In the same summer that Britain was gripped by the Profumo–Keeler scandal, the Edinburgh Festival was besmirched by its own flurry of moral outrage when a drama conference, organized by impresario John Calder, flaunted a naked woman on a trolley. The boundaries of good taste, it was felt, had been pushed too far. Front-page headlines in the Scotsman confirmed what some had feared when the Festival was proposed for Edinburgh, that its citizens were too straitlaced for such an event. Despite the disapproval that greeted Calder’s conference, however, Edinburgh quickly adjusted to a new climate of artistic experimentation and provocation, and soon proved virtually unshockable.
Commenting last night on the surprise appearance of a nude woman at the final session of the Drama Conference in the McEwan Hall on Saturday, the Earl of Harewood, artistic director of Edinburgh Festival, said he believed the incident had sabotaged the chances of another conference of a similar nature in next year’s Festival. He regarded the whole incident as extremely silly and pointless.
The incident brought an end to the Festival in a loud explosion of indignation. Anna Keseler (19), an Edinburgh model, was wheeled across the organ gallery for 30 seconds as part of an ‘action theatre’ display staged by Kenneth Dewey (21), avant-garde director from Los Angeles. It was part of a ‘Play of Happenings’, organized by Mr Dewey, which was designed to get the audience involved in the conference …
Mr John Calder, London publisher and organizer of the drama conference, thought the whole thing ‘very funny’. Not so Edinburgh’s Lord Provost, Duncan M. Weatherstone. ‘It is quite a tragedy that three weeks of glorious Festival should have been smeared by a piece of pointless vulgarity,’ he said in an indignant statement issued yesterday …
After the first startled gasp which followed Miss Keseler’s nude appearance in the McEwan Hall, the audience were further shaken by the sound of a piper playing and marching in the top tier. Someone hung a sheep’s skeleton on the platform, men hung from windows 70 feet up, to the background noises of tape recorded gibberish and murmurs of apprehension from the paying public.
As if that was not enough, American film actress Carroll Baker slipped off her marmalade mink with a queenly air, revealing figure-hugging silver trousers and tunic. Then, for no apparent reason, she jumped down from the platform and made her way out of the hall – not by the aisle, but by jumping over the seats without a ‘by-your-leave’ or an ‘excuse me’.
At his country home in Kinross, Mr John Calder had his Sunday morning peace shattered by the loud reports of Press and Provost. ‘I saw the whole thing,’ he said, ‘and it was all in very good taste. The girl was wheeled through very quickly and no one in the audience could have seen very much of her.’ . . .
At her Portobello home yesterday, Miss Keseler described her appearance as ‘a bit of a giggle’.