When the Edinburgh festival began over the first full weekend of August, after a pandemic-enforced year when stages were dark, it wasn’t in a hot and sweaty Spiegeltent surrounded by the hubbub of excited beer garden drinkers. Nor was it in one of the city’s grand old concert halls, with the audience jostling politely past others to their seats as one of the world’s great orchestras tuned up.
Instead, the first murmurings of festival life in 2021 took place on Silverknowes beach, out past the housing estates to the north of Edinburgh, on the banks of the Firth of Forth. With a dusky grey sky looming over the tidal Cramond Island, a few dozen audience members made themselves comfortable on the rocks, adjusted their headphones and prepared to watch Move, a show grounded in Celtic keening rituals.
Five women dressed in sombre robes move across the sand flats, lighting fires, trailing smoke and singing in tongues so powerful they seem to fill the horizon. They tell stories of flight and migration, of death and of new birth, in the characters of women from around the world. Although an early version of Move was first seen in the community halls of the Isle of Lewis two months before lockdown began, its repurposing as outdoor theatre for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe feels designed as a lament for the months just gone; for those we’ve lost, and the old certainties of the past.
0 of 6
“Move started off being a really intimate portrayal of grief,” says the play’s writer and director Julia Taudevin, who also appears. “Now it’s this epic look at what the world is and how small we are within that, in the context of the planet and the passage of time. The play has developed hugely [during lockdown restrictions] . . . we took a firm decision to see those restrictions as something to be creatively generative. ‘If we can’t be in theatres, what can we do? How can we make work in a way that feels creatively satisfying?’”
What Taudevin describes is a form of necessity as mother of invention which most of the festival’s major producing venues, companies and lone comedians playing the city’s more spacious bars seem to have embraced vigorously. On top of a multistorey car park in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, four of the festival’s key venues have banded together to create a temporary open-air stage (ingeniously named MultiStory). A version of the locally-loved Proclaimers musical Sunshine on Leith was playing when we passed, with passersby stopping on the street to listen in.
Around the city, meanwhile, the lynchpin Edinburgh International Festival – under director Fergus Linehan, in his penultimate year in charge – has erected three spectacular tented performance spaces, containing distanced audiences of several hundred and bearing the precision acoustics of a concert hall for, for example, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s backing of pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason in her interpretation of Clara Schumann’s works amid the leafy suburb of Inverleith.
That a festival of any substance is happening at all is a minor miracle in itself. At the beginning of July, there were still major doubts as to whether Scottish government rules on distancing would dissipate in time for many of the events being quietly planned to go ahead. While many of the restrictions did indeed go on the first Monday of the festival, a lack of overseas travel means that foreign tourism numbers are negligible, with audiences being made up of locals and visitors from across the UK.
Instead of the usual 3,800 shows, this year there are roughly 700, with a third of them online-only. The effect is strangely eerie during the week, with the usually bustling temporary beer gardens of George Square lying mostly empty during work hours. The usual venue tenants Assembly and Underbelly are back with slimmed-down programmes, while Gilded Balloon, the Pleasance and Summerhall are also in operation nearby.
The bad weather has been a contributing factor, though, and when the sun has come out the streets have been busy – but thankfully, not as unbearably so as usual on the Royal Mile. For locals, the vast majority of whom feel warmly towards the festival but with justifiable concerns about overtourism and booming holiday lets, perhaps this is the perfect festival?
“I hope this festival is the start of the recovery,” says Gareth Nicholls, artistic director of the city’s new writing hub the Traverse Theatre, which is hosting Frances Poet’s Edinburgh-set play Still and Enda Walsh’s new work Medicine before the latter transfers to Galway and New York. “But I also hope it’s the start of looking at what the festival means to the city and how we can improve it for residents, for audiences, and for artists – how we can celebrate everything that’s brilliant about it, but improve the things that are maybe not working so well.”
Held outdoors in the woodland grounds of Newhailes Estate, a short bus ride along the coast in Musselburgh, Doppler is one of this year’s most anticipated productions. While the Edinburgh-based site-specific theatre company Grid Iron have staged many definitive festival shows over the years, this adaptation of Norwegian author Erlend Loe’s book was meant to be a return to the company’s low-key, self-sufficient roots when it was planned for 2020.
A dark satire about a man who abandons his family to live in the forest, where he slaughters an elk and adopts its calf over his own children, the production was initially hamstrung then eventually called off because of Covid-19, before last August’s thunderstorms did for the in-process filmed version.
“It’s bloody wonderful,” says Grid Iron’s co-artistic director Judith Doherty – who was raised in Magilligan in Co Derry, before leaving to study in Edinburgh in the 1990s – of finally getting onsite. “What I found difficult in the lead-up was that I couldn’t believe it was going to happen, even though we were told that rules were going to be relaxed. It was right at the end of our rehearsal period, before we moved onsite . . . that was the emotional bit. Then as soon as I saw lights in trees and everyone with their waterproof gear and high-vis, it immediately felt completely normal.”
The rain, of course, is a problem which the theatre world’s eager pivot to outdoor work hasn’t accounted for, but which Doherty is all-too-familiar with; “just because there’s coronavirus, we’re still in Scotland, not the Mediterranean.” As well as Grid Iron regulars, though, she’s also seen local Musselburgh dog-walkers in the audience, eager to find out what’s been happening in their woods.
“There’s definitely still trepidation,” says Doherty. “I’ve spoken to some people that say they feel much more comfortable going to the covered outdoor areas than going into buildings. They’re going to see stuff, but definitely with a bit more reticence – it’s important for everyone to keep that in mind.”
Going right back to its beginnings in 1947, of course, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is lots of festivals, with the prestigious International Festival coming first, devised as a means of restoring the international values of high art and cooperation after the second World War. In 2021, all are embracing the festival’s founding spirit of can-do resurrection from international disaster. The Book Festival has moved from Charlotte Square to Edinburgh College of Art, where it’s staging a mostly broadcast event with some lightly-attended live shows. The Film Festival, moved to a slot in June more than a decade ago, is back in August once more.
Irish arts are also well-represented, both through Medicine – the distancing requirements when it was booked meant the International Festival’s resources could accommodate the relatively tiny ticket returns – and through an array of online performances, of the sort other nations are also getting involved in. Showing to audiences in Edinburgh is one thing, but the big goal is to be seen by international producers, who will be looking to book work with a view to reopening.
“Nothing beats being on stage in Edinburgh, the flyering on the streets and the buzz of being out there and engaging with other presenters,” says Christine Sisk, director of Culture Ireland, of the nation’s artistic representation in Edinburgh. “But I think we’ll still look to keep a digital element to what Culture Ireland supports, because we’re hugely conscious now of sustainability and the environmental impact of how we operate. We have to look at both models going forward.”
For Taudevin, who made it to the beach with Move, the digital question is also a live one; the Traverse will be releasing the filmed version of the play later this month. “The point of making art is connecting with each other, and thinking about why we’re here and the purpose of life,” she says. “We’ve got to ask these questions together, right? That’s the point of making theatre. In the context of a world where we’ve not been allowed to leave our house, the only restriction being three hours between high tides feels quite welcoming. I can’t wait to tour the world with this show – to every beach.”
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe continues until Monday 30th August, see edfringe.com, eif.co.uk and individual venue sites for details of live and streaming shows.
