“Pass it on boys, pass it on,” exclaims the Richard Griffiths teacher in the Alan Bennett play, and the Olympic flag was duly handed on from China to Great Britain over the weekend in a blaze of excitement, a rather sad eight-minute cabaret from London featuring David Beckham kicking a football, and a very funny speech from Boris Johnson claiming bragging rights in ping pong.

The Leona Lewis song, though, despite all the righteous huffing and puffing that’s suddenly flared up, was no worse than the song the Chinese proffered at their opening ceremony (in which Sarah Brightman partnered a local pop star who resembled an unholy alliance between Engelbert Humperdinck and Denis Lotis), and at least she’s a global superstar.

She’s also a true East Ender, as is David Beckham, and I sincerely hope the Cockney flavour of that short taster is improved and worked on when the cultural programme gets underway. But who’s in charge? I note that Keith Khan has been quietly done away with, and we hear not a peep from Cameron Mackintosh or Jude Kelly.

I propose a joint artistic directorship of the rock impresario Harvey Goldsmith, the classical populist Raymond Gubbay, and Amanda Thompson of the Blackpool Pleasure Beach. That should do it. The last thing we want is an imitation, soulless Cirque du Soleil along the lines of the Chinese extravaganza. And why not a segment from the RSC?  
 
Nothing I’ve read from the Edinburgh Festival has made me feel deprived in not going this year. The most risible reportage has been that of critics reviewing some sort of sophomoric rubbish improvised from their own reviews. In other words — can you believe it, to quote Richard Wilson — the reviews were produced before the actual performances to which they related.

This of course has nothing to do with art, only to do with a sinister kind of vanity on the critics’ part and a final admission on the fringe’s that there really is no such thing as quality control in the programming.

Actually, I don’t necessarily think there should be quality control in the programming. That’s the critics’ job, but they seem to have given up on that one, too.

One report painted a hilarious picture of the Telegraph’s nice Dominic Cavendish suddenly turning into a raving lunatic because his little Assembly Rooms play (not one of the improvised ones) was being invaded by noise from an adjacent production.

But Dominic must know that the Assembly Rooms has always operated thus, in a completely philistine manner, with diktats that performances should only be an hour long and with little regard for sound insulation, scenic design standards, or any serious artistic or intellectual aspiration.

You only find these things on the international festival, which continues this week, though according to a Brian Logan round-up in the Guardian at the weekend — which jokily (I mean laughably) promoted a fifteen minute “mueslical” devised, apparently, in the Guardian flat — you’d have thought the circus had already left town.

This final week of the festival proper sounds intriguing, with a world premiere of a Heiner Goebbels piece based on texts by T S Eliot and Beckett, with music by the Hilliard Ensemble; continuing performances of Matthew Bourne’s new Dorian Gray dance drama (which has received mixed, but hardly off-putting, reviews); and a seriously rich music programme.

And just think how pleasant Edinburgh might be as the rain must surely clear off at last, along with all the crap jugglers and fire-eaters along the Royal Mile and critics writing about shows that never happened as far as the public were concerned but somehow materialised within their own little fantasy bubbles. 
 
 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 8:33 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.