The Edinburgh Festival
As a theatre-lover who grew up in Edinburgh, August is my favourite time of year. When the festival rolls around, we have the enormous privilege of the world’s largest arts festival arriving on our doorsteps. The whole city bursts to life almost overnight – the fire jugglers and unicyclists spring up on the cobbles of the Royal Mile, the back room of almost every pub becomes a theatre, and the buzz of thousands of hopeful performers fills the air. The shows run all day, every day, late into the night, and the city centre transforms itself into something alive with possibility in every nook and cranny. You might stumble upon your new favourite comedian, or watch earnest spoken word in an alleyway, or see world-class circus performers showing off in the street.
For one month every year, we become the centre of the artistic world and all of Edinburgh becomes a stage. I love this sudden enlivening, and I love the feeling of the city quietly becoming ours again as it all fades away for another year. I’m really looking forward to running my Scottish LGBTQ+ history tour as a show this year and being an official part of the Fringe for the first time!
I don’t remember a time when the festival wasn’t a part of my life. When I was wee, my parents would take us to children’s shows and to see our favourite authors at the Book Festival. I can still recall the sense of wonder I felt strolling through the tents that made temporary bookshops in the heart of the city, or stopping to gaze at a tattooed contortionist squeezing his body through a tennis racquet on the High Street. The festival has always been a part of Edinburgh’s beating heart to me.
The Book Festival in Charlotte Square, 2013. This year it moves to a new home at the Edinburgh College of Art. Image: Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
When I was a teenager, the festival city became our playground. We would head out in the first days of the Fringe and persuade promoters to let us in to get bums on seats. We saw Tim Minchin that way back in 2005 at the Gilded Balloon, haggling with one of his flyerers in the beer garden until they gave us eight tickets for the price of two. On the Royal Mile we watched street performers from around the world plying their trade, from the fire-juggling unicyclists to elegant acrobats. My mum – a keen festivalgoer herself – would take me to “proper” plays at the Traverse and dance shows at the Festival Theatre.
A street performer on the Royal Mile. He’s about to start juggling fire while blindfolded, once he gets situated on his giant unicycle. Image: "snappybex" ("bexross") on Flickr, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Edinburgh is blessed with a thriving cultural scene all year round, but there is something special and unique about August and its explosion of theatrical life. It brings a sense of spontaneity and carnival, a feeling that you could turn the next corner and see anything at all in front of you. A man riding a bike dressed as a fish, that comedian off the telly standing in front of you in the Tesco’s queue, someone singing an aria under a bridge, the world’s most-pierced woman reading tarot cards, a gospel choir practising in the park – all things become possible and the remarkable becomes normal.
Bruno Walter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic at the first EIF in 1947. He said the festival was “one of the most magnificent experiences since the war” and that “here, human relations have been renewed”. Image: Edinburgh Festival City
What those of us who live here call “the festival” is really a mixture of festivals all rolled into one, from the International Festival and the Fringe to the Book Festival and the Art Festival. The original, the Edinburgh International Festival, began in 1947 with the lofty goal of providing “a platform for the flowering of the human spirit” in the misery of the post-war years. Europe was grieving coming to terms with the horrific events of the war while still in the grip of rationing and trying to – literally – rebuild. The festival aimed to build bridges and common humanity through the arts, and it does the same thing today. The EIF is a curated festival of some of the world’s best performers and companies across disciplines, from ballet and modern dance to opera and international theatre. You might characterise it as the city’s “high art” festival, and it takes place mostly in conventional venues like theatres and concert halls.
In its very first year, the EIF was joined by what would become the Fringe festival. There had been frustration from many in Scotland’s arts scene at the time that there was little to no Scottish work included in the programme. Suggestions from the festival’s first organiser, Sir Rudolf Bing, had included sword dancing and bagpipe music, and contemporary Scottish performers and artists felt unrepresented by these shortbread-tin images of their country.
A company called Glasgow Unity Theatre was instrumental in the “first fringe” in 1947. Formed in 1941, the company grew out of workers’ drama groups and was firmly rooted in Glasgow’s socialist and trade unionist history. They placed a strong focus on working-class creators and audiences, and they were committed to the creation of a “Scottish people’s theatre” grounded in local culture and left-wing politics. Like many grassroots arts groups in Scotland at the time, they felt that the International Festival was bourgeois and exclusionary.
Glasgow Unity Theatre performing ‘The Lower Depths’ by Maxim Gorky, which they would revive and bring to Edinburgh in 1947. Image: Scottish Theatre Archive
Eveline Garratt, Unity’s assistant director, wrote to the Glasgow Herald in January 1947 to express dismay that the festival would be so expensive and inaccessible to the general public and would include no Scottish works. She said that the company had approached Rudolf Bing about presenting a Scottish play and been told that “no Scottish theatre is up to standard”. A debate followed in the newspaper’s letters pages, with prominent cultural figures like the poet Hugh MacDiarmid supporting Unity’s position and decrying the lack of Scottish representation.
It was a debate that was keenly felt in the Scottish theatre community at the time, with a distinct sense that the country’s culture was being denied a platform. The desire to show up the establishment and ensure the presence of modern Scottish culture at the festival played an important role in what we now think of as the “first Fringe”.
Queues outside the Pleasance in 2009. Over 70 years since Glasgow Unity Theatre performed here at the “first fringe”, the Pleasance remains one of the festival’s most iconic venues. Image: gracecasson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Six Scottish and two English companies turned up uninvited for the 1947 festival. They took advantage of the theatre-going crowd by staging their own performances, sometimes in unconventional spaces like cinemas. Glasgow Unity Theatre performed a critically acclaimed run of The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky and The Laird o’ Torwatletie by Robert MacLennan at the Pleasance, which is still a Fringe venue 74 years later.
The whole thing was a very ad hoc affair to begin with, but the idea of simply showing up and putting on theatre during the festival had been established. Although “the Fringe” wasn’t yet a formal event, it would eventually draw its name from early references to these shows “on the fringe” of the main festival. It was several years before there was any official organisation at all, when some Edinburgh Uni students first set up a drop-in centre for performers in 1951. They provided cheap food and beds, youth hostel style, and I would love to have felt the buzz of something still so new and exciting within those walls. In 1959 the Fringe Festival Society was created and the first guide to the shows was printed. The Fringe as we know it today was born!
Over the decades, the Fringe has grown bigger than the EIF and spawned new “fringes” of its own. In a normal year, there might be 3000 different shows at the Fringe, listed in a paper programme half an inch thick. The festival’s size and international reputation has made participation expensive, and ironically far beyond the reach of many companies of the sort who staged the “first fringe” back in 1947. New, stripped back “free fringes” have sprung up around its edges, where performers work mostly for tips but can keep their costs low and take advantage of the same theatre-going audiences looking for something new. In recent years, numerous successful careers have been formed at the “free fringe”, where a successful show can build up a wild buzz through word of mouth and see people queuing hours in advance for a tiny pub room. For the lucky ones, the Fringe and its fringes represent a chance to have their work seen by some of the most influential critics and artists in the world.
Fringe vibes on a random weeknight in George Square gardens a few years ago. Image: my own
In 2020, for the first time in their history, the festivals couldn’t take place at all. This year, they’ll be different: smaller, more online, more outdoors. The buzz will be quieter, the audiences will wear masks. There are only a few hundred listings instead of thousands, with many of them livestreamed instead of live.
Maybe this is a chance for our festivals to get back to their roots – to show us how the arts can hold a mirror to our humanity, process our grief and begin to heal our trauma, just as they aimed to do in the wake of war back in 1947. Our festivals might feel like they’re finding their feet again this year, a little lost and scrappy and changed by the events of the past 18 months, just like we all are. We might not be able to feel the same sense of abandon that August normally brings, but a little taste of that spontaneity and possibility is exciting all the same.
A walking tour of Scottish LGBTQ+ history fits with the spirit of discovery that flourishes during the festival, digging up hidden stories and seeing old places through new eyes. I can’t wait to play my own small part in the city coming back to life and share this history with a new audience. You can find out more about the tour here, or head over the Fringe website to book tickets.
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