Theatre stages comeback at Edinburgh International Festival

Published Wednesday 2 April 2008 at 11:20 by Thom Dibdin

Edinburgh International Festival has unveiled its most theatre-focused programme in more than a decade, with this year’s event featuring 11 major performing arts productions.

EIF officials claim that this year’s theatre section will be the largest since former director Brian McMaster’s first festival in 1992, when there were 18 productions. Last year’s festival featured only seven theatre productions, with five in 2006.

World premieres of a major new ballet by Matthew Bourne and a new piece of verbatim theatre by David Harrower are among the highlights of this August’s programme, which will also see the return of Scottish Opera to the EIF.

The line-up will be seen as a major fillip to theatre in Edinburgh, coming soon after the announcement of a new comedy festival as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which critics claim threatens to overshadow theatre at the event.

It will also counteract fears that EIF director Jonathan Mills, who is in charge of his second festival and has a background in classical music, would choose to focus more on musical works at the event.

Mills admitted there might be surprise at his decision to programme so much theatre.

He told The Stage: “A lot of people said, ‘Oh, this guy from Australia is a muso, he’ll do a lot of music’. But, actually, I am as interested in the theatre programme as I am in the dance programme.

“That is what makes one a good, or not so good, festival director. I think it is a part of what I have to do.

“What I was looking for in the theatre programme was theatre that contributed to a sense of its community and a sense of its culture - and thought about those values fundamentally. You can imply a journey through music and/or dance, but you can explain a journey in theatre.”

Highlights of the programme include Haris Pasovic’s East West Theatre Company transplanting Nigel Williams’ Class Enemy from south London to Sarajevo and Harrower’s 365 One Night to Learn a Lifetime, which concerns a halfway house for children leaving care homes. This EIF co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland will be directed by NTS artistic director Vicky Featherstone.

Theatre Company TR Warszawa brings two pieces - Dybbuk, which questions Poland’s relationship with its Jewish population in the 20th century, and a Polish translation of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian National Theatre’s Jidariyya is an adaptation of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem of the same name about finding the beauty in life.

Heiner Goebbels is currently developing another of EIF’s world premieres - I Went to the House But Did Not Enter.

His collaboration with the Hilliard Ensemble will use iconic 20th-century texts by TS Eliot, Maurice Blanchot and Samuel Beckett as his source material.

In the dance section, Bourne and his company New Adventures return to the festival with Dorian Gray.

Mills said: “Nutcracker! was something he did in the 1992 EIF when he was a relative unknown. Before he was a household name he was doing things for us, so in a way, this is a maturation of the relationship that has occurred with Matthew in the past and one that we will want to nurture into the future. This festival, collectively over the years, has nurtured many people’s careers.”

The dance programme also includes Nina Ananiashvili performing Giselle with the State Ballet of Georgia, the UK premiere of Steve Reich Evening from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas dance company and the European premiere of Mortal Engine from Australian dance company, Chunky Move.

While there is no performance from Scottish Ballet this year, one of the two staged operas is from Scottish Opera who return - after their controversial absence last year - with a new production of Smetana’s The Two Widows.