TRAGI-COMEDY OF THE HIGHLAND ‘AGELASTS’

HI-Arts Journal aims to provide a regular platform for figures in the arts world to have their say about a key issue of the day.  This month: A proposed Highland Year of Culture in 2007 is surely a good thing, isn’t it?  GEORGE GUNN begs to differ.
 

THERE was always something comic about Highland Council’s InvernessHighland2008 bid to be named European Capital of Culture. The problem with the whole affair was that the people behind it were incapable of laughing. They were, every civic one of them, what Rabelais termed ‘agelasts’, which is a neologism he coined from the Greek to describe people incapable of laughter and whom Rabelais detested because they came close to stopping him writing altogether.
 

It was as if out rode our Highland Don Quixote, onto the corporate plain of the hard sell and the multi-million pounds marketing deal, certain that the old tin basin he wore on his head was a brand new helmet of ideas and that his old donkey was really a galloping stallion. The grand scheme of 2008 soon turned into a bathetic embarrassment without a Cervantes to put it right.
 

Of course the ‘agelasts’ of Inverness learned nothing from this.  When it became obvious that the Highland bid was never going to make the short list, when set alongside Belfast or Newcastle/Gateshead, instead of some honest soul-searching as to why the enterprise had failed, we witnessed a display of true ‘agelastian’, ‘Wha’s lek us, damned few an they’re a’ deid’ chauvinism. The Highlands are special, you must understand, unique, economically transformed, undergoing a cultural renaissance and the jewel in the crown of braw, bonnie Alba. 
 

That none of this is true doesn’t seem to matter. Instead of a year as a European Capital of Culture, Jack MacConnell, the First Minister, announced that 2006 would be the Scottish Year of Highland Culture. Except that 2006 is now 2007 because the Koh– i –Noor of our cultural crown jewels, Eden Court Theatre, will not be ready due to its extensive and necessary restructuring until then.

Lots of prime events are promised for this flagship year and Eden Court is essential because Cameron MacIntosh is planning to mount one of his West End productions and obviously this cannot be staged in Latheron village hall. Real theatre production needs a real theatre and Cameron, the Big Mac, is a real theatre producer. He also owns huge swatches of Lochaber. This irony seems to be lost on the “agelasts” at the Highland Council.
 

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