The Edinburgh festivals can be understood as process of gentrification. This is a small city which has simply run out of space.
But there is a deeper disquiet within Scottish culture that a palpably unrevived festival scene underlines.
What if the festivals, already experiencing a silent crisis prior to the pandemic, will simply continue to decline? What if they never return to their former glory and an already fragile Scottish cultural sector sinks with them?
Behind these concerns sits the great awkward question of whether Scotland’s cultural and political leaders really feel that there is the will, or demand, to reinvent the basis for these events. The festivals were founded with an existential mission to bring nations together after half a century of carnage, but there is no equivalent vision today.
The pandemic may be a crisis on the scale of global conflict – but the implications of recovery from it seem to point in the opposite direction – remoteness is sensible policy.
Without the magic of accessible international travel and its capacity to bring so many performers from so many places together; Edinburgh’s festivals are doomed. If this element gets discarded the city will end up like Prospero, realising, finally ... ‘my charms are all o’erthrown,/And what strength I have’s mine own,/Which is most faint: now, ’tis true,/I must be here confined by you.’