Frank Dunlop: A tribute
Frank Dunlop 1927-2006, Director of the Edinburgh International Festival 1984-1991
I met Frank Dunlop on the Festival Theatre stairs in August 2017. We’d been at a Scottish Opera performance of Mark Antony Turnage’s ‘Greek’, part of the Edinburgh International Festival. He was standing on his own, and I said, “You don’t know me but I was at the first performance in Leith Town Hall.” In 1988, Dunlop as Festival Director put on the British premiere of Turnage’s adaptation of Steven Berkoff’s ‘Greek’. Sung in English with an excellent cast, including the versatile Fiona Kimm, as the mother and Quentin Hayes as Eddy, the Oedipus character, it was conducted by Sian Edwards. It’s unusual for any modern opera to be revived, but ‘Greek’ had achieved that fame, and both Frank Dunlop and I acknowledged that in our brief conversation. I hope I also said how much I’d enjoyed so much in his Festivals. But Dunlop, I’m sure, that night had a certain satisfaction in seeing himself acknowledged as someone who knew a thing or two about music! We chatted pleasantly and he said, ‘We try to come over every year’. I saw him the following year at Ian McKellen’s 80th birthday show in the Assembly Hall where McKellen acknowledged him from the stage.
The 1988 ‘Greek’ achieved notoriety before the first performance. Radio Scotland spoke about the ‘shocking language’ in the Policemen’s Chorus. Inside Leith Town Hall, the audience sat avidly reading the libretto in the programme. It read: “Policemen (unison) “Fuck, fuck, piss and shit!” The opera was watched attentively and applauded vigorously, as was the 2017 version – but it was bowdlerised!
Frank Dunlop’s term as Director of the EIF coincided with a time when I was keen to expand my knowledge of drama, and ready to explore opera. He became Festival Director in 1984, a late appointment, after John Drummond’s unexpected resignation. Drummond, often supposed to be an ‘elitist,’ had wide-ranging interests and had in 1982 introduced the annual Fireworks Concert in Princes Street Gardens, the mainly free event which genuinely took the Festival to all parts of Edinburgh every year until 2019. Funding arguments became too much for him. Dunlop had wanted the job for years and, already a successful theatre director, was willing to take a cut in salary. His first programme had some hints of what to come, including an excellent Berliner Ensemble ‘Galileo’.
World Theatre dominated the rest of his years as director, challenging and exciting Edinburgh audiences. And there were no surtitles in the 1980s – you read the Shakespeare in advance maybe, but otherwise, you had just the programme. The Japanese Toho theatre came in 1985 with ‘Macbeth’. The unforgettable production began with the cast of exotically dressed warriors processing through the theatre (the Lyceum had an aisle then). At the end were two old women, who took their places seated on the floor at either side of the stage. They sat attentively, perhaps sewing, through conflict and drifting cherry blossom, and when Macduff’s wife and children were massacred, tears ran down their cheeks. Toho were back the next year with a breathtaking ‘Medea’, an outdoor performance in the Old College, which went on in all weathers – I remember the cast’s white and blood-red costumes in pouring rain that year. Too, came Spanish director and actor’s Nuria Espert’s ‘Yerma’ for many the first chance to see the work of Federico Garcia Lorca, executed in Spain in 1936. ‘Yerma’, a play about infertility, was acted on a huge taut trampoline, an outrageous idea which worked.
In 1987 the Berliner Ensemble returned with ‘Troilus and Cressida’, Shakespeare’s ambiguous war play. At the production’s centre was the great East German actor, Ekkehard Schall, as Thersites. In rags and covered in boils he sat on the front edge of the King’s Theatre stage, declaiming his vituperative rants against mankind. From further afield came the charming Raun, Raun Theatre from New Guinea, who transformed St Bride’s Centre into a maritime setting for their mythological trilogy written in ‘Pidgin English’ – not, as some people had hoped, easily intelligible to a UK audience. The following year the same venue was host to the Tomson Highway’s ‘The Rez Sisters’, about a group of First Nations Canadian women who hope to win the biggest Bingo prize in the world. Played in the round, it was a great popular success, with cards handed out for a real game of bingo – with prizes! Its subplot concerned the tragic death of the female lover of the main character. Unbelievably it was panned as being ”only fit for the Fringe.”
Interesting opera ran alongside this. In 1985 I saw the Opera de Lyons in Chabrier’s ‘L’Etoile’ at the King’s Theatre, recently upgraded with 100-seat orchestra pit. King Ouf, in a side box, climbed onto the stage singing, “Moi (pointing to himself) je suis le roi”. Foreign opera and I could understand it! The following year Frank Dunlop himself tried the impossible – to put on a performance of Weber’s ‘Oberon.’ Seiji Osawa conducted the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie in a style which is familiar now – the orchestra sitting in the centre, the singers moving around without scores, and in this case, dressed in elaborate costumes. Over-the-top but great fun. So too was Dunlop’s series of operas from the Stockholm Folkopera. Using Leith Town Hall, a reduced orchestration and with multiple casts, their first venture was ‘Aida’. Its notoriety preceded it, as, at its first night, which I attended, two audience members left the theatre as the introductory belly-dance started. The triumphal march began with chorus coming forwards individually to throw buckets of bloodied plastic hands on the stage. Audience giggles subsided as more and more of them piled inexorably higher. 1987’s ‘Magic Flute’ saw a delightful Papageno apparently converse enthusiastically – in Swedish – with watching children!
There was much more: Jazz and Classical Usher Hall collaborations, ‘The Thrie Estaites’ revived in the Assembly Hall, Eddie McGuire’s composition for Yehudi Menuhin with the pick of Scottish fiddlers, and late-night at the Lyceum, ‘Scotland the What’! As well as Art exhibitions – important historical retrospectives and showcases for new artists. Much was made of the funding tensions between the “extreme left” District Council and Dunlop. In fact the astute Council Leader, Paolo Vestri, who sought to bring the arts to the whole city throughout the year, and Dunlop were on the same page. Dunlop, a great fixer –often an admirable quality in public life– generally sought a way through difficulties.
1988 saw Frank Dunlop’s greatest triumph, the European Premiere of John Adams’ ‘Nixon in China’. The Scotsman held a successful fundraising campaign to bring it to Edinburgh, and with an augmented Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the pit, conducted by the composer, Houston Grand Opera, played three nights at the Playhouse. That morning BBC Scotland played an excerpt from the opening chorus, and at 7.30, Airforce One taxied onto the stage and James Maddalena, as Richard M Nixon, and Carolann Page as Pat Nixon came down the steps.
Controversial, of course. But which Festival Director wouldn’t want to be controversial? Certainly not Frank Dunlop!
Thanks to Eileen Miller’s ‘The Edinburgh International Festival 1947-1996’ (published 1996) especially for her index of all the performances in the EIF’s first 50 years.
Thanks also to Angus Calder’s New Statesmen reviews 1985-198, which I’ve recently edited for the Edinburgh Music Review
