There's a lot to admire in Ubu and the Truth Commission; the mixture of archive footage and animation, the coordination of that with the action on stage, the puppetry, the slick stage management.  And how on earth did they manage to get that vulture squawking and flapping its wings let alone the whirling microphones?

The victim and witness statements were harrowing (were they verbatim testimony?) and the distance given by hearing them delivered, as I expect they were in fact, in translation as the witness spoke in their own language heightened the feeling of amazement at how cruel human beings can be to one another. 

A white Ubu who personifies the apartheid regime and its enforcers gives us all the grossness, selfishness and evil of the original as he scurries about trying to hide his misdeeds and make up his mind about revealing all to the commission.

I've always thought of the truth commission as a really noble concept and had the impression that it had served South Africa well.  But this play seemed to me to present an altogether bleaker vision of its effect and as Ma and Pa Ubu sailed away into the sunset of a better tomorrow I had no confidence in it being better for anyone.

Wikipedia has a very long and detailed article on the play for searchers after more and undoubtedly truer analysis.  

One of the problems of having visitors at Festival time is that even the gaps between events tend to get swallowed up being sociable.  That's my excuse for not having written anything about what I've been to in the last several days and now I can't be bothered to write very much.  But I want to have a record so here are some brief notes.

Another Kronos Quartet concert in which one piece by a former Beiruti featured recordings of bombs and gunfire made during the Lebanese civil war. At this time of WWI commemoration it was a powerful reminder that the war to end all wars didn't.

Ever since I encountered Vita Sackville-West in Harold Nicolson's diaries in the 60s I've been mildly fascinated by the Sackville-West family.  I thought her goings on were on the odd side but there are other interesting skeletons in the family cupboard and Robert Sackville-West has taken some out and given them an airing in The Disinherited. It is a sad but fascinating tale of illegitimate children and family squabbles with which he entertained a packed Book Festival tent.  It's on my Christmas list.

Another author, not so well known and whose tent was not quite so tightly packed was Phil Adams who read us his entry to the City of Literature Story Shop competition.  The engaging little tale of a salmon and a bear had to fight hard to be heard above the torrential rain beating down on the spiegel tent but we all enjoyed it as we did the Prosecco downed by friends and family in celebration afterwards.

The Royal Overseas League runs an annual music competition.  This year's gold medal winner was a saxophonist and I went to hear him in a programme called Sax before Midnight.  It was a mightily varied programme that finished with the always appealing and melodic tangos of Piazzola.  He started however with a piece by Stockhausen, renowned in my mind for his Helicopter Quartet and for his general oddness.  If I heard Im Freundschaft correctly though he had a sense of humour, as did the person who dressed in a bear suit to play it on bassoon.

When it was suggested that we go to see MacAulay and Co. being recorded for BBC Radio Scotland I reflected that I could just as well have stayed in my bed to listen to it but I went along and rather enjoyed it.
 
The Pure, the Dead and the Brilliant by Alan Bissett explores the issue of Scottish independence from the point of view of  some mythical creatures of folklore, a selkie, a banshee, a bogle and a demon. It's very funny and doesn't take itself too seriously though its conclusion that independence is the way to go comes as no surprise.  The audience are caught up in the general hilarity and from where I sat I could see only one NO vote amidst a sea of YESs as we waved our programmes, folded to show the appropriate page, at the end.

One wet evening we set off to find some folk music.  The Royal Oak was our first port of call.  We couldn't find a gap in the crowd listening to free music in the main bar so dived downstairs and parted with a very modest sum to be entertained for an hour or so by a trio of young and accomplished players.  I've forgotten their name but I'd go again.  We spent an unsatisfactory time in Sandy Bell's afterwards where I doubt if even the musicians could hear themselves then went through various musicless pubs and ended up at the tailend of a free, funny and filthy comedy gig.
 
Crammed onto the tiny stage in the Jazz Bar were eight musicians who gave us a terrific version of The Rite of Spring.  If it sounds discordant said the leader Dave Patrick talking about their work on the piece just think what it sounds like when it's not played properly.  Of course in this case it's the dissonance that gives it character and according to this piece in The Telegraph was probably a major cause of the riot at its premier.

The first play I went to at The Fringe this year was by Marivaux and I was delighted to find that another of his plays was being performed.  I was even more delighted when I saw Games of Love and Chance.  This 18th century romantic comedy in which mistress swaps place with her maid to observe the man destined to be her husband and he does likewise with his valet had been transported to the 1920s and its comedy stretched to farce.  It was terrifically well acted and I look forward to seeing another TwoSquared Productions show next year.

In a bare basement corner of Summerhall an audience of a dozen or so stood for an hour around a long low narrow table.  At one end a nurse, at the other a soldier, each only inches away from us. The play consisted of periods of action simulating men rushing forward under fire followed by periods in which letters full of love, hope and longing were exchanged.  The horror of the war was simply but powerfully shown.  At a whistle blast from the nurse the soldier began an attack.  He rocked back and forward with ever increasing urgency, willing himself to get to the wire and focussing his mind on the future he hoped for while she created the noise of war. The attack culminated in the actor throwing pieces of liver at the wall.  The attack over, the nurse collected the pieces of liver and sorted them into "dead", "blighty" and "fixed, back you go".  Eventually after one attack a letter comes from the War Office, "killed in action".  When The Flood was over there was rightly no curtain call and no applause. 

Fortunately liver wasn't on the menu of the excellent meal we had afterwards in The Royal Dick.

The last play of my Fringe going (one EIF play to go) was definitely the oddest and rivalled the cosmonaut play in its ability to fail to communicate anything to me.  Lippy started with a very nicely observed and humorous after show discussion about a play we are supposed to have just seen.  Then we see a play in which four women variously ferret about in bin bags full of shredded paper, hang over tables, squat on buckets and ultimately I believe die from starvation.  They don't say very much in the course of the action.  It seemed to me the sort of play Salvador Dali might have written.  Proper theatre critics have made some sense of it and I much appreciate Lyn Gardner's review in The Guardian for articulating much of what I felt about the show.  

A late night session at the Jazz Bar featuring the Russian trumpeter Valery Ponomarev backed by a galaxy of local jazzmen was excellent entertainment although I found Mr Ponomarev's insistence that we all applaud and clap along a degree less amusing than he did.

Eager to get the lowdown on collateral debt obligations and the like I went to hear John Lanchester on his book Money Talk: Nonsense Versus Bullshit.  It was very amusing but a serious and cautionary tale nonetheless.  What a balls-up it's all been since the smart money men started selling mortgages to people with no hope of being able to keep up the payments.

I confess to never having read anything by the great Thomas Mann although I have seen his work in the form of the opera Werther and the film Death in Venice.  His son Klaus was also a writer and according to Alan Massie while Thomas was interesting as a writer Klaus was much more interesting as a man.

So much more interesting to Massie that he has written a novella called Klaus which is a fictionalised version of his life.  So interesting was his talk on the subject that I have bought the book and placed it on my pile of unread masterpieces for later consumption.

Eagerly looked forward to have been the James plays, a trilogy by Rona Munro about James I, James II and James III who were kings of Scotland in the 15th century.  This is a joint production by the EIF, the National Theatre and the National Theatre of Scotland and all three are directed by Laurie Sansom who took over artistic direction of  the NTS quite recently.

I saw them in a oner yesterday and thought they were stunning.  Check out the broadsheets for reviews, most of which are very favourable.  My favourite of the three was James II which the critics favoured least.  So much for the critics is what I say. 

To properly enjoy a Festival day you've got to feel that you're packing a lot in.  I did my best yesterday with a day weighted on the musical side.

I kicked off with an excellent show by Shrewsbury and Severn opera.  The Lost Domain is a dramatisation of a novel by Alain Fournier who was killed early in the First World War.  It's a story of youthful love and the search, ultimately unsuccessful, for the happiness of the past.

The young cast sing, dance and act with skill and commitment.  They faithfully convey the emotional truth of the tale in a well choreographed, costumed and staged production that makes good use of projection on the cyclorama, that sweeps on and off simple but effective settings and is an object lesson in how to deploy a large cast on the Adam House stage.

Music and lyrics?  Excellent.

I must read the book thought I and lo and behold it's a school text in France freely accessible here.

Then I nipped across to the museum to enjoy a free concert by the Erskine string quartet. The Erskine in question is the sixth Earl of Kellie, an 18th century composer and they played some of his music as well as some 21st century classical stuff and rounded things of with an arrangement of two of Phil Cunningham's accordion pieces.  Nothing if not eclectic.

Down at the Book Festival I enjoyed two authors talking about their books on 21st century India.  It's 30 years since my sole visit to India and there have been such momentous changes that it would probably spoil my memories of the place to go back.  Asked why, given the not so very nice picture of many aspects of life in Delhi he paints he continues to live there, Rana Dasgupta pointed to the energy of the city.  All is change and forward movement.  It makes Europe seem effete and worn out.

John Keay's Midnight's Descendants sounded a good read too if rather more academic. 

The Kronos Quartet have long been amongst my favourites.  In a show called Beyond Zero they played rather mournful music, initially alone, and then accompanied by a film collage of First World War archival footage of troops parading, troops embarking, troops attacking, tanks lumbering over the landscape, biplanes dogfighting and suchlike nastiness.

It certainly left you in no doubt that the war was a sad and bad thing but then personally I was in no doubt about that beforehand so it was perhaps a case of preaching to the converted.

You'd expect film of that era to be jerky and spattered with little black spots and similar noise but here a great deal of artificial blemishes had been superimposed in the manner of rapidly changing semi opaque blue and sepia Rorschach tests.  The effect was no doubt wonderfully evocative of the blast of bombs and gunfire but it pained my eyes to the extent of spoiling the show for me.  The wildly enthusiastic applause proved me to be in a minority.

Before I got to Kronos I stopped off in the New Town to see a friend's art exhibition and was treated to a glass of wine.  I'm sure that was a friendly gesture rather than a marketing ploy. I left empty-handed not without regrets over a couple of the pieces.  I could have made an offer I suppose.

Theatre Alba can be relied upon to produce something worthwhile in Duddingston Kirk gardens and proved that last night with their production of Robert McLellan's Mary Stewart.

Unfortunately the climate can't be relied upon to provide pleasant conditions in which to watch an outdoor show and so it proved.  I had taken the precaution of putting thermals under my cords and wore a down ski jacket and a Helly Hansen cold weather sailing hat so I was well equipped to stay warm and to withstand the rain that drizzled periodically during the first act, poured down during the interval (we were under cover then) and drizzled continuously throughout the second act.

There were not many of us there but we all stuck it out as of course did the actors who delivered a fine performance of an interesting play.  Theatregoers are more familiar with Schiller's Maria Stuart and the Donizetti opera based on it.  Those cover Mary's imprisonment in England and her execution and include a wholly fictional meeting between her and Elizabeth I of England.

McLellan's play covers ground which I imagine is as familiar to Scottish school children today as it was in my childhood.  Essentially it deals with her struggle to maintain her authority over the quarrelsome and self-serving Scottish nobility as a Catholic monarch, a very young and inexperienced one, in the early and fervent days of the Reformation.  It opens just after the murder of Rizzio, explores Darnley's repeated efforts to be given the crown matrimonial and her resistance to that, Darnley's murder, her subsequent marriage with Bothwell and ends with her setting off to imprisonment in Loch Leven.

Her personal and political lives were both steeped in tragedy and nowhere was that better illustrated in the play than in the scene in which Bothwell enumerates all the forces that are arrayed against her from her former friends in France, her cousin Elizabeth, the protestant church in Scotland, most of the Scottish nobility and even her (half) brother James.

The cast were mostly Theatre Alba regulars and worked well together.  Andrea Mckenzie made an excellent Mary, exceptional given that she took on the part at very short notice.  Of the others I particularly enjoyed Robin Thomson's devious Maitland whose surface humour concealed an ice-cold calculating interior.  His chuckled "hoots, toots mon" could well find a happy home with me in future.

There was so much communicating going on behind me between two young women at Mercy, Mercy, Mercy that I eventually lost patience and suggested that they delay their conversation till the music was over.  Nobody expects to listen to jazz in a sepulchral silence but continuous chatter seems to me to defeat the object of going to a concert in the first place.  And as far as I could judge they were the only people in the Jazz Bar behaving in that way.

That was the only blemish on an hour and a half of music associated with Cannonball Adderley and his band.  Most of it from the 50s and 60s, much of it composed by his brother Nat and other members of the band.  In this line-up Nat's place was taken by Colin Steele and Cannonball's by Martin Kershaw.  It was excellent.

The Middle East could do with a little bit of mercy, mercy, mercy at the moment but none of the speakers at the Book Festival event on the middle east that I went to offered much prospect of that.  It was an interesting but sobering hour.

Mercifully there has been more music on hand to keep festival goers cheerful and I much enjoyed a late night show by the colourful Caribbean tenor saxophonist Arturo Tappin whose uninhibited and vigorous set was something of a contrast to the more restrained afternoon presentation by a sax quartet from Glasgow.  Who ever thought Weegies could be restrained?

My own show finished yesterday.  We got quite reasonable houses, quite a reasonable review and the show got better as the week went on.  It seems possible also that our efforts may be the talk of the cabinet table when they reassemble and swop holiday experiences if the Foreign Secretary enjoyed himself on Friday.  Of course if he didn't (the play has a few unkind words to say about politicians after all) he might point to it as the sort of crap you encounter on the Fringe.

Rumours by Neil Simon was our stablemate in the Royal Scots Club and I saw their last show last night.  It's a cracking comedy of a farcical nature and the cast made a great job of it.  A nice note to leave the venue on.

One strategy when looking for the silver threepenny bits hidden in the plum pudding that is the Fringe is to look for authors whose work you like or admire.

That worked well for me with David Mamet but I came a cropper with David Greig.  I really found The Cosmonaut's Last Message To The Woman He Once Loved In The Former Soviet Union difficult to enjoy.  The staging of it in Riddle's Court didn't help.  The rule there should be don't let your actors sit down because no-one beyond the front row will be able to see them, and above all don't let them lie down.  In this production they sat down a lot and lay down now and then.  To be fair the cosmonauts themselves were clearly visible throughout on an elevated platform but it would all have worked better if the audience had been elevated.  Raked seating next time please.

Now as to the play itself I didn't have much of a clue about what was going on so turned to the internet when I got home.  The Guardian's review of a 2005 production says "....it is pretty hard work for the audience...".  I agree.  But what's it about?

Well it seems communication and in particular the failure to communicate is the theme.  So I must congratulate Mr Greig on his success in failing to communicate with me.

A two hour ukulele workshop in the hands of cabaret diva Tricity Vogue was a tempting proposition at the weekend but I plumpted for Madeleine Smith and Seamus Heaney instead.

I Promise I Shall Not Play Billiards opened with three women circling a seated fourth.  All were dressed in similar mid Victorian costumes of crinoline skirt and voluminous blouse.  The similarity didn't end there because each of them took the part by turns of Madeleine Smith, accused of murder in mid 19th century Glasgow.

It was an interesting presentation but failed to tell me much more than I already knew about the case, which was damn little.  So even now I am scurrying to Wikipedia to find out more including I hope the significance of the title.

In A While with Seamus Heaney we were led gently through the poet's life and works by an Irish actor whose mellifluous voice had an unfortunate soporific effect on me so that I am unable to properly report on the show.

No-one could have dozed off during David Mamet's highly charged and loudly argued Race.  This 2009 play is set in a lawyer's office where the multi-racial partnership is approached by a rich white man seeking to be defended against an accusation of raping a black girl.

It has all of Mamet's clever plotting and linguistic virtuosity as the characters collide against one another at high velocity and the story twists and turns.  The complexity of race relations, of how to deal honestly and fairly with one another without prejudice, special pleading or special treatment from one side or the other is expertly, humanely and wittily explored.

The context is the post civil rights America of today but this South African company no doubt seized upon the play as a vehicle with which to reflect on relationships within their own post apartheid  society.

Back in Britain meanwhile the European debate goes on and Anthony Giddens at the Book Festival gave an interesting talk that got away from our perennial preoccupation with perfidious Brussels laying down anti-British rules about straight bananas and the like, to reflect on Europe's place in the  context of today's highly connected and highly interdependent world.

He has of course written a book putting forward his ideas and it seems to me that it would be a good idea to have a copy of Turbulent and Mighty Continent delivered to every home in the land in time for the citizens of the UK (or perhaps by then it will be just the rUK) to reflect on the bigger picture before they cast their votes in favour of or against straight bananas.

No mikes were in evidence in Blackwells bookshop where Trinity College presented a selection of pieces from their latest syllabuses.  Piano, recorder, clarinet and saxophone were all played by Trinity staff and a local music teacher treated us to a set of traditional Scottish fiddle tunes.

Introduced as having achieved unbelievably high marks in her grade 6 exam a sweet little girl from Heriot's delighted the audience with a haunting harp melody.

The concert was free and I even came away with a goodie bag.  The contents were not wildly exciting but I always have need of a biro that hasn't yet run out of ink.

On the way home from FOH duties for the Grads  I popped into a free standup comedy show.  At most standup shows it's blindingly obvious that the Fringe exercises no quality control over participants and this show was no exception.

Thanks to the couple of glasses of wine I'd had earlier in the evening though I found it mildly enjoyable and eagerly seized the opportunity given to me to grunt fiercely into a microphone as one comic drew his audience into his act.

On the Fringe a full house at any time is a consummation devoutly to be wished but to sell out at 10.30 in the morning is such stuff as dreams are made on.

Yet there we were yesterday, around fifty of us, crammed into Valvona and Crolla's little back room for Larkin About where we spent a delightful hour in the company of two actors and two musicians sharing Philip Larkin's passions for poetry, jazz and women. 

You could call it the secret life of a librarian only it doesn't seem to have been very secret even in his lifetime judging by the letters he wrote to his various women and to male friends, let alone what he revealed in his poems.  Randy isn't the word for it. Hard to tell from this show whether he was a likeable person or not but certainly interesting and I'll be off to the library in the fullness of time for a volume of his poetry and a biography.

One minor criticism.  What was the point in such a small room only three rows deep of miking the performers?

Is this a typically botched photo from my phone or is it the world being smothered by a dark cloud of evil?

I maintain it's the latter since I snapped it while watching In Search of Vanished Blood, a video presentation on the walls of the National Gallery of Scotland late on Monday night that was part of the Lights Out commemoration of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

The video was accompanied by a soundtrack of whining shells, air raid sirens and exploding armaments rivalled briefly by the Tattoo fireworks until not long after it started there was a very loud bang and all went dark.

I hung about for a bit but had had enough by 11 so don't know whether they got the show back on the road or not.

There was blood, albeit in the shape of red fairy dust, on show in the Grads production of The Duchess of Malfi that I saw earlier in the evening.

Now I know this play is regarded as a Jacobean masterpiece but frankly I think it's a load of cobblers not redeemed by poetic language as can be fairly claimed for some of Shakespeare's more nonsensical work.  So that tends to colour my view of any production including this one.

In the director's notes she says that she sees the play as a Hammer horror movie and with blood and gore splattered over the screen, wolves howling in the moonlight, madmen stumbling along the dimly lit corridors of Transylvanian castles to the sound of clanking chains and distant screams the show has a chance.  But not, for me at any rate, in the well lit and comfortable auditorium of the Royal Scots Club.

More to my taste was the other Grads show on view at the same venue this week.  The Wonderful World of Dissocia presents itself initially as a gleefully anarchic and absurdist romp, beautifully lit and energetically performed by a team of actors on top of their game. 

The sting comes in the second act. Fortunately the lights went down before I had properly read the programme because the director's note on the play gives away what to my mind should be the shock of realising what it's all about.  So if you go, and I thoroughly recommend that you should, don't read the programme until afterwards.

For tickets https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/duchess-of-malfi and https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/wonderful-world-of-dissocia

Festival going kicked off for me on Friday with a production of  Marivaux's The Dispute at the ever interesting Summerhall.

The story concerns an experiment to find out which of the sexes is the more fickle.  Four children, two male and two female are raised in isolation and at around 18 years of age are released, find one another and social interaction begins.

Lo and behold la donna e mobile, but the lads are just as bad.  This was a very nice production with good use of video and sound and fine acting.  I was intrigued though by the male bonding activities of the two boys.  Play fighting and general horsing around seemed authentic though I can't say I was much into that myself.  But they also jump and bang their chests together.  That's something I've never done nor seen done, except in another production of The Dispute that I saw at the Traverse not that long ago.

This coincidence sent me scurrying first to my own copy of the play then to a facsimile of the original text to see whether Marivaux's stage directions include chest banging.  No they don't. Ils sautent is all he says.

Somebody is copying somebody.  No harm in that.  I've done it myself.