Alasdair Gray @ EIBF

 

As the actors spoke the opening lines: ‘storm clouds, whose snow and hail and rains pour down... heralding the Lord’, so too did the Edinburgh skies unleash yet another summer torrent upon the roof of the Edinburgh Book Festival tent, symbolically setting the scene for Alasdair Gray’s Fleck, a contemporary version of Goethe’s Faust and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Gray, accompanied by three actors, presented a dramatised reading of his play to a small and intense Book Festival audience. Not happy with the Goethe ending, Gray’s own version, written in rhyming couplets, diverges from the original in Act Two, never to return. Rightly enough Gray explains that the play is an imitation, not a translation: he wanted to differentiate the story and "wrench it into the 21st century." The 75 year old polymath, famous for the Scottish tome Lanark, and his distinctive artwork that punctuates Glasgow, is lesser known as a playwright and when he first approaches the stage he seems very much an elderly man, unsettled and feeble. However all sense of senility disappears when he steps into the character of Nick (the Devil) and he becomes vigorously youthful for the remainder of the event. Perhaps Gray has struck a deal with Auld Nick himself? [Renée Rowland]