Festivals: What Good Are They? What Are They Good at? The Case of Edinburgh 2017

The seventieth-anniversary incarnation of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) in 2017 was, as far as theatre went, neither as international nor as festive as might have been expected. The Edinburgh Fringe, founded in the same year as an open-access alternative to the EIF, was, in spite of its anarchic feel on the streets as spectators elbowed past weirdly dressed figures hawking their shows, neither as alternative nor as open access as its promoters would have us believe. The EIF was dominated by bleak English-language offerings—some powerful, some not, from the UK and Ireland.¹ The Fringe was dominated by stand-up comedy at corporate venues and was often, as many flyers asserted, "wacky" or "outrageous," but in entirely normative ways; it was also, with some notable exceptions, only rarely alternative in any political or aesthetic sense. And only rarely did either festival offer or take new directions.

Along with the Festival d'Avignon, the EIF is the progenitor of multi-arts festivals founded to shore up European culture and civilization in the wake of World War II, and it remains among the most prestigious. The Fringe, with 300 venues, 3,398 shows, 53,232 performances, and 2.7 million tickets sold in 2017, is the largest of the world's 250-plus fringes, and according to its publicity posters, the progenitor of all fringes. But although the EIF, with audiences of over 450,000 and sales of £4.3 million in 2017, is dominated by classical music and the Fringe overwhelmingly by stand-up,² apart from venue sizes and ticket prices the distinctions between the events as theatre are decreasingly clear. The cu-rated EIF relies more and more upon co-productions and collaborations and focuses increasingly on English-language shows and the locally Scottish—the absence of which was one of the initial discontents that led to the founding of the Fringe. The Fringe, on the other hand, relies increasingly upon large-venue conglomerates (Assembly, C Spaces, Gilded Balloon, Pleasance, Summerhall, Traverse, Underbelly, Zoo), each of which is in various ways curated, makes its own programming and financial arrangements with companies, controls material conditions such as scheduling, set up, and strike time, and presents its own independent program. The Fringe also increasingly features curated programs from various disciplinary interests (Dance Base, Aurora Nova celebration of physical theatre) or national or cultural ones (Arab Arts Focus, Big in Belgium, CanadaHub, Taiwan Season, Focus Korea). And although Fringe venues, unlike the EIF's traditional spaces, in addition to ubiquitous church and community halls, tents, bars, and restaurants, included a swimming pool, a boat, a bathroom, a racetrack, and at least one shipping crate in 2017, in terms of programming there were many shows—Mies Julie from South Africa, for example, or Hong Kong Three Sisters—that would not have been out of place at the EIF. Meanwhile, some shows at the EIF—Australia's Meow Meow cabaret and Forced Entertainment's Real Magic—would have been a good fit for the Fringe. The offerings at both, as at festivals everywhere, included new writing, solo shows, adaptations of classics, physical, immersive, and devised theatre, and installations. This is what festivals are good at. But what cultural work do they—can they—perform? What new directions can they take?

New Writing

The site at which the EIF and Fringe most clearly converge is the Traverse, which hosted the EIF's Meet Me at Dawn in 2017. Traverse is the most explicitly curated and least predatory of the Fringe's corporate venues, in that its Fringe programming is an extension of its year-round mandate dedicated to new writing. Meet Me at Dawn was one of three shows at the EIF by Edinburgh-based playwright Zinnie Harris, and one of the best pieces of new writing at the 2017 festivals.³ Helen (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) and Robyn (Neve McIntosh), a couple, entered wet, having swum ashore after the sinking of their rented boat. "Are you okay?" From this beginning Harris led the characters and the audience through a magic...