New director Mills unveils Edinburgh International Festival programme

Published Wednesday 28 March 2007 at 12:25 by Thom Dibdin

Alan Cumming is to return to the Edinburgh stage for this summer’s International Festival, in a year which sees new director Jonathan Mills focus the event around Monteverdi’s landmark opera L’Orfeo.

Taking the 400th anniversary of the first performance of the opera as his starting point, the 44-year-old Australian has built a festival which celebrates both the influence of myth and the complementary use of words and music in the theatre.

“Festivals are about ideas,” Mills told The Stage. “I don’t think they are about discrete isolated events just cobbled together. They need a sense of cohesion, a sense of connection.

“L’Orfeo is so fundamental to all operas that follow, that I thought it was worth celebrating.”

Mills has secured a restaging of the production of L’Orfeo, conducted by Jordi Savall in Barcelona in 2002, for the opening weekend of the festival and he hopes the surrounding programme will draw influence from this event.

Cumming’s appearance as Dionysus, in a new version of The Bacchae by David Greig, is another stand out element of the festival programme. Black Watch director John Tiffany will direct this co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland and the Lyric Hammersmith.

American Repertory Company will present Orpheus X, directed by Rinde Eckert. This show is one of several combining words and music. Others include the Vienna Schauspielhaus - performing Barrie Kosky’s adaptation of Monteverdi’s Poppea - and the Wooster Group, for whom Elizabeth LeCompte has reimagined La Didone.

“A single idea does not just resonate in opera. The idea of opera has cross-fertilised theatre, as theatre has cross-fertilised opera,” added Mills.

“Barrie Kosky is very clear that this is not Poppea the opera, this is Poppea, his grungy, sexy, dirty cabaret show. The Wooster Group is taking its own particular approach to Cavalli and doing the Dido story on this imagined lunar landscape called Planet of the Vampires.”

Meanwhile, Mabou Mines Dollhouse will present its Obie award-winning production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, in which all the male roles are cast as under 4’6” and the female roles over 5’7”.

The programming also illustrates the direction in which Mills plans to take the festival. A collaboration between Theatre Cryptic and Singapore’s T’Ang Quartet reflects his desire to encourage co-productions with emerging Oriental festivals, while a production of Beowulf that will tour Scotland exemplifies his determination to take parts of the festival out around Scotland.

Scottish Ballet will appear in the dance programme with a new commission from Stephen Petronio and a work from artistic director Ashley Page.

• Edinburgh International Festival, August 10 to September 2