In August, Edinburgh plays host to the biggest arts festival in the world. But that leaves one problem: what to see? With the Fringe programme alone weighing in at 416 pages, it can be difficult to know where to start.
But don’t be deterred because Edinburgh’s constellation of festivals offers a galaxy of possibilities for anyone who loves the arts, from some of the best theatre, music, dance, film, writing and visual art in the world to the latest work by emerging artists no-one has heard of – yet. From fire-juggling violinists to the American town which has a golden retriever for its mayor, it’s all here.
Critic and arts journalist Susan Mansfield, who has been writing about the festivals for more years than she cares to count, selects some highlights for Artmag readers.
Manhattan Transfers
Edinburgh International Festival welcomes its largest-ever representation of American artists this year on the 250th anniversary of American independence, flying the flag for collaboration, resilience and tolerance. This year includes the festival’s first jazz ensemble residency, Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO), with its founding artistic director Wynton Marsalis. The festival opens with a performance of Marsalis’ jazz symphony, All Rise, in which JLCO is joined on stage by the RSNO and the Festival Chorus, a total of more than 200 performers on stage at the Usher Hall (Aug 8). The JLCO season continues with Duke Ellington’s groundbreaking Black, Brown and Beige (Aug 11) and an exclusive collaboration with piano virtuouso Yuja Wang (Aug 12).
EIF also features a residency by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Venezuelan virtuoso Gustavo Dudamel (Aug 14-16), and San Francisco Ballet with the European premiere of their new work Mere Mortals (Aug 28-30). And there’s a chance to catch rising star tenor Laurence Brownlee in a recital which includes songs from his Rising project in which he commissioned leading Black American composers to set poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to music (Aug 12).
One of the highlights of the theatre programme is a modern American classic, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, set at the height of the Aids epidemic, in a radical staging by Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, which the playwright has endorsed as his favourite version (Aug 15-19).
The theme of American stories continues through the Fringe with Blackbox (Aug 5-30, Underbelly), part play, part magic show, which tells the incredible story of abolitionist Henry “Box” Brown, who mailed himself to freedom in a wooden crate. In Becoming Dr Ruth (Aug 6-30, Assembly Rooms), Broadway veteran Anne O’Sullivan tells the extraordinary life story of Ruth Westheimer, who came to the US as a Holocaust survivor and went on to become the nation’s favourite sex therapist.
Meanwhile, the most famous name at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival is the novelist John Grisham, who has sold some 500 million books in 45 languages. In his first festival appearance in the UK, he will talk to Ian Rankin about his newest book and first murder mystery, The Widow (Aug 25).
Women on Stage
The Traverse Theatre has long been the flagship for the best new writing at the Fringe, and this year it claims that place again with a curated programme which celebrates writing by women, led by three commissions by Scottish women playwrights.
Zinnie Harris, who made her debut at the Traverse in 2000 with Further Than The Furthest Thing, will direct her latest play, Supposing: which continues her exploration of mythic tales in contemporary contexts. Morna Young’s After Party focuses on a legendary actress who gathers her family to celebrate her 80th birthday, only to make a revelation of her own, and emerging Glasgow-based playwright Eilidh Loan makes her debut on the Traverse main stage with Cathy, inspired in part by her grandmother, starring veteran Scottish actress Elaine C. Smith.
Meanwhile, Irish playwright Eva O’Connor, who created her first productions on the Fringe 15 years ago, is at the Traverse with For Dolores, fresh from its premier at the Galway International Arts Festival, a play about two women who met as students in Edinburgh and find themselves together again several years later, considering the past and the future of their friendship.
(July 31-Aug 30, see www.traverse.co.uk for details)
Women in Art
Visual art across the city this August has particularly strong representation from female painters, photographers and sculptures. Sandra George: Start from the Level (City Art Centre, ends Sep 27) is already proving a highlight, bringing together 200 works by this Edinburgh-based photographer whose art was never exhibited during her lifetime. A community worker in the 1980s and 1990s, she offers a fresh perspective on the city, as well as turning her penetrating gaze on herself.
National Galleries of Scotland welcomes Gwen John: Strange Beauties (Aug 1-Jan 4, Modern Two), which attracted five-star reviews when it opened in February at National Museum Cardiff. The first retrospective of John’s paintings in 40 years, it has been credited with bringing a pioneering woman artist out of the shadows and into the spotlight where she belongs.
Meanwhile, the Scottish Gallery hosts Grasslands, a major new show by Scottish artist Kate Downie. A master at capturing the overlooked aspects of landscape, she has studied grasslands from the Tay estuary to the windswept coast of Shetland to make this new body of work (July 30-Aug 29).
Katie Paterson’s Afterlife at Collective (ends 6 Sep) is an outstanding body of sculpture: 197 amulets, 3D-scanned in museums around the world and remade in materials which reflect the fragility of the earth: coral from the Great Barrier Reef, ash from wildfires, plastics found in the deepest oceans and many more.
Fife-based Paterson’s most famous work to date is Future Library, a project based in Norway which receives a story every year by a leading author. The works are kept under lock and key and will be published in 2114, one hundred years after the project was launched, on paper made from a forest planted at the same time. Paterson will talk about the project at the Edinburgh International Book Festival alongside participating writers Elif Shafak and Valeria Luiselli, and will reveal the latest writer to take part (Aug 29).
Art on stage
Elsa McTaggart, musician, performer and great-granddaughter of the eminent Scottish painter William McTaggart, has created a show about his life and legacy, Elsa McTaggart: Capturing the Light. Working with a Hebrides-based artistic team, she explores his background as a Gaelic-speaking crofter from Kintyre and why he returned to that part of the world to make his most famous work. (Aug 7-28, Space Triplex)
Actress Cara Wilson, who is also a painter, has carved out a niche for herself making shows about women artists during which she paints a picture in their style. Wilson, now 81, says she intends to bring new work to the Fringe for as long as she can, and this year performs as Helen Bradley: Painter and Storyteller, who became famous for painting the world of her Edwardian childhood (Aug 5-30, Pleasance Courtyard).
This year, there are no fewer than four plays about Vincent Van Gogh on the Fringe including the English-language premiere of Vincent Van Gogh: Between Worlds, written and directed by Paola Veneto, and drawing heavily on Van Gogh’s own writings (Aug 6-30, Assembly George Square).
Van Gogh fans might also enjoy Van Gogh and Me, by John Retallack, about the charged encounter between Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles in 1888 (Aug 13-30, Dovecot Studios), When Vincent Met John, about a speculative meeting between Van Gogh and John Lennon (Aug 5-30, C Venues) and Paint, Vincent, Paint, which tells the story of Van Gogh’s childhood through the eyes of his brother Theo (Aug 7-29, Greenside).
On Home Ground
Various initiatives in recent years have encouraged more participation by Scottish artists across the festivals. National Theatre of Scotland, which made its Fringe debut 20 years with an unknown play called Black Watch, presents Through the Shortbread Tin, in which writer and performer Martin O’Connor dives deep into sporrans, stags and shortbread, and explores the knotty problem of Scottish identity which the help of three Gaelic singers (Scottish Storytelling Centre, Aug 7-31).
Fraser Scott’s play Common Tongue, performed in Scots with vigour by actress Olivia Caw, is a fast-paced, quick-witted show about finding the right words and the intersections of language and identity in Scotland (Scottish Storytelling Centre, Aug 7-31).
At the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Scots makar Peter Mackay introduces his project Our Many Voiced Country, in which he brings together contemporary poets based in Scotland who work in different langauges, from Catalan, Orcadian and Gaelic to Tamil and Arabic, and invites them to work together (Aug 16).
And fresh from winning the NEXT Innovator Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Louis Paxton’s comedy drama The Incomer is one of the headliners at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. It explores the lives of two oddball siblings on a remote Scottish island who find their status quo shattered when a nervy council official arrives to encourage them to move to the mainland (Aug 13-15).
Why not try…
The spirit of the Edinburgh festivals is all about taking a chance, stepping out of your comfort zone and trying something new, so why not take a chance on one of the following?
Alaa Shehada, Palestinian playwright, performer and stand-up comic, was a hit at the Fringe last year with his solo show, The Horse of Jenin. He’s back this year with The Bridge, the story of a madcap road trip to bring olive oil from this year’s harvest from his mother in the West Bank to his sister in Jordan (Aug 6-16, Assembly Roxy).
Also returning this year is Mimi Martin, fresh from a sell-out run off Broadway, who won a Scotsman Fringe First Award last year for her one-woman play Youth in Flames, about an ex-pat party girl in Hong Kong who gets the wake-up call of her life during 2019’s pro-democracy protests (Aug 5-31, Pleasance Courtyard).
Writer and performer Bryony Kimmings has been coming to the Fringe for more than a decade making frank and fearless work about her own life. Over the years, we’ve seen her explore her relationship with alcohol, dissect female role models, fall in love and fall apart. She’s on the main stage at the Traverse this year with Bog Witch, a show about moving to a tumbledown cottage in the country with her son in a last-ditch attempt to be happy and sane (Aug 2-30, Traverse)
Borges and Me, the popular memoir by Jay Parini about driving top Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges round Scotland in a Morris Minor while he was a student at St Andrews University has been made into a film by director Marc Turtletaub. With performances by Alan Cumming, Peter Mullan and Freya Mavor, it promises to be a delightful addition to this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival (Aug 15-18).
On the subject of road trips, Meet Mayor Max charts the journey of British playwright and performer Alex Robbins to Idyllwild, California, to visit the town whose mayor is a golden retriever. Can a four-footed politician restore faith in democracy? We’ll see! (Aug 5-31, Pleasance Courtyard).
The Fringe boasts plenty of spectacle in its circus programme, but perhaps nothing quite like Tale of the Firebird, a show in which all 12 performers are both virtuouso musicians and world-class acrobats. The Vienna-based Freestyle Orchestra takes “interdisciplinary” to a new level, combining a specially composed violin concerto with an acrobatic performance. There’s also real fire (Aug 6-30, Assembly Roxy).
For more information:
Edinburgh International Festival www.eif.co.uk
Edinburgh Fringe www.edfringe.com
Edinburgh International Book Festival www.edbookfest.co.uk
Edinburgh International Film Festival www.edfilmfest.org
Edinburgh Art Festival www.edinburghartfestival.com
