The title of Ali Smith’s multi-award-winning novel poses a question that cuts to the heart of book festival culture: how to be both serious and fun, serving both readers and an audience. It’s a particular challenge for fiction, which doesn’t profit from the usual talking-heads format in the way of, say, a celebrity autobiography or a topical tome about climate change.
Edinburgh international book festival supremo Nick Barley has responded with a laboratory strand of semi-staged performances, which may or may not grow into something bigger. In the second of three to be devised this year in partnership with the Lyceum theatre, two writers and three actors had just three days to corral Smith’s dazzling, time-vaulting novel into a 45-minute performance.
How to Be Both consists of two randomly ordered sections. In one, the recently bereaved Georgia looks back on her fractious relationship with her dead mother. In the other, the Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa rears out of the walls of history and, as the performer and musical director Seiriol Davies cleverly frames it – co-opting Miley Cyrus – crashes into Georgia’s life like a wrecking ball.
Writers Clare Duffy and Julia Taudevin focus on three key episodes. First, the fabulous Annie Grace takes centre-stage as a free-spirited mother, caught between her twist-dancing youth and the straitjacket of motherhood. Then Francesco forces his own song into counterpoint, poignantly recalling the moment his secret was uncovered. Finally, Saskia Ashdown’s all-too-credibly stroppy Georgia relives the moment in which she slammed the phone down on her mother’s otherness. It’ll take work to bring Francesco fully into the picture, but the mother-daughter dynamic is captivating, and the potential is genuinely thrilling. As Ali Smith herself put it in the post-show discussion: More. Please. When?
