"THINGS usually work out in the end."
"What if they don't?"
"That just means you haven't come to the end yet."
The screen version of Jeanette Walls's best-selling memoir The Glass Castle is still in the works and not scheduled to reach cinemas until next year, so choreographers Joke Laureyns and Kwint Manshoven, of Belgium's kabinet k company, can still lay claim to the book's most famous quotation as a touchstone for their powerful work with very young performers, RAW, which eventually reached Scotland at the end of this year's Edinburgh International Festival.
The words appeared in the programme for the performances at the EICC, and while undoubtedly appropriate for the show, they also seemed apposite for EIF 2016 at the time, even if we have to wave it farewell since. As Mary Brennan reported in her review a week ago, it is a piece that depicts a feral, part-play, part-survival existence and raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions about how we regard children. It is now three years old and the young people who have grown up performing it, and the adults who created it with them, are ready to move on. The fact is that we might have seen it some time ago, but Tony Reekie, then director of Imaginate, the capital's springtime festival of theatre and dance for young people, has admitted that he shied away from presenting it here.
I have no wish to stoke any pointless row after the event, especially as no hint of the feared furore materialised, but neither did the hoped-for vast audience for what was a last chance to see a terrific piece of work, although ticket sales were respectable. A bit of a fuss might actually have done the box office some good – and had you asked me beforehand if I thought UK audiences were more ready for RAW now than when it was first made, I'd have said that our society seems, of late, to have become even more confused and conflicted about the way we look at children. And RAW certainly made you think about that, as well as a myriad other things, so those of us who saw it were particularly privileged.
Overall, of course, as The Herald has reported, it was a record-breaking year for all of Edinburgh's Festivals, with bumper ticket sales at the EIF, the Fringe and the Book Festival. It is the development of the EIF that is the most intriguing, however. Its expansion into new areas of programming was only slightly tarnished by the over-optimistic booking of Anohni for two nights at The Playhouse, and the home it has occupied since the start of the millennium, The Hub, became a "destination venue" for the first time, with its bill of music, cabaret and clubbing. As well as realigning the Festival's dates with those of the Fringe, director Fergus Linehan has also extended the event at both ends. The Virgin Money Fireworks Concert's shift to the holiday Monday had already happened, but the Festival this year boasted more beginnings than Sinatra had farewells, with Cecilia Bartoli's Norma on the Friday, the Opening Concert on the Saturday, and the Deep Time free outdoor event on the Sunday.
Taking into account Fringe previews as well, any predicted concentration of Edinburgh's Festivals into a three week period again has simply not happened, and the demonstrable cultural appetite of the public suggests it never will. As they say, things usually work out in the end.
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