Home to the largest theatre festival in the world, the city of Edinburgh is synonymous with theatre, becoming a home for so many theatre makers and theatre lovers.
The first theatre companies to take part in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe certainly took ‘fringe’ literally. Gate-crashing the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947, they began in a characteristically outrageous fashion and they haven’t stopped since. Now the high point of Edinburgh’s summer calendar and a festival in its own right, it has cemented the careers of some of modern theatre’s biggest names, notably Phoebe Waller-Bridge and The Cambridge Footlights. The Edinburgh International Festival was an attempt to forge reconciliation in the wake of the Second World War, and the Festival Fringe has retained this commitment to cultural celebration with some of the most diverse theatre offerings in the world.
Edinburgh has a long history of championing innovative theatre. The Royal Court Theatre — established in 1956 — was the sounding board for much of the most radical writing over the next few decades. The first performance was none other than Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, which remains a seminal work to this day. They fought against the 1960s censorship to produce works from some of the most culturally significant writers of the 20th century. 17 of Caryl Churchill’s plays were first performed at the Royal Court, and they also brought famous works like Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis to audiences for the first time.
This was followed just under a decade later by The Traverse Theatre in 1963, which aimed to champion new writers in Edinburgh. One of its founders was Samuel Beckett’s publisher, John Calder. Originally established as a ‘club’ rather than a theatre, it was exempt from censorship, and their shows were some of the most radical and exciting in Scotland. It has hosted famous names including Robbie Coltraine and Steven Berkoff, and it is now one of the main venues for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The 1970s cemented the Traverse as a main player in the Edinburgh theatre scene when David Hayman directed the award-winning Slab Boys.
I cannot end this article without mentioning the University of Edinburgh’s very own Bedlam Theatre. This neo-gothic church has been home to the university’s theatre scene since the 1980s. It opened as the first student-run theatre in Scotland, and remains fully democratic and run by a committee. They put on more than 40 annual performances which range from theatre classics to new student writing and have a long list of notable alumni, including Sir Michael Boyd (the former Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company).
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