One legacy of this year's Hay-on-Wye literary festival lies in the part played by the Guardian. Not the paper's high-energy sponsorship, but its ongoing perpetration of a hoary old Hay myth—namely, that it is the biggest literary festival in Britain or, indeed, the world. The first claim is not true, which makes the second claim even less true. To be fair, Hay's director Peter Florence doesn't make either claim himself, preferring to consider Hay a matter of quality rather than quantity. So where does this insistence on size come from? For any Hay reporter interested, here are the facts: The biggest lit-fest in Britain is the Edinburgh book festival. Where Hay this year had 363 events, Edinburgh last year had 650. Where Hay shifted 130,000 tickets to about 80,000 visitors, Edinburgh had 207,000 visitors. Where Hay is nine days long, Edinburgh lasts for two weeks. Does it matter? Of course not. What it does represent is a good excuse to repeat the equally hoary jibe about the metrocentric, fact-fuzzy London-based press. Hay-on-Wye is the picnic in the country for the literary metro-set, which thus assumes it must be the biggest. What makes this sillier than usual this year is that the first Man Booker international prize, which has just been awarded to Ismail Kadare (see Julian Evans), will, on 27th June, have its prize-giving in Edinburgh. And, oh no, there are other facts to note, such as Edinburgh becoming Unesco city of literature. And, on top of that, the new Harry Potter book will be launched there in July. Weary cultural reporters will have to raise their eyes northward twice before their usual Scottish appointment in August—with that really big arts festival. But there's no need to worry. Scotland's other cities think that Edinburgh is just a narcissistic city of government and toff culture too self-satisfied to notice anything that happens outside its fish-bowl borders. Sound familiar?
Hay orgy of, er, sex
In another area, however, Hay is advancing in leaps and bounds—or licks and bonds. It's been a long time since literary folk have seemed sexy. But the festival-long parties going on at Whitney Court, organised by social pioneer Palash Davé, have become a feature for younger (and more lissome) followers of the literary scene. One evening, billed as the "naughty party," was rumoured to have transformed into a genuine orgy, in which members of the UEA writing course (did we hear something about sisters?) furnished themselves with decadent material for their forthcoming short stories about degeneracy in British literature. We assume. Prospect was of course tucked up in bed at the time with the architectural criticism of Deyan Sudjic and Charles Jencks.
Yet more big things
In sculptural circles, the competition for size has broken out into a species of giganticism. Millionaire arts patron Wilfred Cass has commissioned heavyweight object-creator Tony Cragg to create 11 massive pieces for a newly excavated chalk pit at the Cass sculpture foundation in Goodwood park; in Bilbao, American titan Richard Serra has installed the largest commissioned site-specific sculpture in the world (called The Matter of Time) in gallery 104 of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim, itself a giant sculptsure. Making a mockery of all this must be the meaning of Giancarlo Neri's enormous table and chair on Hampstead Heath—otherwise it has no meaning. It's just big.
Happy birthday Stephen Joseph Theatre
This August, the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Alan Ayckbourn's Scarborough fastness, celebrates its 50th year. Stephen Joseph, the son of publisher Michael Joseph and actress Hermione Baddeley, dreamed of bringing theatre in the round back to Britain and became Ayckbourn's mentor. The playwright may get bashed for being in Scarborough, or for writing untrendy plays, but he has created a theatre both unique and perfectly suited to his work, reinvented the rep company and—hardest of all, this—nurtured an enthusiastic and sophisticated local audience. A birthday that merits honour.
