He got his first taste of the capital's festivals in 1965 – now Brian Cox is putting aside his film-making to support an international strand, he tells Tim Cornwell
WITH a peaked cap scrunched down over plain glasses, inconspicuously sipping a skinny latte in a Fringe venue café, Brian Cox is barely given a second glance by the waitress. He shows no signs of being the film star whose many roles include the s
inister intelligence chief Ward Abbott in the three Bourne films, or the stage actor going so brilliantly berserk with a chainsaw on the Royal Lyceum stage – as Uncle Varick, in John Byrne's play of the same name – in 2004.
Then suddenly he breaks into a high, whinnying imitation of Edinburgh's own Richard Demarco, the veteran festival personality, in a noisy performance that imagines Demarco threatening to up sticks from Edinburgh and relocate to Dundee. People at the nearby tables don't know what's hit them.
"Ricky is really the forefather of this as much as anybody else," Cox declares, fondly. "Ricky is the great internationalist and always has been. I love Ricky."
Cox's first real taste of the Edinburgh festivals was in 1965, when he spent August in rehearsal for a Royal Lyceum show – his first job after drama school – that was to start in September. He knows legendary figures, such as Demarco and Jim Haynes, one of the founders of the Traverse Theatre, from those days.
"Edinburgh's very infectious, it doesn't leave you," says Cox. "For me, Edinburgh is my spiritual home, it's where I come back to. There's something about it." But back in the 1960s it was a city with a split personality, he says, "the hedonistic pleasures and then back to the Wee Free sensibility".
Cox is back this year as patron of The World venue. Orphaned Cambodian dancers and musicians, West African musicians, gyrating dancers from the favelas of Brazil – The World is a celebration of international cultures. Its performers are supported not only by Cox, but also by such international stars as Peter Gabriel and Kylie Minogue.
There are hopes that both Gabriel and Minogue will show up to support the venue in person. Gabriel is on holiday in Sardinia, but could come for the last weekend of the festival, World staff say. Minogue is on a UK tour and may well find her way to Edinburgh.
International acts took a heavy hit this year when the Aurora Nova venue in Stockbridge, which has delivered top physical theatre acts from countries ranging from Russia to Korea, closed down after failing to cover its costs. The World has taken over from the Assembly operation at St George's Church on Shandwick Place, which has hosted international acts including the Soweto Gospel Choir under the Assembly banner in previous years.
The World is the brainchild of Toby Gough, a Fringe maverick and international theatrical entrepreneur who brought Children of the Sea – a stunning, award-winning show performed by Sri Lankan child survivors of the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami – to the Royal Botanic Gardens for the 2005 festival. Kylie Minogue backed the group and came to an early performance.
Cox poses uncomfortably for photographers with some of the World's line-up. "I'm giving it a front and giving it a presence, that's really my main role," he says. He may also help out financially – though he jokes Gough still owes him money for a show called Lady Salsa.
International music and dance acts at the Fringe sometimes look like travelling variety acts. But with The World's acts, says Cox, "there are quite important messages involved, it is not just frippery and show. It is actually about an indigenous culture and how it survives. You are only representing a bit of the iceberg, but it's important that is done."
The Cambodian artists who form Children of the Khmer are the product of a music school started by survivors of the Killing Fields – the period when intellectuals and the educated were slaughtered wholesale and musicians were given the choice of smashing their rarest instruments or losing their lives.
Worldwide, indigenous cultures are losing their voices to globalisation, says Cox – and that includes the West Coast of Scotland: "West Coast accents have become very assimilated towards Glasgow," he claims. "The rural accents have not kept up the same way as they have on the East Coast. A guy from East Lothian is very different from a guy from Edinburgh."
North and south Fifers have kept their distinctions, he says. "Those accents are very much intact, because somehow or other it hasn't been affected the same way, or absorbed in an ever-larger Glasgow. The individual voice is very important, something that hasn't been lost."
In June, during the Bafta Interview which was part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Cox recalled his Dundee childhood and the extraordinary drive that made him into the actor he is today. His father died when he was nine; his mother was a Roman Catholic jute-mill spinner who suffered repeated nervous breakdowns and Cox was subsequently raised by a sister and an aunt. He got his start sweeping floors at Dundee Rep at the age of 14, then found his way to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.
And now he is here in Edinburgh on a break from recording new episodes of his popular Radio 4 series James McLevy, about an Edinburgh detective.
Toby Gough and Cox have worked together for the best part of two decades. Gough approached Cox about The World when the actor was on the set of The Good Heart, his latest film, in Iceland. "He asked, 'Where are you?' and I said, 'I'm in Iceland,' and he said, 'Perfect!' I'll come,'" says Cox. And so they filmed a promotional spot for the venue in front of a geyser.
Cox pays tribute repeatedly to Gough's "extraordinary" skills and his talent for cutting through international red tape – even though he was once jailed in Cuba for it. "He has done it and dedicated his life to it. He spends his life on Edinburgh."
Scotland, says Cox, has kept an international eye on Europe and the rest of the world since the Auld Alliance, though in his eyes it suffered from being "North Britain" until the 1960s.
"It's very much part of the Celtic character, the travelling and the itinerant nature of life," he says. "Our mark as a small country is in that sense extraordinary, the influence we have." He was recently invited to work with the Mary Slessor Foundation, named for the former Dundee jute worker who became a West African missionary. The foundation works on medical, training and agricultural projects in Nigeria.
Cox has brought shows to the festival in the past – including The Crucible, with Moscow drama students – and performed at the Edinburgh International Festival in the late 1960s, but never acted on the Fringe. His son Alan is directing a production here this year.
Cox was a major supporter of the Film Festival's move away from the August maelstrom to June. It is time, he says, to spread the festivals out more, perhaps moving the International, Fringe and Book festivals away from each other.
"I would like to see them all be more independent, it would be good for the summer months from May to the end of September. I think you want to spread it out, it's good for business."
But there are dangers in fiddling with the existing order, and change should be "organic," he stresses. "The people of Edinburgh would probably go nuts, 'Christ when do we get the city back?'"
The full article contains 1283 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
