Awards Coverage

Thumbs up for the Bourne supremacy

With a hectic festival schedule, Bette Bourne's dash to The Herald Angels awards was suitably dramatic, finds Keith Bruce

[Saturday, August 29th, 2009]

The life and times of drag artist and grande dame of gay theatre, Bette Bourne, has been celebrated at the Traverse during this year's Fringe in a series of conversations Bourne has been having with playwright Mark Ravenhill.

Departing often from Ravenhill's script, Bourne explores of his own life from the illegal gay scene of the 1950s to his leadership of the troupe Bloolips and friendship with Quentin Crisp.

Bourne was previously awarded a Bank of Scotland Herald Angel in 2001 for his portrayal of Crisp in Tim Fountain's play Resident Alien, and this week he receives an Archangel Award in recognition of his sustained contribution to the gaiety of festival Edinburgh.

Kathryn Howden is one of Scotland best actors, as was recognised when she received a Herald Angel in the first year of the awards, 1995, for her role as Tottie in Sue Glover's Bondagers at the Traverse.

This year she is the central character in the Traverse contribution to the EIF programme, giving a superb performance as Janet Horne in Rona Munro's new play The Last Witch, which has its final shows today.

Required to be flirty, fiesty and tragic, Howden is outstanding among a very fine cast.

It was in 2005 that three young women received an Angel for their work as young producers, bringing exciting new work to the Fringe under the Fuel banner.

Kate McGrath and her colleagues have maintained their commitment to Edinburgh and Fuel at the Fringe 09 brought six new shows into the city this past week, using new spaces at the McEwan Hall and university medical school as well as the Pleasance and the Drill Hall.

Work of the highest quality made by a carefully chosen group of artists wins Fuel its second Bank of Scotland Herald Angel. Boundaries were blurred in the International Festival with the listing of the six women singers of Dialogos in the theatre section of the programme as acknowledgement of the thoughtful staging and lighting of their music in Canongate Kirk. Tondal's Vision was a reconstruction of a 12th century visionary Christian text set to beautifully sung medieval polyphony.

As an aural and visual experience it was one of the most moving events of this year's Festival.

In the Fringe brochure Zic Zazou's show Brocante Sonore appears under theatre but the company are music makers who use a junkyard of scrap to make their instruments.

Lengths of plumbing, a snooker ball, a xylophone made of bricks and the air escaping from a balloon are all employed in pursuit of melody and rhythm. This clever factory of sound is another Angel-winner.

David Leddy has emerged as one of the most interesting theatremakers working in Scotland and his new show for the Fringe, White Tea, explores the differences of experience in the West and the East in a narrative about a post-Hiroshima peace campaigner and her daughter.

The show combines the old ritual of the tea ceremony with new technology and the language of live art in an elegaic and affecting way.

Site-specific performance is a feature of this year's Fringe, but Shadwell Opera were especially bold in choosing to mount their production of Mozart's Magic Flute, with all its Masonic symobolism, in Rosslyn Chapel. The ancient and ornate church to the south of Edinburgh that has become a mecca (if that's the right word) for fans of Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code. Their irreverent, modern dress production is thoughfully staged and dressed, very funny, and has a cast of very fine singers.

Bourne gets top marks for gaiety

Keith Bruce on this week's awards

[Saturday, August 31st, 2009]

The Bank of Scotland Herald Angels award ceremonies at the Festival Theatre on Saturday morning are sometimes in danger of becoming unmissable shows in themselves, and never more so than this weekend.

A small orchestra and the young cast of a superb production of Mozart's Magic Flute began proceedings, and the fabulous junkyard music-making of Frenchmen Zic Zazou ended the show, which was only graced by the presence of Archangel-winner Bette Bourne because he was swiftly conveyed to the venue in a taxi after the end of his performance at the Traverse.

Bourne has been exploring "A Life in 3 Acts" - his own - in the company of playwright Mark Ravenhill. Having won an Angel for his portrayal of Quentin Crisp in 2001, it was time that his own contribution to theatre was recognised with an Archangel.

His timescale gave the opportunity for Shadwell Opera to perform the opening of their Mozart, which has been playing in the appropriate surroundings of Rosslyn Chapel, but proved the boast of producer Elly Brindle that they could stage it anywhere by filling the foyer of the Festival Theatre with life. She, director Jack Furness and conductor Aidan Coburn stepped up to receive an Angel.

They were presented this week by Kath Mainland, chief executive of the Fringe, as she began the final weekend of her first year in the post, unanimously acclaimed for the stability she has brought to the organisation, alongside Lisa Stephenson, head of marketing and customer experience at Lloyds Banking Group.

The site-specific Magic Flute was a far cry from Dialogos singing Tondal's Vision at Canongate Kirk, but not in all respects. An Angel for this superb realisation of medieval text and music was received on the company's behalf by Charlotte Gosling, media manager of the Edinburgh International Festival.

The other EIF show in this week's list was the Traverse production of Rona Munro's new play The Last Witch. Actor Kathryn Howden, who received an Angel in the first year of the awards, 1995, for her role in another Traverse production, made it a pair for her performance in the title role as Janet Horne, who was put to death in Dornoch in 1727.

David Leddy's White Tea is one Fringe show that audiences in Scotland will certainly have another opportunity to see as it tours immediately after the Fringe, ending with a week at the Tron in Glasgow at the end of September.

Like Howden, Leddy paid fulsome tribute to his company colleagues for their role in the success of the work.

Another returning recipient was producer Kate McGrath, whose Fuel organisation received an Angel in 2005. Now a mature, bold and always imaginative venture which has formed partnerships with very talented artists and companies, the arrival of its slate of productions to the Drill Hall, McEwan Hall, University Medical School and other venues was a notable landmark in this year's Fringe bill of fare.

The blue boiler-suited musicians of French troupe Zic Zazou have found promoters beating a path to their door at C Venue in Chamber Street to catch their show Brocante Sonore.

Their theatrical music-making with angle-grinders, pots and pans, horns, rattles and lengths of tubing is a wonder to behold and it will surely be returning, if it is not whisked off to international success first.

A short, captivating taste of the show brought Saturday's Bank of Scotland Herald Angels to a storming close.