Book Festival 2025 round-up: Two
Hawk plays Cutler and further stagecraft at the Futures Institute
By Hugh Simpson
The Book Festival’s strand of performance-related events has produced some notable successes this year. The biggest draw, and probably the biggest triumph, was Hamish Hawk’s Life in a Scotch Sitting Room Vol. 0.
This was billed as Hawk’s homage to performer-writer Ivor Cutler, and it was difficult beforehand to imagine exactly what form the performance would take. Some singers (no names mentioned) take such opportunities just to perform their own material. But Hawk only included one of his own numbers, a closing rendition of Catherine Opens A Window that fitted beautifully with what had gone before, in a fully realised performance blending story and song.
Andrew Pearson, Stefan Maurice and Hamish Hawk. Life in a Scotch Sitting Room Vol. 0. Pic: Thom Dibdin
Instead, Hawk’s written contributions to the event consisted of stories of his suburban Edinburgh childhood, much like Cutler’s in their combination of clear-eyed reminiscence and essentially truthful exaggeration. While not in any sense imitations of Cutler, they certainly had something of his spirit and were performed in a beautifully over-the-top sitting room on the Spiegeltent stage.
Accompanied by Andrew Pearson and Stefan Maurice, Hawk also performed a couple of chapters from Cutler’s Scotch Sitting Room and several of his songs, signalling when Cutler’s work was being performed by donning an appropriate hat.
Once again, this was no impersonation, but Hawk demonstrated that (unlike many) he really ‘gets’ Cutler, whose ‘eccentricity’ or ‘surrealism’ is often evoked. These are only incidental facets of a creator whose Scottish magic realism and troubling strangeness are rarely met head-on, as they undoubtedly were here by Hawk, whose own performance was full of assured glee and diligent tribute. The evening was enhanced by the use of Cutler’s own harmonium, now in the possession of Capercaillie and Celtic Connections’ Donald Shaw after Cutler supposedly broke up with it at Glasgow Pavilion.
It was something of a triumph, and it is clear that two decades after his death, Cutler has not gone away as many suspected. Instead, he will surely eventually be recognised as Scotland’s answer to Gogol or Kafka (only with better songs).
Disrupting The Narrative
Another extremely impressive live experience came in Disrupting The Narrative, where poets Hannah Lavery, Jeda Pearl, Shasta Hanif Ali, Niall Moorjani and Alycia Pirmohamed performed with music by Niroshini Thambar. A series of poems – sad, angry, lyrical, caustic and focused – dealt with the history of Edinburgh that tourists tend not to be informed about.
The debate over names of streets and statues often skates over the fact that these are symbols of the enslavement of countless people and the oppression of countless others – not least the South and South-East Asians shipped over as indentured labourers for the many Scottish-owned plantations after slavery was abolished, on virtually the same terms as the enslaved people.
Hamish Hawk performs as Ivor Cutler. Life in a Scotch Sitting Room Vol. 0. Pic: Thom Dibdin
Moorjani’s bitingly satirical attack on Scots who believe that Empire was an English problem, and that the Scots were also oppressed by it, was a particular highlight, but Lavery’s work was as essential as ever, and the other poets also impressed.
Thambar’s music, and the effective photographs of Kat Gollock, making use of double exposure and shadow to reveal Edinburgh’s landmarks anew, were beautifully considered counterpoints to a performance whose intelligence, rigour and angry beauty made it an essential contribution to a story that, as Lavery pointed out, is far from ‘being telt’ yet.
That Edinburgh – like other Scottish cities – was built on slavery, and the ‘Enlightenment’ was largely founded on racist assumptions, are truths that many simply refuse to face up to. The more common image of the city as douce and tweedy was certainly much in evidence at Alan Taylor: Edinburgh In Its Own Words, an event marking his anthology Edinburgh: The Autobiography.
It isn’t really Taylor’s fault that the audience at the Q & A responded to his remarks about Edinburgh’s obsession with ‘what school you went to’ by all informing us of where they were educated. It was, however, characteristic of a certain smugness and self-congratulation that bedevilled an event whose supposed criticism of Edinburgh attitudes was always couched in the most indulgent of terms. There was also too much reminiscence from Taylor and chair Mike Wade about the ‘good old days’ of the print media, and a lot of namedropping tended to obscure the more interesting opinions on Irvine Welsh, banning books, or the compelling stories about the bizarre Fringe luminary Zenya Hamada.
melancholy reflections
Trenchant criticisms of nostalgia, and how it is currently weaponised by the far right, were displayed in Jonathan Coe: Cosy Crime Meets Political Thriller. Coe didn’t always appear happy about the ‘cosy crime’ label, especially as it now seems to be applied to Golden Age writers like Allingham or Christie, and his latest novel The Proof Of My Innocence does somewhat hijack the genre before crashing across several other forms.
The overtly political content of the novel (it is set during the blink-and-you-missed-it premiership of someone the subtitles think is called ‘list rust’) led to some melancholy reflections. Notably that, after 25 years writing satirical prose, Coe has looked at the political scene and realised that satire has had no effect whatsoever. This reminder of Peter Cook’s remarks about the cabarets of Weimar Germany was dispiriting enough, but was then followed by statements that Coe can already see the end of his writing life in sight, and that there was no point in trying to write for posterity, as reputations just fizzle out after death.
Hamish Hawk in conversation. Life in a Scotch Sitting Room Vol. 0. Pic: Thom Dibdin
It’s not just posterity that is the problem – the Greek translation of the new book has nine pages of footnotes, explaining who the Wurzels are (and probably Liz Truss too). Coe is always a serious thinker as well as a humorous writer, and is notable because, unlike some writers who have a very highly developed ‘shtick’ at book festivals, he always thinks before answering a question.
This was even more true at M John Harrison: The Course of His Art. Harrison’s pauses before answering were often of epic length, but the answer was always worth the wait. Harrison has been described as ‘the best writer you’ve never heard of’ and his imaginative, moving and somewhat idiosyncratic prose cannot be recommended highly enough. Harrison is definitely not one of those writers who slices off chunks of a prepared persona for public appearances, and is a compelling speaker as a result.
He may be characterised as a science fiction or fantasy writer, but his distaste for those forms goes beyond his realisation that he wasn’t suited to writing about ‘men hitting each other on the head with swords’. His contention was that sometime in the 70s, these genres took over film and literature to such an extent that they now dominate our way of looking at the world and seeing ourselves, and as such have contributed to the way that information can no longer be trusted as information.
Beyond the Archive
The last bastion of such reliable information may well be the library, and the 100th anniversary of the National Library of Scotland was commemorated by Beyond the Archive events, one of which featured playwright Jo Clifford and poet Jen Hadfield. Both have recently donated their archives to the library – a process they claimed consisted of putting numerous crates of unsorted documents into a van.
An event notably well chaired by Jenny Brown featured each writer showing objects they might put into a ‘living archive’. For Hadfield this included drawings of stones, a child’s concrete poem about a lion and a genuine message in a bottle she found near her Shetland home. Clifford brought memorabilia relating to her plays including Great Expectations, Light in the Village and Jesus, Queen of Heaven, and her stories reminded us that theatre can – as we all hope – change lives.
The Book Festival continues until Sunday 24 August.
Some of these events may be available online, see the EIBF website for further information.
Edinburgh International Book Festival website: https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/
ENDS
