The Golden City

Contemporary reviews of The Golden City, both as newspaper clipping facsimiles and for legibility as transcripts

SUCCESS IN THE CATHEDRAL

Glasgow Cathedral; Strathclyde Theatre Group in “ The Golden City “. Directed by Hugo Gifford and Bertie Scott

( Photo: Donald Fraser, Thom McGinty, Romilly Squire in the farce sequence which opens “The Golden City”)

This very large and ambitious project, the preparation of which has occupied Strathclyde Theatre Group and a great many other people for more than two years, had its first public performance in Glasgow Cathedral on Monday night; it can be said at once that it justifies the time and work put into it.

Those who saw the powerful “Everyman” staged by the Group in the Cathedral three years ago will have had some idea of how they can use the physical (and metaphysical) resources of this setting, and those acquainted with the story of Jan of Leyden and the siege of Munster will have recognised the positively appalling dramatic possibilities. Neither can have been prepared for the effect of the whole which is always absorbing, at times deeply moving, and at moments can without hyperbole be called stupendous.

To make a whole of this chaotic and complex piece of sixteenth century history - the two year reign of the Anabaptists in the Westphalian city of Munster, the catastrophic climax of millennial and revolutionary movements excited by the Reformation – is a feat in itself.

The directors use every kind of means, from burlesque and knockabout to straight explanatory comment, to set the historical scene, and the entire space of the nave (within which the audience, at times mingled with and almost overwhelmed by the performers, are invited freely to move about) to contain it.

Luther contends with the Pope at the beginning in an all-in wrestling match; to describe the sudden conversion of the elect to the practice of polygamy their kingdom is invaded by figures from pantomime; at one point the opposed leaders, the Anabaptist King within the city, the besieging papish Prince Bishop without, shout defiance at each other down the whole length of the echoing nave.

We get just enough history for coherence in this way, and not too much. The explicit aim is not representation of a past event but the realisation of its essence or spirit as it touches our own day, and here – the approach is expressively successful.

Something of the heart wrenching hope of the Anabaptists, who had the audacity to take the promises of the Gospel absolutely, and tried to live them out in despite of princes, property, and law and order, is brought alive; something also of the destructiveness that ambushes the militant “pursuit of the millennium.”

It is transmitted not only in the words with which they harangued and exhorted each other but in a symbolic language used with forceful imagination.

Within a magical containing cincture King Jan and his court of free spirits, released from all bondage to sin, dance slow apparently endless measure of blissful licence; hair-raisingly, when violence takes over, from without and within, the other side of this inclusive self-election manifests itself as the lights go down and the Cathedral becomes (perhaps for rather too long a time) a suburb of Pandemonium.

The atmosphere of dream, or nightmare is extended and maintained, especially in the second half, itself a representation of happenings in which men tried to act out their dreams.

The greatest virtue of this production is that doing so it does not disparage or belittle them but on the contrary, shows how dreams are the conversation men maintain with perfection: “They are our faith” says Jan of Leyden, exhibited as a monster and about to be torn apart “not just to survive but to live”.

It is impossible, and would be inappropriate to say much about individual performances. Hugo Gifford is suitably youthful (and again not inaptly) Mephistophelian Jan; his fellow director Bertie Scott acts as deliberately offhand compere; Romilly Squire doubles as Pope and Prince Bishop; Thom McGinty is one of the chief Anabaptist prophets.

All of those concerned with the production, about 100 altogether we are informed – are warmly to be congratulated.

Performances will continue this week before The Golden City is transferred to Edinburgh for presentation in St Mary’s Cathedral in the second week of the Edinburgh Festival. Glasgow people are urged to see it while the can.

Christopher Small, The Glasgow Herald, 1974

THE GOLDEN CITY at Glasgow Cathedral

THE WORLD’S coming to an end every night this week in the great nave of Glasgow Cathedral by courtesy of Strathclyde Theatre Group in their most ambitious production to date.

“The Golden City” originally suggested asa subject for dramatistaion by Andrew Cruikshank, one of the group’s enthusiastic patrons, has evolved over the past two years in what a programme note calls “a flux of activity, frustration, and satisfaction.” It tells in a spectacular all-enveloping manner, with extraordinarily effective use of sound, music and lighting, and with acting that for the most part by some magic of place and occasion far surpasses its own limitations, a strange story of the Anabaptists.

Briefly: in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation (encapsulated here as a grotesque prize-fight between the Pope and Martin Luther) this small ultra strict religious sect - persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike - congregated in tolerant Munster and finally had its gates shut against unbelievers and barricaded themselves in to wait for the imminent Second Coming and the promised Golden Millennium in the New Jerusalem.

And while things in Munster worsened and the people as a whole wore rags and scarves, the court of “King John” became ever more licentious. In the end the Apocalypse did come but hardly as envisaged by the believers, for it was they, the Anabaptists who were massacred by the invading soldiery, as it was the mutilated body of their leader which was hoisted aloft in a cage. All this in the name of religion.

This is marvellous material for the kind of production at which Hugo Gifford excels (he himself plays John of Leyden with the dynamic presence of a genial Mephistopheles). The audience enters into a medieval marketplace with a carnival in full swing; then on the stroke of eight the jugglers, puppet masters, freaks and dancers became the players, melting in and out of half a dozen characters with token changes of costume. On the face of it there is no attempt at unity, for every style you can think of is pressed into service from the most grandiose and declamatory, through pantomime, farce, song, and dance to utter realism and, occasionally, very moving passages of sheer commitment.

The unity is in the use of a Brechtian commentator and boss figure (Bertie Scott) and above all in the way the whole great space is put in use. Big, high stages at either end of the nave, and half a dozen smaller trolley platforms support the action : (As in the memorable “Orlando Furioso” the audience must follow the action around) Except where the players must make their point by infiltration, or where some spotlit prophet of doom and damnation is seen far aloft in the clerestory.

The sin of debauchery was cleverly symbolised by a dream-like dance ( Stuart Hopps choreography to Bob Stucky’s lovely music played on brittle sounding percussion instruments) in sharp contrast with the starving multitudes realistically writhing round our feet. And what about the Apocalypse with a huge glowing eyed serpent snaking down among us from the roof while the group, Panxty and the other musicians fill the air with sounds of doom.

I think “The Golden City” still needs shaping and cutting, the latter especially in the second part. No doubt this will happen before it reaches St Mary’s Cathedral for the final two weeks at the Edinburgh Festival. But even so it’s certainly not one to miss.

Cordelia Oliver, The Guardian, 1974

Gold, Oil and a flawed Diamond

Nicholas de Jongh and Caroline Tisdall sum up the Edinburgh Festival's poor relations, theatre and art

Gold, oil and a flawed Diamand

Nicholas de Jongh and Caroline Tisdall sum up the Edinburgh Festival’s poor relations, theatre and art

SUDDENLY all the lights went out. The huge cathedral was overwhelmed by darkness and in a great sound-storm music and terrorised voices merged. In the vacant high spaces of the Cathedral white lights glimmered and vaguely-seen enormous black wings seemed to move above us. Sounds swelled to pandemonium. The Apocalypse had come to the “Golden City”, arrived in the expected form of Armageddon, though the confident Anabaptist visionaries did not know that this was only the prelude to the death of their religious sect, not to the awaited resurrection.

With scene-experience like this Strathclyde Theatre Group have provided the Festival’s single dramatic sensation. Flawed and limited though “The Golden City is, and deep though the debt to Ronconi’s ”Orlando Furioso”, there is no missing the sensual and rare dramatic impact of the work. The group has spent two years creating “The Golden City” a reconstruction of the rise and suppression of the Reformation sect of Anabaptists in the 1530s. They returned, as Luther did to a religious system which exalted the Bible as the source of authority and refused State intervention in religious matters.

The play’s concern with the working of a timeless religious fanaticism - of a kind which the Anabaptists enjoyed. But the key to its effects lies with staging. Performing “The Golden City” in a cathedral gives it a religious atmosphere which is crucial to its impact. On an ordinary stage the play would not work. The performers have followed Ronconi in creating moveable acting areas – eight six feet high small rectangular stages on wheels. The actors move these through the audience (there are no seats) and they themselves walk and run among us as well. There is a remarkable sense of being part of their Anabaptist congregation; as John Leyden, the Anabaptist leader stabbed a girl, an old woman dressed in black pushed her way past me and tore to the girl’s side. The sensation was strange almost as if this was a real accident or assassination. It is a typical dramatic gesture in the play.

To create this sense of obsessive religious ardour which overwhelmed so many in the town of Munster, the actors initially depend on anachronistic religious caricature. The European “religious championships” are staged with Catholics and Protestants as footballers. The Pope takes part in a boxing match as “the reigning spiritual champion” and “a good clean fight with absolutely no divine intervention” is promised.

The evening’s failing is that it infinitely over-extends a single and repetitive theme of religious fanaticism in action. Its aim of “mirroring disintegration of reality “is never fully attempted. The play’s scenes of starvation and demoralisation are skimped. There is a sense of dramatic staxis. But the methods and the context are quite remarkable. Would any church in London have the courage to mount this ? Hugo Gifford, the director, deserves praise.

Compared with the rest of the Edinburgh Fringe dwindles ”Hinge and Bracket and Friends” continues the fringe theme of innocence and nostalgia. Dr Evadne Hinge and Dame Hilda Bracket are two guys dressed as elderly Edwardian spinsters, singing Gilbert and Sullivan, with perfect Edwardian commentaries and asides. There is something both touching and comic about their excitement and love of the music. Perversely I would like to see them exploiting that sense of innocence. Michael Almaz’s “ Letters from K” at the professional Pool Theatre is concerned with Franz Kafka’s neurotic relationship with Felice from whom he twice broke away. But the marvellously inscrutable quality of his doubts and his exploitation goes for nothing in Mr Almaz’s aimless monologue for the disconsolate fiancé.

The Festival’s professional theatre standards have lived down to the low level which Peter Diamand has steadfastly maintained: Mr Diamand’s great success is with the musical aspects. He has remained silent and impervious to criticism. How can Ronald Maver, a former drama director of the Scottish Arts Council who is on the Edinburgh Festival Society board remain associated with such needlessly undistinguished standards? The fringe remains as an interesting dramatic display though I would like to see it selecting some theme and allowing the university dramatic societies to research around it in terms of dramatic, social and political interest.

Finally, I make my own highly personal awards of valueless Purple Thistles of Commendation and Black Thistles of Contempt based on viewing more than 20 productions. Purple Thistles best new professional play, Cecil Taylor’s “Schippel” at the Traverse. Best amateur production “The Golden City”. Best professional performance Emrys Jones “ Dr Faustus” and Simon Callow in “Schippel”. Black Thistles: Peter Diamand and Bill Thornley for the Festival’s professional drama programme. The Lord Provost of Edinburgh for keeping the city’s grant to the Traverse Theatre at £2000 per annum for the past three years.

Nicholas de Jongh, Guardian, 1974

“The Golden City” : St Mary’s Cathedral

Strathclyde Theatre Group spent 2½ years preparing this production for the public. They are a company brimful of talent, energy and enthusiasm – directed by Hugo Gifford, already established in his late twenties as one of the most enterprising spirits in contemporary Scottish theatre. For the first half hour with actors warming up the audience by turning St Mary’s Cathedral into a fairground, complete with acrobats, sword-swallowers, fortune-tellers and puppet sideshows. “The Golden City” promises to live up to all that could be expected of it.

What goes wrong then? Perhaps it is that having taken a theme which requires a great deal of serious examination – the dreadful Munster episode of 1534-35 - Mr Gifford proceeds to only fitfully examine it all, and to fill in the vacuities with gimmicks.

The Anabaptists who set up a polygamous commune under the “kingship” of Jan of Leyden (acted by Mr Gifford) make a tremendous subject. The best moments in “The Golden City” are visual – Stuart Hopps pavane emblematic of Jan’s court, which begins the second half as strikingly as the carnival begins the first. Whenever there is a need to deal in depth with issues raised by the Anabaptist tragedy, however, the play dodges them. The lapses into fragments of undergraduate revue, panto and slapstick, seemed to please the performers more than the audience. In the second half, tediously, we were fed bits of history, letters and lectures, shouted up and down the nave (Sandy Johnson as Knipperdollink had a better sense of speech rhythm than any of the others).

The work is ambitious and confused. An authentic sense of theatre and a Ken Russell-like flashiness fight for the upper hand, and the latter wins when we are treated to “Apocalypse” by leaving the lights out and our ears hurt by a dose of radiophonic noise. When the racket stops, and the words can be heard, the poverty of the writing is apparent. ”Flesh exists to create dreams” King Jan declares twice, at crucial points where it would have been hoped that he would do more than echo clichés from “Death of a Salesman”.

The Anabaptists represented the extreme left-wing of the Reformation, and its notable that such items as “Pay more for barley” song came over with more conviction than other things in th production. The point is that the political issue appears to have involved Mr Gifford and his company at a proper imaginative level of commitment, where the religious issues, having involved them scarcely at all, are reduced to custard pies and a wrestling match between the Pope and Martin Luther. “The Golden City” has been praised by some critics in such terms that I have seen it twice before venturing to disagree. It seems to me that what we have here is waste of talent on a huge scale, a pretentious spectacular which uses its cathedral setting ??? place for showing off with a toybox of tricks.

Robert Nye, Scotsman, 1974

Hugo Giford : Director of the Golden City and STG

A man of rare skill and imagination

An appreciation by John Fowler

With the sudden death of Hugo Gifford this week at the age of 36 the Scottish theatre has lost a fresh and promising talent.

Though he trained as an actor and had acted and directed on professional stage, he was best known as the first director of drama at Strathcyde University and as founder of Strathclyde Theatre Group, which he built into a link between the university and the community involving students, staff and men and women from all walks of life.

Having spent 10 years as a university teacher (though hecould never be categorised as an academic) he left 18 months ago to form a small touring company, Kabal, whose first production toured in Scotland recently and whose second was being planned when he died.

His most notable early production for STG was “ The Golden City” an apocalyptic account of the religious ferment in a German city in Reformation times. This he helped research, write and acted in as well as directed, and it won the group one of the early Fringe First awards when they took it to Edinburgh in 1974

It had all the hallmarks of his work: music, movement and above all theatrical inventiveness.

My first memory of Hugo dates from shortly after that production when I saw him along with other members of the theatre group in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow declaiming Shakespeare at a fast pace to a startled and snow-flecked audience of Saturday afternoon shoppers.. This was a direct consequence of “ Golden City”- the extravaganza had lost money and a public read-in of the complete plays was a desperate measure to raise funds.

The following year I showed him a play I had written and a collaboration and friendship began between us which I, like all writers who worked with him, found exciting and rewarding. Unlike many good directors he always sought to realise the intentions of the playwright, and one of the group’s chief aims was to encourage the works of writers new to the stage. Those with whom he worked fruitfully were the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown and Robert Nye.

He had many memorable productions to his credit: an outstanding “Everyman” in Glasgow Cathedral and more recently a turbulent and controversial interpretation of Marlowe’s “Dr Faustus” at the Strathclyde Drama Centre, the tiny theatre space where most of his work as teacher and director was accomplished.

In class, he concentrated on the practical rather than the academic approach to plays and one of his great assets was the ability to inspire enthusiasm among the young people with whom he worked. He had a magic which could reveal talent in people who had been unaware of it themselves, and to which others had been blind.

Hugo Gifford had rare skill and imagination. He had a kind nature and an endearing personality, and men and women loved him for it. When the lights dim and the actor leaves, the stage is a barren empty place.

Glasgow Herald, Thursday 16 July 1981

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