Edinburgh Festivals look to return to their roots this August

The week just gone brought happier news. On ­Tuesday, EIF director Fergus Linehan announced that his Festival’s prestigious programme would, ­government guidance allowing, go ahead this coming August.

The 2021 EIF will, Linehan says, be “reimagined”; which is to say that it will be presented outdoors in what are described as “bespoke, temporary outdoor pavilions”. The programme, which will, it seems, be slanted towards music, will occur in three ­ venues, including the Old College Quad at Edinburgh ­University and Edinburgh Park. For those unable to get to Edinburgh, due either to coronavirus restrictions or health concerns, the Festival will be ­streaming selected performances online.

Following the good news from the “official” ­Festival, the Fringe announced on Wednesday that it, too, would be coming back in August. Shona ­McCarthy, the chief executive of the Fringe Society, declared that registrations were now open for artists who wished to present their work in this year’s ­programme.

The Society announced the launch of Fringe ­Player, a new online platform for artists who want to create work to be streamed on the internet. ­However, buoyed by the Scottish Government’s latest ­pronouncements on the loosening of Covid restrictions, the Fringe also hopes to offer live, in-person shows.

“As Scotland navigates its roadmap out of lockdown, much is still unknown about what the Fringe will look like this August,” the Society’s announcement read. “However, a range of scenarios are being prepared for, from socially distanced live events to digital offerings.”

These are, of course, fantastically welcome developments. The International Festival’s decision to go with an entirely outdoor programme is, in my ­opinion, entirely correct.

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The EIF is a big beast, its programme is led by some pretty large-scale orchestral, operatic and theatrical fare. In that sense it is like an oil tanker, albeit a ­glorious and much-loved vessel.

It can’t be expected to change course at a moment’s notice. It’s only right, therefore, that the International Festival doesn’t leave any aspect of its schedule at the mercy of ever-shifting Covid restrictions.

Not only that, but, if the artist’s impression of the covered, open air venue planned for the Old College Quad is anything to go by, audiences really can look forward to state-of-the-art outdoor accommodation. Your parents’ flyaway gazebo from the local DIY store this is not.

However, where the Fringe is concerned, things are slightly different. I’m glad that the Fringe Society has been deliberately vague about exactly what kind of work is likely to make up its 2021 programme.

I hope McCarthy and her excellent team will ­forgive me if I don’t get particularly excited about the Fringe Player. Offering an online platform is, ­ unquestionably, a worthwhile and important project in these plague-battered times. However, and this has to be said, there has been too much excited talk from some quarters about the “new possibilities” created for the performing arts by the Covid-imposed necessity to go online. This enthusiasm is understandable but, for the most part, wrong.

GIVEN the terrible threat the pandemic has presented to live performance, it was inevitable that some artists and commentators would make a virtue out of a necessity, leading to grand claims about the glittering future of the “online arts”.

Calmer heads realise, however, that, generally speaking, online work represents a lifeboat, rather than an epochal change in their chosen art form. The thing about a lifeboat is that it’s only a means of survival until one can be taken safely back to dry land.

Likewise, with the live arts, online work has been a very welcome haven during the necessary closure of theatres and music venues. But it’s no substitute for the seminal connection between performer and audience member who encounter each other in the same physical space.

Of course, the internet has the potential to reach much bigger audiences than live and present performance, but the same was true at the advents of sound recording, radio, cinema and television. There is a reason why every technology that was perceived as sounding the death knell of live performance has, ultimately, proved to be a very different and distinct medium from the live arts.

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Human beings are social animals and we need to experience culture live and direct, viscerally even. So, great though it has been to binge watch Call My Agent and Deutschlands 83, 86 and 89, many of us are straining at the leash to be back in theatres engaging with live drama.

Which is where the Fringe really comes in. This could be the year in which the Fringe returns to its roots as the home of upstart, troubadour artists who are motivated, first-and-foremost, by the desire, in fact the need, to express themselves in a live and present performance.

When the Fringe Society talks of ­“socially distanced live events”, the ­assumption will be that they mean ­outdoor productions, such as Grid Iron theatre company’s postponed show Doppler. However, the beauty of much “fringe” theatre is that it can be ­extremely fleet of foot.

It is perfectly possible that Scotland’s post-election First Minister will announce, between mid-May and the end of June, that indoor performances at 40 or 50% capacity will be permitted. If that happens, the Edinburgh Fringe will, I suspect, find itself inundated by artists and companies keen to stage work that requires very few performers and a bare minimum of props, sets and lighting.

Such work will often be rough-and-ready. Some of it will, quite frankly, be awful. But some of it will be highly ­original and mind-blowingly brilliant.

I attended my first Edinburgh Fringe in 1989, aged 18. I’ve been to every Fringe since, both as paying audience member and, since 1998, professional theatre ­critic. Needless to say, I felt last year’s cancellation as keenly as anyone.

While researching my book on modern Scottish theatre (Modernism and Scottish Theatre Since 1969) in the middle to end of the last decade, I spoke with many of the leading figures in our live drama, from directors Giles Havergal and Gerry Mulgrew, to playwrights (and, it should be said, also directors) Zinnie Harris and David Greig. Every one of them talked about the immense importance of the Edinburgh Festivals, and the Fringe in particular, in raising awareness among Scottish theatre artists and audiences that what was happening in Warsaw, Paris and, even, Buenos Aires might be as important as, or (whisper it) even more important than, theatre being produced in London.

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This year’s Fringe will certainly have less international work, thanks to the on-going effects of the pandemic. However, Covid restrictions permitting, the festival may well attract artists from around the UK, and, perhaps, neighbouring countries such as Ireland, Denmark and Sweden, who are willing to come to ­Edinburgh, at fairly short notice, with the kind of experimental work that has often lit up the Fringe.

To make sure I wasn’t barking up the wrong tree about the appetite of artists to come to this year’s Fringe, almost at the drop of a hat, I put in a call to Guy ­Masterson, multiple award-winning Fringe actor, writer and producer. Prior to last year’s cancelled festival, ­Masterson, who is, like his illustrious great-uncle Richard Burton, a proud Welshman, had performed at 26 consecutive Fringes, ­often with critically acclaimed one-man shows, such as Animal Farm, Under Milk Wood, Fern Hill and Other Dylan Thomas and Shylock.

As it happened, when I got in touch with him following the Fringe Society’s announcement that there would be a 2021 programme, Masterson had just spent some time on the Edinburgh Fringe online forum. On that platform, he told me, there is huge enthusiasm for performing in Edinburgh this coming August.

“Hell yes! That’s the feeling I’m getting from the artists on the forum,” the actor says. “If there’s a Fringe, these performers are going to be there.

“I do believe they will do it, and they will tailor their work to what the Fringe can provide for them… I have thought the same way. Part of me wants to go up because I don’t want to miss it.

“I don’t want my consecutive record [of 26 Fringes] broken, although it was enforced that it be broken last year. Forgetting last year, I’d be continuing my consecutive record.

“So, that’s one of the reasons I’d do it, even if it was just to come up and do some Dylan Thomas.”

MASTERSON first presented his solo performance of poems and short stories by his compatriot, the great Welsh author Dylan Thomas, on the Fringe 20 years ago. It is, he agrees, precisely the kind of show that can be staged at the year’s Fringe, at short notice, should government guidelines suddenly allow.

“That is something I can do in a garden or on The Meadows, if it were allowed. If my [financial] risks were reduced completely, let’s say my overheads were down to about 30 quid a gig, and I had a place to crash, I would take that risk.”

Those are heavy caveats, it has to be said, not least because Masterson’s ­typical overheads are, he explains, more than £300 for each performance. ­Nonetheless, the Fringe veteran is not ­ruling out the possibility of doing one of his much-loved one man shows in ­Edinburgh this August (even, he says, if it means performing ­outdoors and charging theatre-lovers a modest £5 a head).

If even Masterson, one of the biggest names in Edinburgh Fringe theatre, is open to performing this summer, there are certainly grounds for optimism about this year’s festival.

It is foolhardy to make predictions regarding the live arts at the present time. Our extraordinary NHS may be doing a remarkable job at vaccinating the population of the UK, but the pandemic remains a presence here and, certainly, abroad.

However, one can hope for a return this year of the original Fringe spirit. Let’s have artists and producers with the idealism and energy of the great impresario and promoter Richard Demarco.

Sure, his “come all ye” attitude towards eastern European avant-garde performance meant that one might spend an excruciating hour in the company of a highly distressed female actor from the former Yugoslavia whose performance was comprised of little more than going from one audience member to the next pleading “not the children!”. However, it also meant that you would encounter wild flights of theatrical fancy from ­Poland or Hungary that gave you a whole new outlook on life, let alone theatre.

Let’s have theatrical risk takers who are inspired by the stars of Fringes past, like the surreal, brain-scrambling Akhe from St Petersburg or the razor sharp, radical, American satirists The Riot Group. Let’s have Scotland’s own, ­irrepressible actor and performer Tam Dean Burn ­excoriating the Royal Family while dressed in a frock.

Let’s have Nic Green’s politicised movement and dance, David Ireland’s darkly hilarious play writing, and the up-to-the-minute dramatic insights of Jo ­Clifford and Adura Onashile.

Let’s have, in other words, a Fringe full of inspired artists who care much more about feeding our souls than they do about beer brand sponsorship and the ­financial bottom line.