Having disposed of the Film Festival in my last post I'll get back to a more chronological review of my festival going including the Book Festival which for the second year running is, as you can see in the photo above, at the Art College.

After the Grads' shows my next theatrical experience was Room in the EIF.  This show really does defy description.  The stage crew come on at the end to take a bow with the cast and thoroughly deserve it for their slick management of the complex manipulation of the set demanded of them throughout.  This interview with James Thierrée, the creative genius behind it, gives you an idea of the show.  My comment - fun, incomprehensible, on the long side.

The following morning, a Sunday, I rose early enough to get to the Art College by 10.30 to hear Henry Marsh the brain surgeon in the Book Festival.  Unfortunately thanks to an incorrect placement of the event in my diary I was 24 hours too late.  The silver lining to this cloud was that I was able to pop over to the Filmhouse and see one of the Kinuyo Tanaka films.

That evening I went to Leith Theatre to hear the Sons of Kemet.  A sort of jazz band with the unusual combination of saxophone, tuba and two drum kits.  The saxophonist also plays beautifully on a flute like instrument.  The tuba player is unbelievably skilled, bending his instrument to produce sounds soft and sweet and harsh and loud by turn.  They can play quietly but generally they didn't.  Such amplification seems unnecessary to me but luckily I had earphones in my pocket which kept the volume tolerable otherwise I'd have had to leave and miss 90 minutes of wonderful music making.

Muster Station by the site specific masters Grid Iron was brilliant.  We waited initially in what seemed like a tropical greenhouse but was in fact just the entrance corridor in Leith Academy. When the show got underway we were marshalled harshly through passport control like booths in the school sports hall that split the audience into four groups that were subsequently herded separately around the school and exposed to various scenarios.  The premise revealed itself to be that the UK was about to be submerged by a giant wave and we were seeking refuge.  The final destination was back in the sports hall which had been transformed into the sort of temporary refuge that you see on news report with blankets strewn on the floor for people to huddle together on.  I have to say it was rather more beautiful and tasteful than anything you'd see on the news.  Thanks to my correct answers to questions about Finland at an earlier stage (where refuge was being sought) I and some others had earned a special status.  We were given life jackets and moved to a special enclosure in a corner of the hall.  Unfortunately I then lost most of the ongoing development of the show because of the acoustics of the hall.  But it was a great experience.

Olga Wojtas is an Edinburgh writer of whom I had never heard who has written a number of comic crime novels featuring a time travelling incompetent detective, a graduate of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. (That may spark a memory for some).  Miss Blaine makes an appearance in the novels too I learnt at Olga's talk at the Book Festival.  I bought her latest to check whether I find it as funny as her fans do.  Apparently her books were not accepted by a German publisher who declared them too zany for the Germans.

Coppélia from Scottish Ballet was superb.  It's a complete reworking of the original that preserves the essence of the plot.   I expected the setting and choreography to be different, and by jove they were, but I thought to myself very early on that surely the music had never been so powerful.  It hadn't. A new score that incorporates some of Delibes as well as all the tricks of the synthesiser age. The Guardian called it "...a successful stride into ballet's future".  Keep your fingers crossed that it is and read their review.

Anything connected to Cuba generally attracts my attention so no surprise that I went to hear Karla Suarez talk about her novel Havana Year Zero.  It's set in 1993, a year of economic crisis in Cuba, and is about the search by a disparate cast of characters for a document that will prove that the telephone was invented in Cuba.  There is apparently a strong argument that it was but that's not the point of the novel which amongst other things the blurb tells us is about "how people cling onto meaning in a country at its lowest ebb".  Coincidentally I recently bought a book (not yet read) which is the real story of how seven ordinary Cubans born in the 70s and 80s have coped with life there.  It's called How Things Fall Apart which chimes well with Suarez's novel.  As for that, it was a pleasure to listen to the vivacious Karla's Spanish quite apart from learning about her book.

That evening I was at the Usher Hall to hear Jordi Saval and his group of musicians give a programme of the type of music that Ibn Battuta, the medieval Moroccan traveller, might have heard on his extensive travels through Asia and Europe.  It was a good listen.  I had a ticket to hear Saval present Turkish music of the same sort of period at the Queen's Hall the following morning but couldn't go though I've subsequently heard the concert thanks to BBC Sounds.  It was lovely.

I went to Arkle's two shows.  Silent Night was the story of a family spending Christmas Eve in an Anderson shelter during the London Blitz.  It was reasonably well performed and staged but was the sort of play you might pick out from a list of available plays suitable for amateurs who need to deploy 3m, 2f.   Their other show, Tay Bridge by Peter Arnott was better material, the back stories of seven individuals on board the ill-fated train.  It was very well performed and staged with superb tableau moments as the cast were buffeted by periodic jolting of the train and then cast into the sea.  The accompanying light and sound effects were excellent.  Standout performances from Esther Gilvray and Therese Gallagher.

International Theater Amsterdam were due to bring three plays to the EIF which they would perform in Dutch.  All three were based on books so I determined to read the books in advance to get a Fosbury flop over the language barrier.  I got some way through The Magic Mountain yawning the while.  Then the show was cancelled so I didn't need to finish the book.  A Little Life turned out to be a convenient and appropriate birthday present so I didn't even start that one.  I did read The End of Eddy and I suppose it helped me to understand what was going on in the production.  However I much preferred the book and I am sure that was because as Hugh Simpson wisely says in this review -  "It is all done with the maximum of enthusiasm, but the lack of light and shade does mean that a certain profundity is lacking."

As for A Little Life language was not a problem except to the extent that I found it difficult to differentiate between the voices and found myself quite often checking the actor's mouths to see who was speaking.  Was that because they were speaking a foreign language?

The play was great, all three hours and fifty minutes playing time.  Even the twenty minute interval was enjoyable because most of the cast stayed on stage and pottered about doing things in character.

The play centres around the lifelong trauma suffered by Jude, one of the four friends whose relationship is the lifeblood of the story.  Blood there is in abundance as Jude self harms, the result of the horrific abuses he suffered as a child and young man.  These are shown in all their graphic detail in flashbacks.  Ramsey Nasr who plays Jude meets and transcends the extraordinary physical and emotional demands of the part triumphantly.  It's no wonder that he was given Holland's highest acting award in 2015 when he first played the part.

Over the weekend at the Book Festival I heard Marc David Baer talk about his book The Ottomans (which the library have obtained for me more quickly that I either expected or wanted), Abdulrazak Gurnah talk wisely and well about his life and work, Gulbahar Haitiwaji (with help from her daughter) talk about her internment by the Chinese in one of their so called re-education camps and Alan Cumming give an entertaining and humorous insight into his activities and attitudes.

After a couple of hours chatting with old friends in a pub on Sunday afternoon Fiona (here for a chum's golden wedding do) and I went to the Hub to see Liz Lochead's Medea.  It was an interestingly staged production with the bulk of the audience standing around a narrow thrust stage. The principals provided fine declamatory performances and the chorus, who at some stages mingled with the audience, gave the insightful commentary on the action that is their responsibility in Greek theatre (ancient that is).  I enjoyed it but as I admitted to Fiona I felt nothing.  My withers were not wrung.  So we can't give it more than three stars however generous we feel.