Book Festival 2025 – the final round-up
McDermid play and other performances
By Hugh Simpson
The final few days of the Book Festival featured several more theatre-adjacent events, with one of the most eagerly anticipated being And Midnight Never Come, Val McDermid’s play about Christopher Marlowe, which was given a script-in-hand performance in conjunction with Pitlochry Festival Theatre, directed by Philip Howard.
The enticing performance featured one of those to-die-for casts, with a magnetic Andrew Rothney as Marlowe, Daniel Cahill as his spymaster and lover Thomas Walsingham, with support from Nicholas Karimi, Hannah Jarrett-Scott, Jonathan Watson and Irene Macdougall. Watson and Macdougall were particularly impressive, their characters helping to narrate the story of Marlowe’s life as well as his mysterious end in a Deptford tavern.
Andrew Rothney, Hannah Jarrett-Scott, Jonathan Watson, Irene Macdougall, Nicholas Karimi and Daniel Cahill read And Midnight Never Come at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. Pic: PFT
McDermid’s theory about what happened to Marlowe is entirely plausible and elegantly portrayed, with much of the rest of the play being compelling and surprisingly touching. However, it currently seems a little on the long side, with a tendency for the research to be too apparent rather than fully integrated.
There are also far too many references to, and quotations from, Shakespeare (played pleasingly by the ever-excellent Jarrett-Scott in one of a series of roles), as if Marlowe isn’t strong enough to stand on his own without constant reminders of his better-known contemporary.
It remains an intriguing concept, however, and when the play surfaces (as it surely will) it will be well worth a look.
ragged and lively
A much more ragged and lively affair was Frankenstein Cabaret: It’s Alive! This celebration of Mary Shelley was put together by Jenni Fagan and hosted effervescently by Mystika Glamoor.
Performances by Fagan, Ever Dundas & David Bishop, Janette Ayachi, Harry Josephine Giles and Kirstin Innes expanded on Shelley and her most famous work in a variety of ways, with wit and exuberance all round. The cabaret table layout, which was used for this event in the Spiegeltent, reduces the capacity but certainly improves the atmosphere.
Altogether more sedate, but in many ways as urgent and messy, was The People Speak hosted by Anthony Arnove. Although the event did have undoubted star quality in the person of Viggo Mortensen – it was diminished in some eyes not only by the withdrawal of the originally billed Vanessa Redgrave, but the subsequent withdrawal of her replacement Emma Dabiri and that of Kayo Chingonyi.
Ekow Eshun in The People Speak hosted by Anthony Arnove. Pic Grainne Rice.
However, there was another tremendous actor present in Stephen Rea. As well as author Ahmed Masoud, singer-songwriter Miwa Nagato-Apthorp, writer Irenosen Okojie and writer, curator and journalist Ekow Eshun.
The various extracts celebrating dissent, protest and rebellion perhaps suffered a little from uneven choice, the odd uncertainty in delivery and the whole event running over time, but there was an undoubted power to it all, not least when Masoud read If I Must Die by his friend Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian poet killed in an Israeli air strike.
This recognition of voices of the marginalised and dispossessed threw into sharp focus some coverage of this year’s Book Festival, with some people suggesting that the absence of a particular book they would like to see constitutes censorship, or a free speech issue. Leaving aside the fact that the opinions that are supposedly missing are usually ones that get plenty of representation in other quarters, it is odd that a festival with such diverse and considered points of view gets criticised because it doesn’t include everyone’s particular favourite.
stimulating
For an example of how stimulating the festival can be, you needed to look no further than an hour earlier, in one of the other appearances by Ekow Eshun, where he discussed his book The Strangers with sensitive chairing by Colin Grant. Eshun’s empathetic examination of five Black male pioneers was matched by his self-interrogation and thoughtfulness in response to questions.
Eimear McBride is a novelist whose debt to theatre is clear; she (like the characters in her Lesser Bohemians and The City Changes Its Face) trained as an actor, and says that everything she knows about constructing characters comes from Stanislavski.
This influence does not extend to writing for the theatre itself, however; aside from a couple of radio plays for RTE, she has no interest in writing drama. She admitted to being reluctant to let her first novel A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing be adapted for the stage and said that the result was ‘an interesting experiment, but not the book’.
Joe Boyd in conversation with Nicola Meighan. Pic Facebook.
A writer with deep roots in the theatre that are not always appreciated is Chris Chibnall of Doctor Who and Broadchurch fame. He started out as a dramatist, and said that his early breaks – twice simply answering newspaper advertisements saying ‘plays wanted’ seem impossible now, particularly since they came from a world of fringe theatre that has all but been squeezed out of existence. One of his first dramatic works was staged 25 years ago at Old St Paul’s at the Fringe, to an audience ‘of seven on a good day’.
Chibnall has now moved into prose, with a novel in the tradition of Golden Age crime – although host Denise Mina considers it much more gory, and the words ‘cosy crime’ were not uttered once. Chibnall still writes drama, although it tends to be broadly comic, and said that ‘a farce from the author of Broadchurch’ is not the easiest imaginable sell.
Another strand of the arts was represented by Joe Boyd, whose career stretches from doing the sound at the notorious ‘Dylan goes electric’ Newport Folk Festival and co-founding the UFO nightclub, to producing Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, R.E.M., 10,00 Maniacs and Kate and Anna McGarrigle.
And The Roots of Rhythm Remain
He has now produced And The Roots of Rhythm Remain, a doorstep of a book detailing global music, its roots, its reach and his own personal experiences of it. The conversation with Nicola Meighan was beautifully illustrated with musical snippets, such as tracing how The Lion Sleeps Tonight was originally Mbube by the South African Solomon Linda – who of course got no royalties for any of the adaptations.
Perhaps of most interest to local audiences were the reminiscences of fetching up in Dolina MacLennan’s flat not a stone’s throw from where he was talking, encountering the local folk scene, Hamish Henderson (and Scottish drinking habits).
That visit to Edinburgh also led to his first encounter with the Incredible String Band, who began Boyd’ s producing journey and whose Mike Heron was fittingly in the audience.
Jonathan Watson, Irene Macdougall, Nicholas Karimi and Daniel Cahill read And Midnight Never Come at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. Pic: PFT
While much of the Book Festival finds a natural home on this website, there’s plenty more that doesn’t. You’d imagine, for example, that an event featuring mathematician and broadcaster Marcus du Sautoy, would have nothing to do with theatre.
And you’d be entirely wrong, as not only is du Sautoy now a playwright (his play Axiom of Choice has been seen in Oxford and India, and hopefully will be elsewhere soon), he has also worked with Complicité and the UK National Theatre, including on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
His new book, Blueprints, discusses the mathematical underpinnings, either conscious or unconscious, of poetry, painting, music and architecture. As befits the Oxford professor for the Public Understanding of Science, du Sautoy (spurred on by the excellent chairing of Suzy Glass), was an instructive, effusive and inspiring speaker, and you just wished he had more time to go into Shakespeare’s use of prime numbers. Clue – count how many syllables there are in the lines of the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy.
Shakespeare’s flexibility, of course, may be one of the reasons his work resonates more than that of his contemporaries – which is where we came in.
diversity and intelligence
There have been many fine performances at the festival this year – the Hamish Hawk/Ivor Cutler and Esther Swift/Jackie Kay events were easily as good as anything else seen in Edinburgh this August. Jenny Niven should be applauded for encouraging this strand, as should Arusa Qureshi, who was responsible for programming it.
Other events are as compelling as ever in their diversity and intelligence, and the organisation is smoother than you could ever expect from such a large undertaking.
The standard of audience Q&A contributions has markedly improved – the ‘questions’ satirised recently in a Private Eye cartoon by Royston as being ‘in two parts – the first a self-righteous lecture and the second a kind of vitriolic rant’ have all but disappeared.
However, the same cannot be said for the chairing of discussions. It is mostly very good, but there has been the odd event where the chair thinks it is all about them – including one, who shall remain nameless, who took it upon themselves to answer the audience questions first, hardly leaving a space for the writer that the audience had paid to see.
The festival seems to have established itself at the Futures Institute. The children’s zone by the Canopy cafe has helped to spread audiences across the site, while the catering and signage are vastly improved from last year. There are undoubtedly plusses and minuses to being so near to so many other venues, but the buzz is undeniable.
In the end it is unclear just how much ‘repairing’ (this year’s theme) a book festival can do. But in such dark times, it remains a beacon of intelligence and clarity.
The Book Festival ended on Sunday 24th 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
