Edinburgh Festivals diary: How Scottish are the festivals and how Scottish should they be?
The Edinburgh International Festival was almost based in Oxford
How Scottish are the Edinburgh festivals? How Scottish should they be?
This is a question which has arisen repeatedly this August, across all of the various events - and discussed by people from audience members to venue owners, those working in the industry and first time performers. It is a question that, as I write my last festivals diary for this year, I am still pondering.
From the lady who rudely reminded me (see diary from 6 August) that, however long I live here, an English accent and Fringe lanyard will always mark me out as an outsider, to figures showing tickets are increasingly sold to those with Scottish postcodes - the debate is constant.
There is no doubt that there is a disconnect between August industry visitors and those of us who are here year round. A local delegate attending the Edinburgh TV Festival told me she had been asked three times one afternoon how long she was “up for”.
“It’s a London bubble which flies in and flies out and they can’t believe anyone actually lives here,” she complained. “It’s like they don’t know things are going on in Edinburgh - that we can all continue to work in the arts here - outside of August.”
Comedy producer Katie Palmer of Brass Tacks, backed by others in the Scottish comedy sector, this week hit out at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for failing to include a single Scot on its shortlist - again. Just a handful of comedians have ever been nominated for the awards in its 45 years history.
Yet figures from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society show that of the more-than 3,300 shows performed this year, 923 of them are by Scots - and the majority of them from Edinburgh and surrounding areas. Meanwhile, around 60 to 70 per cent of tickets are now sold to people living in Scottish postcode areas.
Underbelly founders Ed Bartlam and Charlie Wood told me early in this year’s Fringe that the proportion of Scottish audience at their shows has increased sharply in recent years, which they fear could hit the festival’s diverse reach. The pair, who launched Underbelly in 2000, warned economic factors such as rising accommodation costs were driving the Fringe to become “increasingly a Scottish audience-based festival”.
In considering all of this, we need to remember the festivals’ history. The Edinburgh International Festival - the OG of all of the other festivals which have sprung up around it over the past 80 years - was set up in 1947 by a group led by Austrian-British opera impresario Rudolf Bing to unite people through the arts after the Second World War.
An arguably lesser known fact, however, is that Edinburgh was not the first choice of location. Oxford was the preferred city right up to the last minute, with the Scottish capital only becoming a contender after that plan fell through and Bing managed to garner support from civic leaders in Edinburgh.
And thank god he did. Edinburgh without the festivals is almost unimaginable now. Love them or hate them, they have shaped this city and its arts scene in ways which can not be underestimated. Hosting the world’s biggest arts festival puts Edinburgh firmly on the global cultural map forever. The Oxford Fringe would not have the same ring to it.
But the festivals’ origins are not specifically Scottish. They were founded out of a movement of international culture and a need for unity. Bing chose the UK due to our (comparative) lack of devastation after the war, at a time when nowhere in mainland Europe could consider hosting such an event.
Yet, on the other hand, they are our festivals. Over time, they have become Scottish; they have become Edinburgh.
We just have to work out a way of living with both of these things at the same time.
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