Still game: Edinburgh’s 2021 fringe is a return to the festival’s roots

On the wall in my kitchen is a calendar made by Edinburgh theatre critic Thom Dibdin. This time last year, he and his photographer brother Peter took a set of pictures of Edinburgh festival venues that were shut because of the pandemic.

In February, we see Thom and his bike on the eerily empty Meadows. In July, he is the only one left standing in the Out of the Blue Drill Hall. This month, he’s on the Mound in front of the National Galleries with not a half-price ticket booth in sight.

In recent weeks, it’s been far from certain the 2021 festival wouldn’t go the same way. The Edinburgh international festival announced a slimmed-down line-up in April, but it wasn’t until the start of July that the fringe published its first batch of shows, a list it was adding to as recently as last week.

It now claims to have 440 in-person productions and a further 260 online – not the 3,800 we’ve grown used to, but not Dibdin’s desert either.

All the same, I had my doubts. It’s Wednesday evening, two days before the official start of the festival, and I’m sitting in George Square Gardens, which has been commandeered by Assembly just like the old days.

My concern is not the number of people; there are loads of them, a prime festival audience in waiting. We even have to queue to get a place on one of the sea of picnic benches before us.

What’s less certain is the art. In one corner, there’s an outdoor stage yet to be put into service and, at the other end, the Spiegeltent, a quaint cabaret big top. Much more visible, however, are the bars and food shacks that line the perimeter. This is not a festival, I think, but an enormous beer garden.

Usually, scaffolding is in short supply in August; this year it’s picnic tables.

But no sooner has the thought crossed my mind than I see Guy Masterson. The actor and director, a fringe veteran of 27 years, has just come off stage from his performance of Under Milk Wood. He is buzzing with delight at being back before an audience, not least because he’d been editing this “semi-skimmed” version on the fly.

He’d only sold two tickets in advance, he tells me, but 16 people had showed up. That’s impressive for the first night of a show only announced at the end of July. He is thrilled. I later hear there’d been more than 100 in for a children’s show that morning.

With audiences game and performers willing, maybe the old festival spirit is back. And by “old” I mean very old. Anyone going on stage in these uncertain circumstances can’t be expecting to get their big break, as Edinburgh mythology promises. The only reason to perform is for the love of it – just like the eight companies who rolled into town uninvited in 1947, the festival’s inaugural year.

“The people who are performing are doing it because they just really, really want to do their show,” says Verity Leigh, programme manager at Summerhall, where she’s built an open-sided 80-seat theatre to compliment her online programme. “Sure, if they get some nice reviews and a bit of attention from promoters, then that’s great, but the motivation is they want to be back doing it live. It feels like it’s back to first principles.”

On Thursday, the fringe’s “let’s do the show right here” spirit is given full vent at the launch of MultiStory, an outdoor venue set up by the Traverse, Gilded Balloon, Dance Base and Zoo. Comedian Fred MacAulay earns big laughs with jokes about performing in a car park – this one is run by NCP – but with Edinburgh Castle dramatically looming behind, the Traverse’s executive producer Linda Crooks is also right to say how photogenic it is.

Although audiences are willing, the city is relatively quiet. By the weekend, there is still not a leaflet nor an Elizabethan costume to be seen. I spot some modest posters in Nicolson Square, but the only person to approach me is a man from the Socialist Worker campaigning against imperialism. Take that, you free-market fringe!

What happens next remains unknown. Even pre-pandemic, the fringe was awash with venues that didn’t feel entirely sanitary and yet those same spaces were often where talent emerged.

Take the 50-seat Pleasance Attic. “That is a space Graham Norton and Michael McIntyre performed in,” says Anthony Alderson, the director of the Pleasance, which has reduced its warren of performing spaces to just two – the same number it had when it started in 1985. “We’ve got to work together to make sure these little rooms exist because that is where the heart and soul of this festival really lies.”