The Hindu : Sept. 11 dominates the Edinburgh Festival

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 07, 2002

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International

Sept. 11 dominates the Edinburgh Festival

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON AUG. 6. Themes built around the events of September 11 and their aftermath dominate this year's Edinburgh Festival, one of the world's biggest and most chaotic festivals of performing arts, and notoriously famous for the shock value of its fringe performances.

This is the first time in its 55 years of history that a single idea will run so strongly through the month-long festival which, in the past, has merely tiptoed around some of the biggest events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The view that imagination died with September 11 is challenged through a series of plays, sketches, posters and even comic performances in the Festival's best traditions of irreverence.

Inevitably, a controversy has erupted over the drag queen Tina C's spoof on the U.S. media's reaction to the terrorist attacks — most daringly mocked through a poster in which she is standing astride the Manhattan skyline trying to fend off a plane heading towards her legs which stand for the twin Towers. It has been attacked for lack of taste, but critics have been impressed by its sheer energy — and her gall.

The most sought-after performance is a play, starring the Hollywood couple Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, about a New York fireman who seeks the help of an editor to write eulogies for his dead colleagues. Then there is the British actor, Steven Berkoff, who performs his own epic poem Requieum for Ground Zero, and a theatre group presents seven personal accounts of what it was like to be in New York on September 11.

But in the end Edinburgh Festival is about controversies — protests, catcalls and walkouts. And barely hours after it opened at the weekend, it already had its first walkout as an angry audience trooped out of a play by the Scottish writer, Anthony Neilson, denouncing its sexually explicit theme.

But Mr. Neilson struck back calling the protesters `cowards'. "I feel bad that audiences walked out, but I can't write for cowards.

If something shocks me, I don't just walk away from it, I ask myself why I am shocked by it,'' he said as the Festival veterans prepared to cope with more such encounters.

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