“IT IS the destiny of the artist not to serve those who make history but to serve those who are its victims,” said Albert Camus. 

How did some of the WWI-related events at the Edinburgh festivals this year match up to Camus’s prescription?

Certainly not Lemi Ponifasio’s I Am, a physical theatre production from a New Zealand company in the prestigious International Festival.

In it, an actor dressed in white sits in a chair holding a rifle. Someone sticks a red card in her mouth. Then others come forward to spit red liquid on her. Upstage, a line of actors dressed in black walk slowly by.

That was just one of a seemingly unending procession of incomprehensible and pretentious tableaux in a show which over the course of two hours manages to be absurdly incomprehensible, with even the handwritten surtitles to the poorly sung musical numbers impossible to read. 

As is the norm with “high art” the sensuous experience of ordinary people is airbrushed out of the creative material. The terrible realities of WWI  are lost in a spiritual haze, a ritualised and idealised interpretation of actual history. 

“Art” says the production’s director, “can remind us of our ability to transform triumphantly without violence and pain.” Yeah, right, but what’s so transformative about boredom?

No wonder the interval had been cancelled, probably because the constant trickle of walk-outs — some far more dramatic than anything happening on the stage — might have turned into a flood.

A co-production between Chekhov International Theatre Festival and the international festival, The War is something of an improvement. 

Directed by Vladimir Pankov, it has some novel aspects and the tightly organised ensemble acting and the powerful live singing and music-making are impressive. 

But intellectual and political coherence is again sacrificed on the altar of aesthetic spectacle. The attempt to suggest that the Trojan wars were some kind of parallel to WWI doesn’t convince and the disproportionate emphasis given to Russian upper-class responses to the war grates, given their comparatively comfortable lives.

The Fringe production Forgotten Voices — dramatised accounts of the war taken from actual oral testimonies — comes closer to Camus’s vision. 

Five actors read from lecterns, backed by a screen showing images from the war. Centre stage, and topping and tailing the production, is a soldier’s wife’s perspective on her experiences at home. 

On either side are the Tommies, recounting their stories of dreadful carnage. With bitter soldierly humour, they speak of class conflict in the trenches and the still-shocking details of the war such as white handkerchiefs being banned by the British army in case the men used them to to surrender.

Fittingly, Carol Ann Duffy at the Book Festival read her moving poem Last Post, which ends: 

“You lean against a wall,/your several million lives still possible/and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food./You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile./If poetry could truly tell it backwards,/then it would.”

Duffy’s mordant wit and melancholy sensibility certainly serve history’s victims well.