When Jessica Gaitán Johannesson led a mass walkout at an Edinburgh book festival event last weekend, she told the audience: “If it was enough to tell stories and hold conversations on a stage then the same festival that invites climate activists wouldn’t also be funded by money that contributes to climate breakdown.”
Johannesson, along with fellow authors Mikaela Loach and Mohamed Tonsy, disrupted Loach’s Saturday evening event as they called on the festival to drop its main sponsor, Baillie Gifford, after revelations that it has billions invested in companies that profit from fossil fuels, prompting the climate activist Greta Thunberg to cancel her own book festival appearance.
There was no demand for refunds as the audience of about 180 exited the auditorium chanting in unison. “The walkout made sense to them,” says Johannesson. “There’s a widespread feeling, particularly among younger people, that we need to make the connection between the cultural sphere and the effect that the money behind these industries has on real people’s lives.”
This year’s Edinburgh festival season has already witnessed an abundance of controversies, protests and activist challenges, leading some to question whether it is the most politically charged in recent times.
Last week, an “in conversation” event with the SNP MP Joanna Cherry went ahead amid tight security at the Stand – a venue that originally refused to host her after staff members objected to her outspoken gender critical views, but which rescinded that after legal warnings.
A comedy event – which was not part of the official fringe programme – featuring the Father Ted creator Graham Linehan was staged in the open air outside the Scottish parliament on Thursday evening, after another venue cancelled it because of his gender-critical beliefs.
Meanwhile, Sab Samuel, the artist behind Drag Queen Story Hour, describes megaphone-wielding protesters telling families they will regret bringing their children to the performance “nearly every day” of its two-week run at the Assembly Roxy. And the first minister Humza Yousaf’s appearance at Iain Dale’s All Talk show last week was interrupted by a rightwing heckler accusing him of being anti-white.
For the chief executive of the Edinburgh fringe, Shona McCarthy, dissent, dispute and “difficult ideas” are very much the point. “Over 76 years, the Edinburgh fringe has always captured whatever is going on in the public mindset – it is a zeitgeist-capturer,” she says.
“The fringe has had walkouts before, protests before, people shouting about things. That’s the space that festivals like ours should provide,” McCarthy adds.
Nor does she have the sense that festivals organisers have to hold the space for open debate any more firmly than previous years: “You can pick out one or two examples that become very noisy and very public,” she says, but in a festival of 3,500 shows “all kinds of conversations are absolutely being had”.
The fringe doesn’t behave in a homogeneous way, she adds, instead “what tends to happen is that one venue, or one promoter, might make a choice over there, but then the door opens over here”.
That’s a sentiment echoed by Jim Monaghan, a performance poet and production manager for the arts company Fair Pley, which put on the Cherry event.
“We’ve had three cancellations in two years out of thousands of shows that deal with very challenging stuff, and two of those went ahead in the end,” he says, referring to Cherry, Linehan as well as the comic Jerry Sadowitz, who is returning to the fringe next week after his show was cancelled last year after complaints about offensive content.
“We’d be mistaken to think there’s some wave of woke activists preventing audiences seeing shows. I don’t think that there’s more censorship, but all these examples are about specific kick-back when social norms change – whether that’s about trans visibility, sexism or concern about the climate.”
Jess Brough, a regular festival contributor, most recently chairing Booker prize-nominee Colson Whitehead, highlights a significant spike in homophobia in audiences this year. “Although arts festivals are supposed to be places that celebrate all different kinds of people, those toxic conversations about gender and identity that are happening across the country become heightened in an environment where people are drinking and gathering in groups.”
They also founded Fringe of Colour, a project to support Black people and people of colour at arts festivals in Scotland: “Audiences are still very white, and tickets are still expensive. There’s still a question of who these festivals are for.”
Of course, cultural and political controversies are not new during festivals season. During the late 80s and 1990s, a Conservative councillor called Moira Knox frequently railed against fringe shows featuring nudity, sex or drug-taking and for a time, the Moira award was issued for the “most offensive show on the fringe”.
As for audience attitudes, the cultural charity The Audience Agency has found that younger members in particular are more likely to attend venues that share their own social and environmental values.
For McCarthy, the mood on the fringe is one of optimism. “Tonally, while the media are shining a spotlight on a couple of things, when you’re going around Edinburgh it feels really positive. It feels like we are in more of a post-Covid space and that people are confident again about coming out.”
“Artists have really struggled over the past three years yet also taken that time to do some real deep soul searching. It’s probably one of the richest years in terms of new writing and original ideas.”
• This article was amended on 21 August 2023. An earlier version said that Colson Whitehead was a winner of the Booker prize when he was a nominee.
