This
year’s Perth Festival gave us a clear indication of its director Jonathan
Holloway’s vivacious, egalitarian view of the arts.
I
doubt that Holloway has an elitist bone in his body, but he does have a tailor’s
instinct for the warp and weft of artists and their performances. Much of what
he delivered this year had the sheen of high art, but if he made a single
selection for his programme that didn’t have genuine (and in many cases
compulsive) appeal to enough people to seriously tick over the box office, I’d
like to know what it was.
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| Jonathan Holloway |
In
the new festival landscape in Perth, with a mightily enlarged, high-octane
Fringe offering shows at close to cinema prices in a carnival precinct going
toe-to-toe with the established festival, Holloway approach is exactly correct,
and crucial to his gig’s success.
I
can only comment about the theatre programme (for a comprehensive overview of the whole occurrence, link here to my friend and mentor Steve Bevis’s take in The West) but it was a unqualified
success, both in its component parts and taken as a whole.
