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The Tron brings some Celtic flavour to this year’s Mayfesto Words: Anna Millar
As the EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL announces the first of their curators, Miles Fielder ponders what such an eclectic mix might bring to the party
The EIFF hopes to screen You Are Not I, the film Sara Driver made the year after she began working on partner Jim Jarmusch’s (pictured) films in 1980. Given the cool aesthetic of their collaborations, less is more might inform their curatorial choices. A new one of their own would be great: another Coffee and Cigarettes short, featuring EIFF patron/Limits of Control star Tilda Swinton?
Clint Mansell left pop music to eat itself and began scoring films for Darren Aronofsky, so a retrospective – featuring the undervalued The Fountain – might be in order. But maybe that’s too narcissistic. More leftfield would be a mash-up with fellow curator Mike Skinner, who is himself abandoning music for filmmaking. They could host a rap- alonga to, say, The Sound of Music? She’s a passionate advocate of the films of Ingmar Bergman and her father Roberto, and the thought of Isabella Rossellini hosting a twin retrospective of those giants of cinema would be wild at heart and crazy on top.
Gus Van Sant could curate some weird and wonderful movies. His much (and unfairly) derided shot-for- shot remake of Psycho pioneered a whole new genre – Family Guy did Star Wars, some teenagers spent 16 years doing Raiders of the Lost Ark – that’s worth exploring frame by frame.
It’s only right that at least one of the
curators should be a Scot, and it’s only right that it be Alan ‘Morvern Callar’ Warner. If film adaptations of he and his contemporaries, Irvine, AL et al, are a bit thin on the ground perhaps the literate ones could stage readings of unfilmed scripts and then wax lyrical about who they’d like to make them? These Demented Lands by Van Sant, anyone?
8 THE LIST 3–31 Mar 2011
T o say The Tron’s artistic director Andy Arnold has big hopes for this year’s Mayfesto would be an understatement. Launched in 2010, Arnold’s plan was to bring Glasgow a new, socially and politically engaged theatre festival – and that’s just what he did. For over two weeks in May The Tron staged innovative theatre, pulling in eager audiences and attracting the attention of theatremakers across the UK and beyond. Running this year for just shy of a month (4–28 May) the calibre of the programme shows just how far the festival – and his vision – has come. Comedy and music jamboree It’s a Dead Liberty features old school favourites Dave Anderson and Sandy Nelson with original songs from Wildcat and 7:84, while elsewhere on the programme Communicado presents, and Gerry Mulgrew directs, a rehearsed reading of Ten Men Dead which deals with Bobby Sands and the hunger strike of 1981; Iain Heggie’s King of Scotland gets a showcase, so too does David Ireland’s politically
charged Everything Between Us (pictured), alongside the Tron Theatre Company’s own productions of David Harrower’s Day Long and Gary Owen’s Crazy Gary’s Mobile Disco. ‘We really want to build on last year,’ explains Arnold. ‘Last year it was largely in-house companies dealing with casualties of war; this year we’re taking it much further. It’s much more broadly based with a Celtic theme, and with some fantastic new work. ‘The motivation for the festival was really to pick up on the excitement that’s here [in the city] for theatre. Last year there was such a great buzz about the place from the bar to the theatre with shows sitting around and on top of each other throughout the Tron, giving people access to as much theatre as possible. In my bones I feel it’s a great thing that will just get bigger and better this year, and hopefully people will come along and agree.’
Mayfesto, Tron Theatre, 4–28 May.
ReviewofReviews WHAT WE SAID:
‘By turns awkwardly skittering and straightforwardly melodic . . . another quiet gem from a band you couldn’t pick apart, and wouldn’t want to.’ THE LIST
WHAT THEY SAID: ‘Radiohead’s works reward close and long listening; this dense and knotted eight-track album is no exception.’ THE OBSERVER ‘This is not Radiohead’s dance album . . . at its best it feels fidgety and unstable, at its
RADIOHEAD: THE KING OF LIMBS
worst downcast and a bit predictable.’ THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
‘You’re reminded that Radiohead are the only band of their size and status that seem driven by an impulse to twist their music into different shapes . . . when it works it’s glorious.’ THE GUARDIAN ‘The abiding impression is of a cigarette break in the eye of the hurricane, down time from a disaster. If this is what the future sounds like, it is nothing to be afraid of.’ THE TELEGRAPH