Could have felt more festive ... Ohio Impromptu at the Barbican's Beckett centenary festival
What makes a great arts festival? Over the past weeks, I've been thinking about this question while going to every single live show in the Beckett centenary festival at the Barbican in London.
But I've found it hard to convince myself that the Barbican series was in any sense a festival at all. I feel as if I have been to a lot of Beckett plays, but I am not sure I've been engaged in a completely immersive experience in the way - to me, at least - the word festival implies.
Take Edinburgh, for instance. Whether you're going to the fringe, the international festival, the book festival, or all three in August, you can't help being swept into inescapable festival mode - the rest of the world fades away while an often relentless round of theatre, comedy and other entertainments takes over. It may not be remotely coherent as an experience, but it certainly has an irrestible dynamic that seems completely removed from the day-to-day. The same goes for the Hay festival: well, there is nothing much else to do in Hay-on-Wye, so you do find yourself imagining that one clump of tents demarcates the limits of the known universe.
At festivals' very best - I'd say Aldeburgh, here - if you are lucky enough to be able to go to several events, you find that you are being quietly invited to make all kinds of musical connections that simply wouldn't have occurred to you before. Thomas Adès, the artistic director, stitches such a subtle tapestry with his programmes (without doing anything as vulgar or obvious as using "themes", thank god), that over the past few years going to concerts there has been revelatory: memorable juxtapositions have been Feldman with Barry and Stravinsky with Tchaikovsky. Then there are pleasures such as discovering a new composer (to me) like Sciarrino, or simply hearing loads of Ravel chamber music.
So Beckett: I've seen some wonderful things. John Hurt doing Krapp's Last Tape was extraordinary. Rockaby I suspect will sit in the brain for a long time to come. But I never felt I was marinating in the material in the way that I would at Edinburgh or Aldeburgh or Huddersfield. It's partly because I live and work in London, so going to Beckett never became more than going to the theatre a lot - it never took me out of the run of things. But maybe it was something to do with the festival, too.
So what does make a good, or even great, arts festival?
