‘Preoccupied by survival’: funding crisis threatens future of Edinburgh Festival

The Edinburgh festival returns next week, the first in three years not to be overshadowed by Covid-19.

The festival, which each summer draws millions of visitors and transforms Scotland’s capital city into a buzzing centre of culture and entertainment, has survived the shock of the pandemic.

This year’s optimism, however, is overshadowed by rising living costs and funding shortages, which the organisers say threaten the future of the event.

In 2020, it was cancelled while the city was in lockdown, returning in 2021 in a scaled-back form. Last year, ticket sales rebounded while the festival was still in recovery.

Outside the offices of the Fringe Society, which organises the month-long arts jamboree, there were signs of vibrancy returning as street performers entertained big crowds two weeks ahead of the opening on August 4.

“Everybody has been so preoccupied by survival that this year feels like it’s genuinely right back to the heart of it,” said Shona McCarthy, chief executive of the Fringe Society.

Last year, planning for the in-person return of the festival took place while Scotland still had some Covid-19 restrictions in place, making forecasting sales and attendances more challenging than usual.

The opening was also backdropped by the cost of living crisis, which meant performers struggled to find accommodation as rents rose along with food and fuel prices.

It was a “traumatic” year for the Edinburgh International Book Festival, according to its outgoing director Nick Barley, as it missed its sales targets and was plunged into a crisis that forced it to cut five staff jobs.

But despite the challenges, Barley struck a positive note, counting on well-known figures such as poet and novelist Ben Okri and climate activist Greta Thunberg to pull in the crowds this year.

Barley said Thunberg’s appearance at the book festival, her first in Scotland since Glasgow hosted COP26 in 2021, sold out “overnight”.

“We had high hopes for last year and when the ticket sales didn’t quite match up to those hopes we were . . . faced with a financial challenge,” Barley said. “It was very traumatic and sad to say goodbye to talented colleagues.”

Meanwhile, this year’s Fringe festival’s theme is “Fill Yer Boots”, a playful encouragement for punters to attend as many shows as possible, and which hints at the organisers’ raised expectations.

Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, who makes her debut as director of the highbrow Edinburgh International Festival, looks to Martin Luther King Jr for inspiration. For her choice of message this year, she has taken the title of the civil rights leader’s final book “Where do we go from here?”

The question resonates with the future of Edinburgh’s festivals as the precarious financial position of the arts is never far away. McCarthy warned that the Fringe, which normally runs on a self-funding model, cannot sustain itself without regular injections of public money.

The pressure of rising costs and keeping ticket prices low hangs over the event. The Fringe, which received a one-off loan from the Scottish government in 2020, will put on just over 3,000 shows this year, still down from 3,841 in 2019.

“It’s our natural instinct to be incentivised and re-energised by the content of the programme,” McCarthy said. “But the reality underneath is that we’ve still got financial pressures and challenges looming ahead.”

The Fringe has frozen registration prices for artists for the past 16 years and aims to do so until 2027. This year it launched a fund — “Keep it Fringe” — to support “riskier” work by up-and-coming acts.

“Everyone wants us to use these different levers, but we have got no way of increasing our income . . . at the same time, the cost of everything just escalates,” McCarthy said. “The Fringe just cannot survive on a self-financing model anymore.”

The festival received emergency support from the Scottish government to help it during the pandemic, and UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt allocated up to £8.6mn for it in his spring Budget this year.

But McCarthy said support needed to be regular in recognition of the crucial economic role the event plays.

“Culture is not ‘nice to have’ and it isn’t just about what happens on the stage . . there is a whole economy around it,” said Lyndsey Jackson, deputy chief executive of the Fringe Society.

Politics will feature strongly in this year’s roster, which follows months dominated by the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon as first minister and the ongoing investigation into the governing Scottish National party’s finances.

Sturgeon’s successor, Humza Yousaf will interview Hashi Mohamed, a leading barrister who arrived in the UK as a child refugee from Kenya. Sturgeon’s predecessor and now bitter enemy Alex Salmond will host a show at the Fringe.

At the international festival, one of the highlights will be the Budapest Festival Orchestra, known for innovations such as staging autism-friendly concerts, performing a show without seats that will give audience members a more direct experience by mingling with the orchestra.

“The beauty of our festival is its diversity,” Benedetti said. “This year is a moment of shared experiment and exploration . . . We are trying different ways of communicating our message.”