Before you tell a story, you must explain yourself. You must establish what your relationship with the listener is and why you are telling your story. This fact kept being brought home to me last week, the first week of the Edinburgh International Festival and the second of the Edinburgh Fringe. And more than anything else, it was the contrast between the two festivals which forced me to reflect on how the context of stories must be established before they are told: the International Festival did this so badly, the Fringe Festival did it so well.
The problem with the International Festival is that it has become a slave to the word "international". The arts events tend to tell their tale through the mask of their nationality: dance from the Netherlands, an orchestra from Cleveland, Scottish opera. Festival director Brian McMaster likes to add a dash of this and a dash of that - Ireland's Abbey Theatre, for instance, and the Catalan director, Calixto Bieito, who together produced Valle-Inclan's Barbaric Comedies - but the forced mating of one culture with another tends to get in the way of the story-telling.
It works better with art forms like opera or dance, which have an international vocabulary, but when a tighter, more intimate relationship with the audience is required, as with new drama, it just doesn't work. New drama has been the weak point of the international festival for years. It is no wonder that McMaster has relied so heavily on the Abbey for his successes (The Well of the Saints, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, The Wake); the Abbey can communicate through its mask of Irishness, and yet be fully understood by an Edinburgh audience.
Barbaric Comedies, which is the Abbey's offering for the Dublin Theatre Festival in October, was reviewed last week; Ramon del Valle-Inclan's apocalyptic vision of a society with an entirely corrupt religious and political culture, is powerfully staged. However, surely not even the most cynical of pub bores could find in it a mirror to hold up to Irish society? The passion behind Calixto Bieito's production suggested it would have far more immediate impact on a Spanish audience. While working with Bieito brought an exciting new dimension to the work of the Abbey cast, the artificial insemination of one culture with another is unsuccessful as far as the story-line goes.
A Swedish production of Moliere's Don Juan received most of the plaudits going for drama last week. I didn't want to devote a precious night in Edinburgh to seeing a play I know so well; of course, I might have come away with an entirely new understanding of it, but it is still telling that the dramatic hit of the week was a story so internationally well-known, particularly as an opera.
The Stuttgart State Opera's production of Handel's Alcina was another hit, and rightly so. The tale of passionate intrigue was softly and smoothly told by the most astonishing range of baroque voices, from Catherine Naglestad's rampant love-queen, Alcina, to the gently plucked lutes of Stuttgart's orchestra. Jossi Wieler's direction and Anna Viebrock's design intensified the drama by playing the show through a huge picture frame, a false mirror in which the love-demented singers saw themselves, literally, as people other than they were.
This is the kind of production at which the International Festival excels. It is interesting that the Fringe's biggest boast - comedy - is so diametrically opposed to it in the relationship it creates with its audience. For comedy to work, the illusion of an intimate complicity between audience and comedian, and between audience members, has to be forged.
The intimacy that laughter forces can really limit a comedian, however. Antrim-born stand-up Owen O'Neill, once nominated for Perrier Award and the writer of BBC's The Fitz, deliberately seeks a theatre audience for his one-man shows. But if you're talking about yourself, you really have to keep the audience laughing or you're just going to sound confessional. This is a recurring problem in O'Neill's new show It Was Henry's Fonda's Fault, which is playing at the Traverse, and tells the story of his burning desire to be a Hollywood actor.
Steven Berkoff must be supposed to have pitched his story well to his Fringe audience in Messiah - Scenes From A Crucifixion at the Assembly Rooms, judging from all the critical acclaim and last week's Scotsman Fringe First. But Lordy, is it awful. The show has been described as "controversial" because it takes the less-than-daring leap of portraying Jesus staging the resurrection to spread his message. Berkoff sketches the rest of the show from a rag-bag of second-hand images of Jesus: He (played by Rory Edwards) is taller than the other disciples and boasts a leonine mane, while the nasty Devil (Tam Dean Burn), who promotes lust rather than marriage, has evil, pointy cowboy boots. Through this fog of stereotype, the sense of Jesus's humanity is groped for in vain - there is an embarrassing Pieta tableau, for instance, of Mary (Fern Smith) hollering about the son born "from my loins".
Like Oscar Wilde, when Berkoff turns serious, he turns sentimental; and I strongly suspect that the "controversy" which Edinburgh audiences have seen in the show is just shock at seeing Jesus portrayed at all.
Hopeless Games, presented by Poland's Fabrik Potsdam and Russia's Do-Theatre of St Petersburg is a truly international Fringe hit, however, which last year won a Fringe First, a rival Glasgow Herald Angel, and five stars from the Guardian. It will be seen at the Dublin Fringe Festival and in Cork, Limerick, Sligo and Belfast next year. It employs an astonishing battery of styles of physical theatre, from Polish folk dance, to ballet, to mime, to clowning, to Broadway musical to slapstick, to create an eerie dance in a disused train station. These are refugees from European history, condemned forever to dance in an abandoned tunnel.
My biggest Edinburgh thrills were all at the Traverse, where the excitement generated by Phillip Howard's consistently brilliant programmes of new theatre spills over into a wonderfully, incestuously, theatrical bar; nowhere in Edinburgh is the relationship between story-tellers and listeners more intimate.
Here, year after year, I have seen plays which tell the women's stories which still don't get told on Irish stages. Kate Atkinson's Abandonment, a Glasgow Herald Angel winner, turns up the volume on the seismic social change which has affected middle-class women in the space of a generation.
This Traverse production is set in a huge mausoleum of an Edinburgh house, which the divorced historian, Elizabeth, has just bought. It portrays her and her sister as frozen in reaction against their rigid mother. Their mother is thoroughly compromised by a life spent furiously white-washing her disastrous, violent marriage to "Daddy", but she still can't help spinning all her dreams for her girls on men - she even traps the dry-rot tradesman into staying for roast chicken. For Elizabeth, having a child would be a longed-for release from the past, and from endless, futile self-examination. For another woman in another time who lived in the room, being pregnant outside marriage (by her employer) meant the end of her life. This parallel plot is fully staged, complete with rustling crinolines, when it could have been sketched by ghostly figures, and this makes the play seem sprawling. Still, it grips right to the end because the women's dilemmas are so true.
Abi Morgan's Fringe First-winning Splendour, presented by Paines Plough, brilliantly turns political unrest in somewhere like the former Yugoslavia inward, into the domestic sphere of women. The war, says one of the characters, "is no more dangerous than what's going on in here", as an English photographer, her interpreter, a general's wife and the best friend she can't stand circle around each other.
While the wolves of war howl closer and closer, the women begin to attack in their own ways: through their looks, their children, their lack of children. The interpreter is an outsider, from the side of the wolves, and obsessed with stealing her hostess's pink Prada mules. Casting the young Irish actress Eileen Walsh was inspired, carrying unsettling memories of a time when being Irish meant trying to make up for being poor.
Ridiculusmus's Say Nothing takes a similarly left-of-centre swipe at international relations by picturing an Englishman - sorry, his family was from Craigavon - who has returned to his roots to put Northern Ireland right with his PhD in peace and conflict studies. Played by Jon Hough, he stands elbow to elbow with his B&B landlady in Donegal (played by David Woods), and they begin a hilarious duet, marked by absolute mutual exploitation and misunderstanding. Donegal is, says the "Brut", his "spiritual home . . . the rawness of it"; "Depressing, yes, very depressing", intones his landlady.
International relations are subtle, after all; they are forged so much better when artists speak out of the complex messes of their own culture, than through forced international co-productions. Perhaps the highlight of Edinburgh for me this year was Zinne Harris's Further Than The Furthest Thing, a co-production between Glasgow's Tron Theatre Company and the Royal National Theatre. Another world premiere, it garnered yet another Fringe First for the Traverse and, although it is nearly three hours long, no-one seemed to care. It is based on the true story of the evacuation of the remote Atlantic island of Tristan de Cunha in 1961 when a volcano erupted.
The islanders, descended from seven families of shipwrecked sailors, had remained caught in several time-warps, part-Napoleonic, part-Victorian, and spoke in their own dialect. Harris's grandfather had been posted there as a priest during the 1940s, and his stories coloured her childhood.
For this is, of course, a story with general, mythic relevance, the story of paradise lost. The character of Mil Lavarello, the strong, dignified woman cast away from everything she knows, where she had hoped to "make old bones" with her husband, is quite magnificent as portrayed by Paola Dionisotti. Her struggle to return to the island from grimy Southampton, with its "H'England tea", "H'England chairs", and even "H'England biscuits" is heroic; but the evacuated island means too much to the British authorities.
As the play twisted inexorably towards its end, there wasn't a dry eye in the house - at least, there might have been, but I couldn't see. Piteous parallels were forming themselves: the plight of the Blasket islanders, a Connemara man in the 1930s finding himself on the streets of New York, even your average young Mayo builder waking up for the first time in London in the 1950s. I hope Ali Curran of the Dublin Fringe and Rose Parkinson of the Galway Arts Festival were shopping at the Traverse; this was an obscure story about a remote part of the world, but it proved how specific a truly international story can be.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival runs until August 28th; for information phone 0044-1312265138. The Edinburgh International Festival runs until September 2nd; for information phone 0044-131-4732000.
