Edinburgh Festivals can be reimagined to be better than ever – Joyce McMillan

Following the cancellation of most of Edinburgh’s August festivals because of the coronavirus outbreak, we must ensure that this extraordinary event returns better than ever, writes Joyce McMillan

American author, actress and activist Rose McGowan, a founder of the MeToo movement, at last year’s Fringe (Picture: Neil Hanna)

When I moved into my Edinburgh flat, in the autumn of 1980, I found under the old linoleum in the kitchen a copy of the Edinburgh Evening News for the day when I was born in August 1952. The front-page classified ads told me that during that week, with the Edinburgh Festival in full swing, the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra was playing at the Usher Hall, and Margot Fonteyn was dancing at the Empire, now the Festival Theatre; I was struck by how much it must have meant, just seven years after 1945, to have a big German orchestra here in Edinburgh, rebuilding a sense of human connection that had been so horrifyingly shattered by a dozen years of Nazi tyranny, and six years of war.

The Festival had been founded, of course, in 1947, in an effort led by conductor Rudolf Bing, and warmly welcomed by Edinburgh Provost Sir John Falconer, to heal the wounds of war through the arts. By 1980, it had become the 33-year-old veteran of an increasingly crowded international arts festival scene, and by any measure a huge success. It had helped transform postwar Edinburgh from an austerity-scarred provincial capital where everything closed at 9pm, to the globally-recognised “Festival City” proclaimed on tourist posters across the world. The Fringe – founded in 1947 by a self-organised group of companies who felt excluded from the main event – had already become one of the biggest arts festivals in the world, and was on the brink of an explosive new expansion; and alongside it ran the Military Tattoo, the Film Festival, and a handful of other festivals, to be joined in 1983 by the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

So when I found that old newspaper, in the autumn of 1980, I was already aware of how my own fate, and that of thousands of other Scots, had been transformed by this strange gift that had come to our capital city, during those postwar years. Like many Scottish-based arts journalists before and after me, I owed my career to it; my first-ever chance to review theatre professionally came on BBC Radio Scotland’s Festival View programme, presented by the late and much-loved Neville Garden.

‘The shaping privilege of my life’

And beyond that, there was the vast, incalculable effect it had had on Scotland’s sense of itself, over the postwar years. Here it was, every August, our own direct point of connection with a whole wide word of art and creativity; the moment when our relatively small capital city became the global, or at least the western, metropolis of the arts. This week, the playwright and Lyceum artistic director David Greig tweeted that “the shaping privilege of my life has been to grow up in a city filled, for one month of the year, with the world’s best literature, theatre, comedy, opera, dance, cabaret and sheer uncategorisable joyful lunacy”; and it’s certain that the inspiration of the Festival, and the international platform it has provided for the work of Scottish artists over the years, has transformed Scotland’s cultural scene in ways too profound to measure.

Yet now, suddenly, the Edinburgh International Festival of 2020 is gone; and with it the Tattoo, the Book Festival, the Art Festival, and most of the ever-anarchic Fringe. The cancellation was expected, of course; but to see the actual announcement of it, after 73 uninterrupted years, was to feel a real sense of shock, and a chill of fear that a long era of peace and freedom, too often taken for granted, might truly be coming to an end. Over the years, as a journalist, I have sat in hot and crowded rooms everywhere from Cracow to Johannesburg watching shows that were about to come to Edinburgh, or companies that had found fame here; and often, as I sat in those theatres, or rushed my way through a ferocious, sweaty Edinburgh Fringe schedule, I thought about how fragile it all was, and how a single ill event – a sudden war, a terrible terrorist attack, or a pandemic – could blow this world of live performance and interaction apart. I knew that it was part of, and intimately linked to, the rare moment of postwar progress, protection and peace into which I had been born. And I knew, of course, that nothing lasts forever; although somehow, I hoped that it would.

A playground for the rich?

So where are we now? The truth is that no-one knows. It’s clear that the economic impact on Edinburgh of the loss of even one Festival, with its 4.4 million visitors, will be severe, and for some disastrous. It’s also clear that even before the coronavirus crisis, the Festivals were approaching a reckoning with the city, which has been increasingly overwhelmed by Airbnb-driven hyper-tourism in recent years. And despite the best efforts of many individual artists and arts organisations, far too many Edinburgh citizens – and too many artists everywhere – continue to feel excluded from the Festival and Fringe, which often looks like, and to some extent is, a playground for the rich.

What happens in the next year, in other words – in the way of debate and agreement about how to take the Festivals forward, how to confront these huge issues, how to reach a new understanding with Edinburgh and its people, and how to respond to the new times we are facing – will determine whether the Festivals as we have known them survive and thrive, or gradually begin to fade into history. There’s no doubt that we have the human and cultural resources to bring Edinburgh’s festivals back stronger, better loved, and more accessible than ever, in 2021 and beyond. The care, vision and leadership shown by Scotland’s top arts organisations during these hard weeks has been truly impressive; and the passion of artists across Scotland and far beyond to sustain, reform and reimagine these festivals, and never to let them go, is palpable. The road ahead, though, will be a relentlessly tough one; redeemed only by the fact that as the founders of the Edinburgh Festival knew 73 years ago, art exists to try to imagine the impossible, to rebuild bridges where they have been wrecked by history, and to begin again, after dark times, making something new.

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