IT'S LOUD, it's often spectacular, and it's useful in adding an upmarket cultural twist to major public events, so it's not surprising that in recent years street theatre has become an increasingly fashionable focus for public investment in the arts
in Scotland as elsewhere.
This year, the organisers of Edinburgh's Hogmanay took the risk of replacing the old Night Afore Fiesta – which introduced Scottish audiences to some of Europe's finest street theatre companies – with a concentrated New Year's Night event in the Royal Mile, supported by a budget of more than £250,000, and mainly created by Scottish-based companies with strong international connections.
The result was an intriguing mixed bag of an evening – part mock-medieval street fair, part installation, part performance – that often seemed like a textbook demonstration of the joys and hazards of trying to create effective theatre in outdoor spaces.
The hazards mainly involved the weather – fine at first, but declining into drenching drizzle – and the difficulties of creating spectacular centrepiece events that achieve any real theatrical pace or substance.
In the evening's finale, for example – a large-scale event called Wishbox, jointly co-ordinated by the Edinburgh-based Iron Oxide and Boilerhouse companies with Liverpool group Wired Aerial – a 20-foot-cubed paper box dangling from a crane wobbled ponderously out over the audience, was briefly and prettily lit from inside while shadows of performer moved across its surface, and then disgorged nothing but a few mildly annoying aerialists, who mugged their way through a 25-minute non-story about how they couldn't get back up into the box again.
And that, by and large, was the story of the evening. The micro-events – including the Abbot Of Unreason's full-length recitation of McGonagall's poem The Tay Bridge Disaster from the ramparts of the City Chambers – were at worst interesting and at best inspired, while the larger set-pieces seemed more tentative and technically cumbersome.
In the three-song mini-opera Deep Breath, performed from a perch on the Mercat Cross, the wonderful actress and singer Cora Bissett gave a terrific vocal, dramatic and aerial performance as a woman soaring away from an unhappy relationship, although even she seemed worried by her harness.
And down on the ground, the Scottish company Mischief-La-Bas ran a hugely timely and entertaining Market Of Optimism, featuring a human cashpoint at which punters could withdraw a currency called neuros (advice slip: "don't run with scissors"), and a series of stalls at which a ten-neuro note would buy you anything from two minutes of good vibrations to a chance to see your troubles stamped into dust by a comely flamenco dancer.
In six closes up and down the High Street, students from Edinburgh College of Art created musical, visual and light installations, from a musical experience called Close With Buskers to a fiery Hope in Hell.
Pursuing the theme of hope in grim times, the Edinburgh group Plutot La Vie staged a dialogue between two windows on either side of the street, in which a little woebegone girl miraculously salvaged a suitcase of hope which the old man opposite had tried to destroy. And in seven windows of the City Council revenue office, each lit in a different acid colour, choreographer Al Seed created a memorable vision of a range of bureaucratic types like shop-window dummies, trapped in a world of convention and stress.
At street level, in other words, this was an event bursting with wit and promise. But it lacked a central event of real beauty and style – and also a coherent sense of how to move and choreograph an outdoor audience so as to give them a good time. This is a skill that some Scottish companies have already brought to a fine art, and which could easily be applied to Edinburgh's Feet First Ne'erday event next time round.
