Latest news with #EIF
Scotsman
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
The best EIF theatre shows - Scotsman critic Joyce McMillan previews the 2025 programme
Scotsman critic Joyce McMillan picks her theatre highlights from this year's EIF programme Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Make It Happen There's no doubt about the big theatre ticket of the Edinburgh International Festival 2025. Based on an idea proposed by the actor Brian Cox - who will appear in the show as 18th century economist Adam Smith - James Graham's new play Make It Happen is a study of the 2008 collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which almost brought the entire global financial system to its knees. Co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and Dundee Rep, the play features a cast of 16, led by award-winning actor Sandy Grierson as Fred Goodwin, the overreaching CEO who became a byword for an age of devastating financial arrogance and recklessness; and its subject could hardly chime better with Nicola Benedetti's 2025 Festival theme of 'the truth we seek'. Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 1-9 August; previews 30-31 July. Faustus in Africa! First created in 1995, Faustus In Africa! - by the legendary Handspring Puppet Company of Cape Town - poses urgent questions about the reckless deals we make with the devil for profit and pleasure, despite the catastrophic costs of colonialism, and of the climate emergency. Founded more than 40 years ago, Handspring has become a world leader in theatre puppetry, taking the art-form to previously unimagined heights; this is the company that gave us the mighty horses for the UK National Theatre's War Horse, and that inspired Baxter Theatre's beautiful 2023 Fringe hit The Life And Times Of Walter K. Here, director William Kentridge and a seven-strong company join forces with musicians Warrick Sony and the late James Phillips to offer a searing take on the Faust legend, and one which could hardly be more timely, in 2025 Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 20-23 August. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Cutting the Tightrope In the politics of our time, the term 'freedom of speech' is routinely used and abused as never before; but to judge by the reviews it attracted when it premiered at the Arcola in London last year, this collection of speedily-written new short plays on the theme will give little comfort to those who believe, with US Vice-President JD Vance, that the main threat to freedom comes from the political left. Made yet more topical by the colossal controversy surrounding Bob Vylan's appearance at Glastonbury, this collection tackles the issues involved head-on; and seeks to nail the growing nervousness of arts organisation about tackling subjects on which debate has become too hot to handle. Church Hill Theatre, Edinburgh, 14-17 August. Make It Happen
Scotsman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
The longest ever Edinburgh festival experiences, from an 8 hour classical concert to a 36 hour comedy show
An eight hour concert at the Edinburgh International Festival? It's not as unusual as you might think, writes David Pollock Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... This year's Edinburgh International Festival will open in explosive fashion, certainly in terms of the ambition attached to presenting a full staging of the late Sir John Tavener's masterwork The Veil of the Temple, which the composer described as 'the supreme achievement of my life'. Presented in the UK for the first time since its premiere at London's Temple Church in 2003, the performance will last for eight hours, from mid-afternoon until late evening on the Festival's first Saturday. Edinburgh Festival Chorus are among the 250 performers at this year's EIF opening concert. | Edrinburgh Festival Chorus The Veil of the Temple will be no act of penance; rather one of transcendence, with suitably spaced refreshment breaks and beanbags supplied. But while its length makes it an oddity in Edinburgh in August, it's not a rarity. Few other places in the world permit such open experimentation with durational work, and in the International Festival and the Fringe there have been many such experiments over the years. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad One of the earliest was also one of the most infamous, a production which is still spoken about with wide-eyed enthusiasm by those who experienced it. First performed at London's ICA in early 1979, The Warp by maverick theatre-maker Ken Campbell also came to that year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, to the now-demolished Regent Cinema in Abbeyhill. A transcendental 22-hour experience, the entrance fee of one pound bought turned-on attendees into a sequence of ten playlets transcribed by Campbell from the thoughts and memories of fellow eccentric and noted poet, painter and jazz musician Neil Oram into a spectacle of live storytelling. Spanning four centuries, The Warp blended science fiction, jazz-rock musical, sex, drugs and promenade performance, with 50 actors playing 200 roles in a non-stop cornucopia of counterculture gig theatre which was as transgressive as punk and as over-stuffed with ambition as prog rock. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In 2011, one of the Festival Fringe's current key venues was opened in a manner which called back to Campbell's work. Hotel Medea began at Summerhall at midnight and ran through until sunrise, lasting approximately six hours, during which the audience were encouraged to dance and eat in honour of the wedding of Medea and Jason from Greek mythology, then experience the break-up of their relationship, including being tucked into bed as the characters' soon-to-be-deceased children. Another promenade spectacular, Hotel Medea was told in three parts. 'It's very much about staying up together all night, and that creates that sense of ritual, the sense of community and togetherness that we're always looking for through theatre,' said co-director Persis-Jade Merivala at the time, invoking the same spirit of community ritual Benedetti taps into with her words on The Veil of the Temple. Nor is it just serious theatre which benefits from this endurance-testing format. Mark Watson was already a comedian on the up when he captured the imagination and the headlines in 2004 with Mark Watson's Overambitious 24-Hour Show, a successful attempt to break the world record for longest stand-up performance. Comedian Mark Watson | Contributed 'Watson's eclectic show included a blind date, a debate on the existence of God, a Euro 2004 review and readings from his novel, Bullet Points,' reported the BBC at the time. 'The comedian began games of Chinese Whispers among the audience to cover his toilet breaks.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Held at the 160-capacity Cowgate Central venue after the nearby Wilkie House proved too small for the opening audience, there were also cameos from Adam Hills, Stewart Lee, Dara O'Briain and Jenny Éclair, and a finale in which Watson proposed to his girlfriend Emily, one of 12 people to remain for the duration. Watson returned to the format every year until 2009, including with Mark Watson's Seemingly Impossible 36-Hour Circuit of the World in 2006, which broke his own record. Since Watson's efforts, attempts to grab the attention with long Fringe shows have really needed to pull something out of the bag to register. Neither a comedy nor strictly a piece of theatre, comedian Bob Slayer's Iraq Out & Loud was very much the epitome of a Fringe concept in 2016 – a consecutive, real-time reading of every word in the then-just-published Chilcot Report into the UK's role in the Iraq war. Undertaken in a shed next to Slayer's BlundaBus venue at Potterrow, Iraq Out & Loud took 1,500 comedians and members of the public (including this critic, writing for this paper) 13 days, reading in short chunks for 24 hours a day, to get through the entire 2.6 million words of the report, winning Slayer an Edinburgh Comedy Awards Panel Prize for Spirit of the Fringe. Edinburgh International Festival itself has also been no stranger to staging ambitiously lengthy works in the past, although not one as overtly singular as The Veil of the Temple. In 1994 it hosted the world premiere of Robert Lepage's The Seven Streams of the River Ota at Meadowbank Sports Centre; or rather, the first three instalments of Lepage's eventual seven-part, nine-hour investigation into the literal and metaphorical fallout of the Hiroshima bomb. My colleague Joyce McMillan tells me 'the event, with intervals, was very long'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The James Plays were a series of three historical plays presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, the Edinburgh International Festival and the National Theatre of Great Britain. | National Theatre of Scotland Then there were The James Plays in 2016 and Stephen Fry's Mythos in 2019, both split into three individual play-length sections, but available as one lengthily consecutive viewing experience when seen in order over one or two days. Similarly, presentations of Wagner's famously lengthy Ring Cycle have been split into its individual operas over days in 2003 and even consecutive years in the late 2010s. Discussing the crescendo that will bering the performance to a close, The Veil of the Temple's director Tom Guthrie describes 'the idea being that you've arrived, and of course in this conception of it, this is with dawn, with the night turning to day, and darkness turning to light, and those are universal themes (of) enlightenment. It's a wonderful, ritualised human expression.' The Veil of the Temple will be performed in five languages and sung by 250 people, in a vocal collaboration between the Monteverdi Choir, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the National Youth Choir of Scotland, with music performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Sofi Jeannin. Across eight meditative, chanting cycles, it takes its inspiration from an all-night vigil in the Orthodox Christian tradition, but its purpose is to find a commonality both between the religions of the world and their practices, and between the worlds of the religious and the secular, which each have their own forms of devotional ritual. Tavener was striving for 'an underlying universal truth', says Edinburgh International Festival's director Nicola Benedetti, who knew the composer. 'I guess it was his wish and his hope that it's in the patience and the sitting with something for those eight hours that can allow for something transformational. His view of that universal truth was something that binds people closer together.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In the midst of an arts festival in 2025, one which offers literally hundreds of different ways to spend your time, the idea of devoting this portion of your life to one single, focused emotional journey which will take you through the best part of a day feels like something approaching a rebellious act. It's a rejection of the shareable, dopamine-chasing quick fix of contemporary culture, and a submission instead to a performance which slowly reveals itself in the company of other humans, however you might feel about the religious resonances behind it.
The Herald Scotland
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
EIF bosses clash with city council over event permits
Organisers said they were "disappointed" at the outcome but hoped an upcoming review of licensing charges by the authority would bring costs down in future. City of [[Edinburgh]] Council's fee structure for public entertainment licences (PELs) - permits for events open to the [[pub]]lic required to ensure safety and compliance with regulations - provides discounts for some some groups including charities. However the council says this is not applied "where there is clear commercial activity". On Monday, less than two weeks before the start of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), councillors considered an application by the EIF Society, which is a registered charity, seeking a partial refund of licensing costs for events at the University of Edinburgh's Old College Quad and Ross Bandstand in Princes Street Gardens. Read more The value of the discount sought was not made public, however PELs range from £1,454 for a venue with capacity of up to 200, to £5,808 for a capacity of up to 10,000. Lebanese-French dance company Maqamat are due to perform at the Old College Quad over four nights in August with tickets priced at £30. The Ross Bandstand will host a free 'big singalong' event featuring Dougie Maclean on August 3 to mark the start of festival season in Edinburgh, followed by Norwegian folk ensemble Barokksolistene alongside Scottish musician Donald Shaw and his ceilidh band the following night, costing £20 a head. Council reports by head of regulatory services, Andrew Mitchell, said these were ticketed events and the licensing department "understands that any monies raised will go back to the Society". He said charges for licence applications "are used to offset the significant costs which are incurred in dealing with licensing issues in the city". However a spokesperson for EIF said events at the Ross Bandstand and Edinburgh College Quad were not being run on a commercial basis "and will not generate a profit". They said: "They are deliberately programmed to engage a broader audience, with an average ticket price of just £25, and thousands of people will attend events in Princes Street Gardens completely free of charge. "As a registered charity, we operate on a not-for-profit basis and subsidise these events significantly to ensure wide public benefit. "Any reduction risks setting a precedent. However, the committee has the discretion to waive fees where it considers this appropriate." Councillors on the licensing sub-committee unanimously refused the fee reduction on the advice of officers. An International Festival spokesperson said: 'We're disappointed by the decision of the Licensing Sub-Committee. "We understand the basis for licensing charges will be reviewed at the upcoming Culture and Communities Committee meeting and we look forward to that discussion.' More from our Edinburgh correspondent It follows a decision by councillors last month to turn down a similar request by the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, also a charity, for a discount on its £18,163 PEL bill for fringe performances on the Mound Precinct and High Street. Officials said in a report published last month the Fringe Society was yet to pay its licensing fees and the council was "processing these applications without payment". They added: "This is not normal practice - irrespective of any request to reduce a fee, payment must be made at the time of application." They said the Society has paid commercial licensing application rates since at least 2012 and discounts "operates commercial arrangements whereby it allows other businesses to sell goods from stalls within the licensed footprint. "It is the understanding of the Directorate that these arrangements are strictly commercial."
The Herald Scotland
7 days ago
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
Edinburgh Festival faces new demands to drop Baillie Gifford
The Herald told last year how Baillie Gifford had more than £60 million worth of shares in the owner of Rosyth Dockyard in Fife, which has previously worked with state-owned Israeli arms manufacturers. Read more: The group, which has called on Scottish arts organisations to sign up to a cultural boycott of Israel, has suggested that the EIF is being 'funded by genocide' just days before the first performances are due to get underway. Baillie Gifford was dropped by the Edinburgh International Book Festival weeks before last year's event was due to be held following a prolonged campaign over the company's links with the fossil fuel industry. The Edinburgh International Festival was instigated in the aftermath of the Second World targeting of the EIF has emerged weeks after the festival backed an open letter from arts organisations across the UK warning of the impact of 'relentless negativity' over corporate sponsorship. Francesca Hegyi, chief executive of the EIF, has suggested there has been a 'wholescale collapse of arts sponsorship' since Baillie Gifford was targeted over its links with fossil fuel companies. Baillie Gifford is currently the biggest corporate backer of the EIF, which recently secured record Scottish Government of £11.75m for the next three years, compared to annual funding of more than £2.3m in recent years. In a statement launching the new campaign, the pro-Palestine group highlighted the EIF's support for Ukraine and Ukrainian companies following the invasion by Russia three years ago. At the time, the festival severed its links with the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, who was made an honorary president of the event in 2011. The EIF also joined forces with the Scottish Government to stage a free concert by a newly-formed "Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra." [[Art]] Workers For [[Palestine]] has stepped up pressure on arts organisations in recent months, including the Glasgow Film Theatre and the Fruitmarket Gallery in [[Edinburgh]]. The Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow has been closed since a large-scale protest was staged on June 24. Its board and management have faced calls to resign over the handling of an "intended occupation" of part of the building, which saw the police called to break up the protest. The pro-Palestine group said: 'After nearly two years of meetings, emails, and statements our ask to the Edinburgh International Festival has changed. 'We are no longer asking the EIF to merely speak to Baillie Gifford. We are demanding they cut ties. Why? Because EIF refuses to act in good faith. "Their own letter to us shows this clearly: 'We do not intend to adopt public political positions on international conflicts.' 'But the EIF has previously taken political positions. They promoted Ukrainian work with hashtags, programming decisions and marketing campaigns. So why is Palestine the exception? 'They're not neutral — they're complicit. Baillie Gifford is one of the EIF's biggest funders. They invest in Babcock International, a UK arms company supplying Israel. 'In plain terms: Palestinian death is making Baillie Gifford rich. And the EIF chooses to accept that money. This is blood money. This is the profits of the Palestinian genocide being used for 'art.' 'Our updated demand: EIF must cut ties with Baillie Gifford. No more conversations. No more delay. "This is about the right to live — not institutional comfort. This is about Palestinian liberation." Baillie Gifford is one of the main supporters of the Fringe Society and the National Galleries of Scotland, which is working in partnership with the Edinburgh International Film Festival next month. Earlier this month the campaign group issued a statement warning Scottish arts organisations: "Transparency, accountability and ethical leadership are non-negotiable." The latest statement targeting the EIF states: "Art is never neutral. Art can either resist — or it can enable. "This is our collective call. This is our line in the sand. We will continue to support artists taking action. We will no longer spend unpaid energy convincing the EIF of the obvious. That art funded by genocide is artwashing.' A spokesperson for the Edinburgh International Festival said: "We share public concern about the ongoing violence in the Palestinian territories, and other areas enduring conflict. "The right to speak out, to demand change, and to protest these issues is fundamental to democracy. "The Edinburgh International Festival gives voice to artists for important ideas, questions and stories to be freely presented and debated with nuance and empathy. "Our 2025 programme tackles this and other important global issues head-on, from a range of perspectives. "Our responsibility is to ensure the future of the festival, so that we can continue to offer public benefit and offer audiences transformational experiences. "To do this we must secure funding from a balanced mix of public and private sources. "Support from long-standing donors such as Baillie Gifford enables us to sustain our artistic ambition, remain accessible to the widest possible audience, and contribute meaningfully to Scotland's cultural life. "Following a rigorous review, our board of trustees agreed to maintain the support from Baillie Gifford, which continues to endorse all that the festival does, from the August festival programme to our year-round work with Edinburgh's communities."
Scotsman
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
EIF sets a new standard for accessibility
Festival director Nicola Benedetti and Foysol Choudhury MSP This year's Edinburgh International Festival has taken a significant step toward making culture more inclusive, launching a comprehensive access guide to support neurodivergent, disabled and D/deaf audience members. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... From detailed venue information to specially tailored performances, the initiative marks a commendable commitment to breaking down barriers and creating a welcoming experience for all. The access guide features detailed listings of accessible performances, including those with audio description, British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation, captioning and surtitles. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It also offers 'relaxed performances,' designed to provide a more flexible environment by keeping lights low, softening loud sounds and creating a welcoming space for neurodivergent audiences and those with sensory sensitivities. These adaptations ensure that people who may otherwise feel excluded are not only accommodated but genuinely welcomed into the cultural fold. I was particularly moved to see a dementia-friendly performance included, demonstrating the festival's thoughtful engagement with audiences who are often overlooked. Accessibility isn't just about physical or sensory accommodation, it's also about ensuring cost isn't a barrier. The EIF is helping to break down financial obstacles by offering a 50 per cent discount on full-price tickets for eligible audiences. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad As Shadow Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development, I'm glad to see the EIF take this step forward. By putting accessibility front and centre, they are setting a powerful example for the wider sector. These developments reflect the inclusive society we are working to build. Culture should be accessible to everyone and I applaud the EIF team for embedding inclusivity at the heart of their programming. This approach not only enhances the experience for the public but also strengthens the entire cultural sector by welcoming broader participation. I encourage other organisations to follow this example, ensuring that the arts are not a luxury for the few but a shared experience that reflects and welcomes the diversity of our communities. Let's continue working together to build a Scotland where everyone has the opportunity to enjoy the world-class cultural experiences our city has to offer. To explore the full list of accessible performances, visit Foysol Choudhury, Scottish Labour MSP for Lothian (Region)
