The British Council is supporting two important arts events in Edinburgh in the coming months: a major Francis Bacon exhibition and the first ever British production of a contemporary play from mainland China.

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads is a new exhibition exploring in depth the artist’s intense and forceful portraiture.  Jointly conceived and organised by the British Council and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, it opens on 4 June and is the major summer show at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival.

The exhibition comprises some fifty works, including self-portraits and portraits of friends, lovers and other artists.  Sitters include Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne, Peter Lacy and George Dyer.  Many of the intimate and striking portraits were painted from photographs, and the exhibition illustrates Bacon’s abiding preoccupation with the intensity of his human relationships.

The works are assembled from loans from private individuals and from many public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Hamburg Kunsthalle; Tate Gallery, London; and the Thyssen Collection, Madrid.

Following its run in Edinburgh, which ends on 4 September, the exhibition travels to the Kunsthalle Hamburg from 13 October to 15 January 2006.  There will be ten additional works in the German show, mostly from collections in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The British Council is also supporting In the Bag, the first ever British production of a contemporary play from mainland China.  It opens at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre on 3 May, and is the latest in the Playwrights in Partnership scheme which aims to match a playwright with a Scottish writer who can recreate the play’s ‘life-breath’, thereby overcoming the awkwardness of some translations.

The author of In the Bag is Wang Xiaoli, who lives on the outskirts of Beijing, and the play was translated from the Chinese by Cristina Bevir and presented in a version by Edinburgh-based playwright Ronan O’Donnell.  It explores a culture torn between its history and its contemporary reality.

In the Bag is the fruit of a three-month research project conducted by Cristina Bevir to map the world of contemporary Chinese playwriting.  Supported by the British Council and the Scottish Arts Council, Bevir explored new plays at theatres and festivals in Beijing, and she is a participant in a conference about contemporary Chinese theatre that the Traverse is holding on 4 and 5 May.