The Edinburgh Festival Fringe celebrates 75 years of revelry

by design that Edinburgh came to be known as “Festival City”. During the second world war Sir Rudolf Bing, the general manager of Glyndebourne’sfestival, conceived of an international arts festival to be held in Britain once the fighting was over. He considered Bath, Cambridge, Canterbury, Chester and Oxford before Henry Harvey Wood, the head of the British Council’s Scottish branch, suggested Edinburgh.

The relationship between the Fringe and its official cousin remained fractious for nearly two decades. Patrick Brookstreasurer of the Festival Fringe Society, likened the relationship to a “state of cold war” in 1965. The Fringe was not acknowledged in the Edinburgh Festival’s official programme until 1969. Yet only five years later, in 1974, the Fringe sold more tickets than the main festival.

In the Sixties the festival became associated with daring, radical work that often pushed the boundaries of moral sensibilities and riffed on the prevailing countercultural mood. Some conservative newspapers commented in horror about “filth on the Fringe”; shows that challenged social mores saw their sales soar. The term “fringe” took on a broader significance beyond Edinburgh, referring to performance or theatre that revolved around experimental work or new writing.

in 1966 to “Fleabag”, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s critically-acclaimed comedy, first performed at the Fringe in 2013The number of bookers, producers and agents there means that “an energy can build around a show that no one’s ever heard of before”, explains Anthony Alderson, artistic director of the Pleasance Theatre Trust.

Rivalry more like. This year.

If you think 'irreverent protest' has gone, you can't have been to much of the Fringe.

With Scottish independence on the rise again after centuries of out of touch foreign Anglo rule, are the English even interested?

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