the times | Thursday August 6 2020 1GT 9
arts
JUPITER ARTLAND; JANE BARLOW/PAcrowds”. He loves the festival, but
shares a growing anxiety among
residents that mass tourism is
hollowing out parts of Edinburgh.
“We want the city centre to be a
liveable, working city, not a stage or
a bar, one great big bar,” McCall Smith
says. “This has been a good time to
take stock of things, to ask, ‘What do
we want our cities to be?’ ”
Not a blade of grass will be damaged
by most of this year’s offerings because
the bulk of creative output from the
International, Fringe and book
festivals is digital and can be viewed
on screen at home. Edinburgh
International Festival’s contribution
begins on Saturday with a one-hour
gala broadcast on BBC Scotland and
through dedicated YouTube and
Facebook pages, featuring Alan
Cumming, Fiona Shaw, Jarvis Cocker
and Akram Khan.
In all of the original output much
of the talent on show, inevitably, is
homegrown. Scottish artists and
national companies created a variety
of new content filmed in famous
venues across the city and broadcast
on a dedicated YouTube channel.
Among the productions, Scottish
Opera presents a modern-day
interpretation of Menotti’sThe
Telephone starring Soraya Mafi and
Jonathan McGovern and filmed in the
King’s Theatre. Scottish Ballet
presents a series of short dance films,
including Catalyst by the dancer and
choreographer Nicholas Shoesmith.
In other recorded streamed
performances the Royal Scottish
National Orchestra performs
Mahler’s Seventh Symphony and the
Rückert-Liederwith the soloist Karen
Cargill, while the Scottish Chamber
Orchestra and Paul Lewis perform
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 2. The
James Plays, the hit of 2014 from the
National Theatre of Scotland, are
among the productions that feature in
Ghost Light, billed as “a love letter to
Scottish theatre”.
The Fringe is streaming a Friday
night showcase of comedy, music,
dance and cabaret that opens this
week. A podcast, Edinburgh Unlocked,
features well-known comedians
including Ivo Graham, Lou Sanders
and Dane Baptiste. The Traverse
and Soho Theatre will announce
a digital bill too.
The online book festival has a
roster of about 200 authors, including
Hilary Mantel, David Mitchell and
Arundhati Roy, along with Rankin and
McCall Smith, the historian William
Dalrymple, and politicians such as
Gordon Brown, the former prime
minister, and Nicola Sturgeon,
Scotland’s first minister. As well as
free hour-long author interviews, the
programme includes online signings
and an audience chat room.
This kind of innovation is here to
stay, believes Rankin, who has already
taken part in a crime writing festival
over Zoom. “People sometimes don’t
go [to literary festivals] because they
haven’t enough time, or they can’t
afford the flight or the train, or the
accommodation,” he says. “An online
book festival is democratic, communal,
accessible and cheap.”
For Zinnie Harris, all she can do
this month is look forward. “When
this is all over, I think the opposite
of lockdown will happen,” she says.
“People will want to sit in crowds and
dance in the streets, celebrate, fall in
love and all the kinds of things they
couldn’t do this time. “I hope next year
there will be a humdinger of a festival.”first time in a long time.”
There are worse places to be. For
residents, the eerie emptiness of the
streets over the past four months has
been a revelation, “an assault on the
senses”, according to Ian Rankin,
the crime writer, who lives by the
Meadows park. If the pandemic has
been a shocking event, “elements have
been enjoyable, including the empty
streets”, he says. “Walking up the
Royal Mile, to the Castle Promenade,
when, literally, there has been nobody
there in the middle of the day, has
been mind-boggling.”
The absence of the festival will
prompt “a complex range of emotions”
among his neighbours, Rankin
reckons. “A lot of folk in and around
Edinburgh are going to feel like they
are getting their city back, to claim it
as theirs, rather than it belonging to
the visitors.”
Alexander McCall Smith is another
resident novelist who has found
pleasure in “walking in the streets
without being overwhelmed by theclosed down the summer and
cancelled her planned exhibition. Four
months later and her gallery, along
with a handful of others scattered
around the New Town, has reopened.
In a lightbulb moment Jansen
realised that “a festival [season]
without the festival would be a
fantastic opportunity”. She brought
forward Modern Masters Women, a
show pitched for 2021 and
featuring among others Anne
Redpath, Elizabeth Blackadder
and Victoria Crowe. For
those prepared to visit in
person, exhibition times
can be arranged by
appointment, or even,
as I did, by a knock
on the door.
As Jansen points out:
“For anyone who loves
Edinburgh but doesn’t
necessarily
love the crowds, there’s an
opportunity for people, and
it will be affordable for theAbove: Jupiter Artland.
Right, from top: Pat
Douthwaite’s Woman
with a Reptile; the
cellist Su-a Lee; the
artist Peter Liversidge.
Left: Akram Khan and,
below, Dizzee Rascalspread the fun. This time they will
flutter over quiet streets, and once
a day a procession of flags will be
carried through the city.
“In 2013 it was a greeting for people
coming into the city — the white flag
is a flag of truce, the beginning of a
conversation,” Liversidge says. This
time around, at a time of high anxiety,
there is “a sense of reconciliation, an
idea that we are coming back to
something billed as ‘the new
normal’,” he says. “I find that
funny because we are always
reinventing normal.”
There is a positive energy
among some of the privately
owned galleries. Christina
Jansen, the managing
director of the Scottish
Gallery, admits that she was distraught
when coronavirus appeared to have
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