The first Edinburgh International Festival was held to great acclaim in 1947, injecting a badly needed dose of artistic life into drab post-war Britain. The only criticism was that it hadn’t included enough Scottish work. Notably missing, said novelist E. M. Forster among others, were the playwrights J. M. Barrie and James Bridie. So for the festival of 1948 it was agreed that theatre director Tyrone Guthrie would produce The Thrie Estates, by Sir David Lyndsay, which hadn’t been performed in Scotland since the sixteenth century. Guthrie reckoned it was three times the length of Hamlet; certainly it was a huge challenge theatrically as well as logistically. He discussed the difficulties he faced with James Bridie, who said he knew someone who might be able to help find a venue.
A few weeks later, over drinks, Bridie introduced me to Robert Kemp. I remember him coming in, out of the Edinburgh drizzle, with a thick tweed overcoat, a tweed cap of a kind which went ‘out’ when my father was a lad, with a thick ashplant in his hand, much more like a cattle dealer than an author. We discussed The Thrie Estates, got on fine and have been the best of friends from that instant.
Next day in downpours of rain we set out to find a suitable place to stage the play. Bridie, Kemp, William Graham of the festival office and myself, in a noble old Daimler with a noble old chauffeur, lent by the municipality. We visited big halls and wee halls. Halls ancient and modern, halls secular and halls holy, halls upstairs and halls in cellars, dance halls, skating rinks, lecture halls and beer halls.
The rain continued to pour. We got extremely wet and Bridie, as our physician, advised, as a precaution against the cold, that we sample the demon rum. We looked at several more halls, and several more rums. The quest waxed hilarious. Bridie and the noble old chauffeur began to sing, as our Daimler careered wildly from a swimming bath, which we were assured could be emptied, in the extreme east of the city, to the recreation hall of a steam laundry in the city’s extreme west. Darkness was falling; the street lamps were reflected in the puddles. The repertoire of our singers was nearly exhausted: the limousine was out of petrol; William Graham was asleep on its flyblown cushions; I was beginning to be acutely conscious that I had led them all a wild-goose chase. Then spake Kemp in the tone of one who hates to admit something unpleasant: ‘There is the Assembly Hall.’
The minute I got inside I knew that we were home. It is large and square in the Gothic style of about 1850. It has deep galleries and a raked floor sloping down to where, in the centre, the Moderator’s throne is set within a railed enclosure. The seats have sage-green cushions; there are endless stone corridors. Half-way up the steep black approach – it stands on one of the precipitous spurs of the Castle Rock – is a minatory statue of John Knox. There are endless portraits of departed pillars of the Kirk, including, as I was afterwards to discover, a very nice one by Harvey of my great-grandfather preaching al fresco in the Highlands.
None of the others thought the Hall particularly suitable; but they were impressed by my enthusiastic certainty and it was agreed that the Kirk authorities be approached as to its use for a play. The Scottish Kirk, with its austere reputation, might have been expected to take a dim view of mountebanks tumbling and painted women strutting before men in its Assembly Hall. On the contrary, no difficulties were raised; no one suggested censoring the bluer portions of the text or issued fussy interdicts about tobacco, alcohol or dressing-rooms. There was a single stipulation: no nails must be knocked into the Moderator’s throne.