The Sun Also Rises
Royal Lyceum
The Cage
Pleasance
Borderline Racist
The Canons’ Gait
The Edinburgh International Festival, respectable elder brother of the drop-out Fringe, takes its art very seriously indeed and expects the audience to do the same. It gives us the exotic, the challenging, the eclectic, the mesmeric. It gives us, in a word, the Mickey Finns. Usually we get Palestinian ghost-lore or Slovakian puppet-theatre or sub-Saharan tribal epic or Lesotho revenge drama or Apache creation myth. Sometimes we get all five, in Finnish, with subtitles and video projections, and an on-stage bongo squadron to keep us from our slumbers. But this year, in a stunning reversal of tradition, we’ve got a straight play adaptated from a bestseller by a well-known author. It’s even in English.
The Sun Also Rises doesn’t readily lend itself to the stage unless you decide to keep the narrator and most of the characters and choose to reproduce faithfully every scene in the book in the correct lineal sequence. The director, John Collins, has settled on this artless scheme and the show comes in at just under four hours. The 1920s setting has been abandoned in favour of somewhere-anywhere-and-nowhere.
We’re in a generic bar which looks like a Swedish chalet varnished in brown and scattered with chairs from a 1970s canteen. The actors wear modern high-street clothes. Utterly barmy! Period costumes effortlessly and emphatically conjure a vanished age but if you ditch that potent amenity, you dump the audience in a mixed-message neverland where word and gesture are antique but suitings and furnishings are up to date.
Lady Brett Ashley (nicely played by Lucy Taylor) is done up as a hard-faced bottle blonde in an H&M coat-dress. Scarcely the toast of Europe, more a single mum at a speed-dating night.
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