Artsy Edinburgh, laid low by the virus, hopes for recovery

Artsy Edinburgh, laid low by the virus, hopes for recovery

SeattlePI.com

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EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) — Francesca Moody is spending August the way she always does: in darkened rooms in Edinburgh, watching some of the best new theater and comedy the world has to offer.

All that’s missing are the hundreds of thousands of other people who usually do the same in Scotland's capital.

“It’s strange to be in a city that you’re so used to being saturated with culture and arts and people,” Moody, a theater producer, said backstage at the city’s shuttered Traverse Theatre.

Usually the venue is a hub for performances at the Edinburgh Fringe, the vast performance festival that helps turn the city into a global creative hub every summer — drawing crowds, generating buzz and filling the coffers of hoteliers, pub-owners, shopkeepers and tour guides.

Every summer except this one. The Fringe, the high-toned Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Art Festival and the city’s bagpipe-swirling Military Tattoo were all casualties of the U.K.’s coronavirus lockdown. Their cancellation was a body blow to Britain’s thriving creative economy, and to Edinburgh’s booming tourism sector.

But there are glimmers of light in artists' and organizers' determination that the festivals will return — even if it's in a smaller, more digital form.

Moody knows all about the power of the Fringe. At the 2013 festival she produced “Fleabag,” a one-woman show by Phoebe Waller-Bridge that went on to become an Emmy-winning TV series. She is trying to keep the festival’s chemistry alive with the Shedinburgh Fringe, a series of theater and comedy shows performed in sheds erected on theater stages in Edinburgh and London and beamed to ticket-buying viewers around the world.

Moody, who watches the shows live in an...

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