutting-edge productions belong solely to the Edinburgh Fringe.

Well conventional wisdom can go take a running jump according to Brian McMaster, who this summer reaches his 13th year as director of the Edinburgh International Festival. Nor does he accept the idea that there is some sort of wedge between it and the other festivals.

Up in his office in the eaves of the Hub at the top of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, McMaster’s desk is piled with applications from around the world for productions to appear at next year’s festival. But for the moment, he is happy to extol the virtues of this year’s performances. Not individually - but as a whole.

“The point about the EIF is that we are not about individual performances,” he says. “Of course there are star names throughout the programme but they are working on new concerts or theatre or dance. There is no single headline event. Rather, the overall programme and the programme on any given day is potentially a headline event.”

McMaster sees the EIF, together with the Fringe, book and film festivals, and the Edinburgh Mela, as part of an overall ecology of the Edinburgh Festival. He refuses to accept any division between what he is trying to achieve at the EIF and the Fringe itself. Indeed, he goes so far as to state that the existence of the Fringe influences his programme to a huge degree.

“What we do is programme in a completely different way so that we complement the Fringe,” he says. “There will probably be radical and ground-breaking things on the Fringe. At least we hope that there will be. But we can be certain there are in our festival. That cliche about the radical and ground-breaking being uniquely on the Fringe upsets me slightly.

“I think it is important that in music and theatre and dance we are on the edge. Particularly for people performing on the Fringe who are thinking in terms of where those art forms are going. That influences me a lot in the programming. We do try and programme on a large scale but we also try and price so it is reasonable for anybody on the Fringe to come to the EIF.”

Away from the commercial constraints of the Fringe, McMaster is certainly flexing his ability to challenge. Both in the productions he brings to the EIF and in the people he brings together through the festival.

The really cutting edge stuff takes place every night, in the Royal Bank Lates. There is Heiner Goebbels’ latest work, the near unpronounceable Eraritjaritjaka, or Sciarrino’s work for 150 saxophones , or Tempus Fugit from Les Ballet C de la B, or Lucia Melts by the unconventional theatre group TG Stan.

These all set out to challenge their audience. Of the EIF’s adopted motto, to ‘Engage the mind, touch the heart and feed the soul’, it is the engaging of the mind which they do most. And at £5 a ticket, it is not an expensive experiment.

Not expensive for the audience, that is. That £5 ticket has got McMaster into hot water with his counterparts at other festivals. What it does, as they have pointed out to him and he admits himself, is to devalue the experience. McMaster is particularly critical of his own £5 series of late night classical music at the Usher Hall of two years ago.

“I have to say there was a definite damage to our bookings in the Usher Hall for main evening concerts as a result of those £5 nights. Which at the time I kept secret but is one of the many reasons for not repeating it.

“I hope this year there is a programme of major events that justify the cheap prices we charge any rate, quite frankly. Be it £20 for a piece of theatre or whatever, it is a damn sight less than you pay at the West End.”

McMaster is rather more happy about his ability to bring different artists together for the EIF. Its an ability which goes beyond Enio Greco directing opera, to commissioning the likes of director Calixto Bieto to direct Birmingham Rep for another year, this time Celestina with Kathryn Hunter in the title role.

Another trademark of the McMaster years has been his retrospective seasons of choreographers. This year Antony Tudor’s work is performed by Ballet West USA, on whose artistic director, Jonas Kage, Tudor created Leaves Are Fading. And Rambert Dance Company include Tudor’s Dark Elegies, which is something of a signature for them, in their short season of works performed to music by Mahler.

There are, however, productions which are quite simply EIF events. And Le Soulier de Satin is one. Rarely performed, The Satin Sliper by the French playwright Paul Claudel is a work which McMaster says is a quite extraordinary experience.

“I think you do things at festivals that you would not normally do,” he observes. “Like going to the theatre for 11 and a half hours. That in itself is something extraordinary - the relationship you build up with the audience around you is quite special, and the way the play works on you over that whole period of time. Epics were part of Greek theatre, so it is not a new idea but it is one which is rarer today.”

And it is that kind of unique experience at which the EIF excels. While the Fringe has become a grand commercial market place, it is at the EIF where the truly new ideas can be conceived and forged.