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The World's Biggest Festival--Edinburgh
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15381 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1989 |
2,050 Words |
| Author
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John Elsom
John Elsom is a contributing editor to The World & I. |
It is a sight to shock the elders of the Church of Scotland, a giant Feast of Fools staged under the very noses of those who normally frown on folly; and to make matters worse, the banquet gets bigger every year. In a land renowned for thrift and moderation, the Edinburgh International Festival has never learned where to stop.
It began in a modest way in 1947, as a sigh of relief after the war. Pablo Picasso contributed its first emblem, a delicate sketch of the Dove of Peace. At first it was primarily a music festival, although it had its theatrical triumphs. In 1948, the director, Tyrone Guthrie, who relished difficult challenges, was asked to stage a sixteenth-century Scottish morality play, Sir David Lindsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits, in the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, a huge, unwieldy debating chamber with an open platform instead of formal stage.
"A rough and exceedingly lively satire," commented the London Times, which encouraged Guthrie to seek open stages elsewhere in the world--and when they could not be found, he asked people to build them. The main Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario, Canada, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and the Chichester Festival Theatre in Britain owe their basic shape and existence to the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh.
Exotic Color
To the gray days of the 1950s, when foreign travel was out of the question for most people in Britain, the Edinburgh International Festival gave a splash of exotic color. It was a way of staying in touch with the arts at home and abroad; and at best, it could open up whole new vistas of experience.
University students were among the first to flock to the Edinburgh International Festival, and they soon discovered that the city had a wealth of natural theaters, where they could present their own shows. If they were fortunate, one of the London critics might drop in and, if they were luckier still, mention their production in a column. This was how the Fringe Festival began; it grew at an even more prodigious rate than the International Festival itself.
Beyond the Fringe was the first major Fringe success, transferring to the West End in London and to Broadway, where it ran for eighteen months. It was also an early example of the politically radical, attacking theater, which characterized the student movements of the 1960s, when the Edinburgh Fringe
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