Edinburgh's festivals tell a tale of caution and fragility, but also of joy

The Edinburgh Fringe is a free-for-all. Every year, this makes the fringe programme look like something designed by a committee of fighting cats and snakes: I wonder in astonishment and joy at a month in which a satire about the British government’s response to Covid, written and performed by Scottish teenagers sitting their advanced highers, sits cheek by jowl with professionally made work from artists such as Tim Crouch and Ian McKellen.

Those who think the amateur and professional work should be segregated from each other are missing the point. After all, companies such as Breach and Barrel Organ were technically amateurs when they first arrived here as graduate companies on the fringe and the standard of their work stood shoulder to shoulder with more experienced companies. There is room for both types of work. The only reason the distinction needs to be made is because, as editor Alistair Smith pointed out last week, the professional work must be paid.

Because of its free-for-all nature, connections gradually emerge over the fringe in a haphazard way as artists’ preoccupations and interests gradually become apparent. The end of the world, climate change, millennial mental health and inequalities of all types are very apparent this year.

But, over at the grander Edinburgh International Festival, everyone is paid and the programme is curated and shaped.

If the fringe is like a bring-your-own-dish buffet, the EIF programme is more like a well-planned smorgasbord. Only, of course, the 2022 programme is not necessarily the precise plate of food outgoing director Fergus Linehan would have been planning with his team before the pandemic.

The festival’s programme was already evolving in relation to cultural shifts and looming climate catastrophe and the festival increasingly looks to programme work that has a number of dates in a region and isn’t flying in and out. Belvoir Street’s Counting and Cracking doesn’t only play Edinburgh but will be in Birmingham too. You Know We Belong Together hits the Southbank before it arrives at EIF. That’s good. The days of large cast shows travelling across the world for short runs should be over.

It’s clear this year’s programme has been shaped by the pandemic. Some shows have been held over from 2020, an offer that was extended to all those who had been programmed that year. But, as Linehan says: “Sometimes artists have lost interest in a piece of work and moved on to other things.”

There have been moments on the fringe this year when I’ve seen shows that are clearly rolled-over 2020 registrations, from companies who might have been wiser to come up with something new.

But leafing through the international programme and seeing what is and isn’t here is also a lesson for the UK and the way it funds and supports companies. Back in 2021 when the programme was being firmed up, Omicron was on the rise and it was better-funded international companies who were able to take the risk and commit.

“There are companies we wanted to come, but if everything fell over because of Covid it would have financially destroyed them. So, they had to make a call. Maybe a few months later they would have made a different call, but it wasn’t until February this year that we started to feel more confident,” says Linehan. He has tried to avoid being overcautious. “We are very conscious that we are in a privileged position. We have such support from our donors and are all too aware that so many arts organisations are in a state of fragility. It means those of us who are lucky enough to be relatively robust can’t sit on our hands. We have gone ahead with a full-throated festival.”

Inevitably, some productions have fallen by the wayside, most notably Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s The Magic Mountain, but Linehan says audiences have been supportive and endlessly forgiving.

But he warns that degree of forgiveness is starting to wear thinner with audiences, something I reckon theatre is discovering more generally, whether disruptions are down to Covid or train strikes.

Theatre feels very fragile at the moment, with soaring costs and an audience hit by the energy and inflation crises. But what the festivals remind is that, as Linehan says, there is a real joy in being in Edinburgh in August, “where a substantial number of people wake up in the morning and can go: ‘I’m going to see two shows today.’ ” The Edinburgh festivals have their flaws, flaws that can’t and shouldn’t be ignored, but this month I will also celebrate the joy that being in a festival city can bring.