Edinburgh Festival celebrates 70th anniversary with ‘epic’ opener

Edinburgh’s arts festivals will celebrate their 70th anniversary on Friday with a multimedia spectacular, shaking off funding pressures and grumbles from residents over the annual tide of performers and audiences. 

A city of around half a million people, Edinburgh attracts around 4m visitors a year, with most coming in the summer months and with demand peaking during the August festivals when traffic noticeably slows and even an expanded council rubbish collection service struggles to cope with street litter.

Edinburgh World Heritage, a city-funded conservation charity, suggested this month that the capital might now be full, saying it needed to avoid the fate of Venice as a “hollow city-museum shell”.

“We must seek to understand the capacity limits of our fragile, historic city,” the group said.

The Broughton Spurtle, a local paper, has warned of increasing difficulty finding performance and events spaces. “We all love the festivals and other special events in the capital. But if we’re not to be devoured by these prodigious offspring, we need to draw a line,” the Spurtle said. “[It’s] time to trim the Fringe.”

Fergus Linehan, director of the international festival, made no apology for ramping up the practice he introduced three years ago of launching the three-week programme with a free opening event in the crowded city’s heart. 

Bloom , a music, light and projection show to be held in a central square, will run over two nights and celebrate seven decades of a festival which, according to its founding chair in 1947, should “provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit”. 

Mr Linehan said the anniversary had attracted extra public funding for a “particularly epic” opener but worries remain about funding for the international festival, which depends in part on support from local and central government. 

Brexit also raises concerns for an event conceived as a way of bringing Europe together after the second world war.

“It isn’t that things are particularly bad today but once you begin to talk about 12 months hence, or indeed two or three years hence, people do start to get very nervous,” Mr Linehan said. “It has created a hiatus in terms of strategic thinking across the public sector and the private sector as well.” 

The Brexit theme pops up in the programme of the Edinburgh Fringe, born when eight theatre groups were turned away from the first international festival but decided to perform in the city anyway. 

Among the fringe shows grappling with the UK’s planned exit from the EU is Brexit the Musical , penned by a partner at international law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner. Its writer Chris Bryant is resident DJ at BLP’s Christmas parties and “his intimate knowledge of the complexities of EU law makes him well placed to write this musical”, the firm said.

Now much the larger gathering, the open-access Fringe offers a total of 3,398 shows, up 4 per cent on last year, with performers from 62 countries. The Edinburgh International Book Festival, which opens on August 12, boasts 1,000 participants from 50 countries.

The flood of artists, fans and tourists that clogs Edinburgh strains its historic infrastructure and has fuelled the mass conversion of homes into short-term holiday lets that critics say threatens community cohesion. 

Fiona Hyslop, Scotland’s culture secretary, waved away calls for the capital to introduce a levy on visitors, saying the tourism sector was already one of the most highly taxed in Europe.

Complaints that Edinburgh was “full” had been a festival perennial for at least three decades, Ms Hyslop said. “We shouldn’t be frightened of the fact that it is getting bigger . . . we just have to change and adapt.” 

A central attraction of Edinburgh in August is the sheer range of artistic endeavour, from high culture to low farce. Thousands of comedy performers mean no shortage of toilet humour but the fringe also features Gutted , a tale of “love, laughter and lavatories” that explores the experience of living with an inflammatory bowel disease. 

The International Festival is this year re-emphasising opera in recognition of the art form’s central role in its first years. The festival boasts nine opera productions and includes a two-week residency by Turin’s Teatro Regio. 

“You have every imaginable type of performing art going on here, from music to comedy to dance, and opera is the one thing that pulls them all together,” Mr Linehan said. “It is the thing that encapsulates what everything in Edinburgh is about.”