The 1948 Edinburgh Festival Fringe was the second edition of what would become the world's largest arts festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It was in this year the word "Fringe" is commonly accepted as having first been associated with the event, after it was used by an Edinburgh Evening News critic. [1] The term would come to define the event, and spawn the genre of fringe theatre. It was, however, still several years before it became common parlance in connection with the event or theatre in general, and also some time before any formal organisation of the event took place.
The previous year, eight theatre companies had performed, uninvited, in Edinburgh during the "official" Edinburgh International Festival in August, which had been set up to help the reconciliation and rebuilding process in Europe after the Second World War. [2] They had not had the explicit intention of establishing an actual unofficial event of their own, merely they sought to take advantage of the presence of audiences to showcase their own works, or, in certain cases, such as that of Glasgow Unity Theatre, perhaps make a statement about the elitism of the official festival. [3] They referred to themselves as the "Festival Adjuncts" [4] or elsewhere as the "Semi Official Festival". [1]
Shows had received good reviews and been well-attended, which was a factor in groups returning to do likewise in 1948. [1]
The participants remained broadly the same. Returning groups included local group the Christine Orr Players, Glasgow Unity Theatre, and the Pilgrim Players from England. [1] However, there were also new companies taking part, including the Glyndebourne Children's Theatre.
A similar set of venues was used for the 1948 event as had been used in 1947. The YMCA on South St Andrew Street again hosted the Christine Orr Players, while the Gateway Theatre also housed productions. A list (incomplete) of participating productions includes:
The most historically significant press notice that the event attracted was that of playwright and journalist Robert Kemp in the Edinburgh Evening News on 14 August 1948:
'Round the fringe of official Festival drama, there seems to be more private enterprise than before ... I am afraid some of us are not going to be at home during the evenings!' [5]
This is considered to be the origin of the phrase "fringe" to describe the event, and, by extension, fringe theatre in general. [1]
Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland and one of its 32 council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian, it is located in Lothian on the Firth of Forth's southern shore.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world's largest arts festival, which in 2018 spanned 25 days and featured more than 55,000 performances of 3,548 different shows in 317 venues. Established in 1947 as an alternative to the Edinburgh International Festival, it takes place annually in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the month of August. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has become a world-leading celebration of arts and culture, surpassed only by the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup in terms of global ticketed events. As an event it "has done more to place Edinburgh in the forefront of world cities than anything else".
Fringe theatre is theatre that is produced outside of the main theatre institutions, and that is often small-scale and non-traditional in style or subject matter. The term comes from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In London, the fringe are small-scale theatres, many of them located above pubs, and the equivalent to New York's Off-Off-Broadway theatres and Europe's "free theatre" groups.
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Robert Kelmsley (Robin) Orr CBE was a Scottish organist and composer.
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Robert Kemp (1908–1967) was a Scottish playwright.
Robert McLellan OBE (1907–1985) was a Scottish renaissance dramatist, writer and poet and a leading figure in the twentieth century movement to recover Scotland’s distinctive theatrical traditions. He found popular success with plays and stories written in his native Scots tongue and is regarded, alongside William Lorimer, as one of the most important modern exponents of fine prose in the language.
The Glasgow Unity Theatre was a theatre group that was formed in 1941, in Glasgow. The Unity theatre movement developed from workers' drama groups in the 1930s, seeing itself as using theatre to highlight the issues of the working class being produced by and for working-class audiences. The movement had strong links with the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Left Book Club Theatre Guild.
Theatre in Scotland refers to the history of the performing arts in Scotland, or those written, acted and produced by Scots. Scottish theatre generally falls into the Western theatre tradition, although many performances and plays have investigated other cultural areas. The main influences are from North America, England, Ireland and from Continental Europe. Scotland's theatrical arts were generally linked to the broader traditions of Scottish and English-language literature and to British and Irish theatre, American literature and theatrical artists. As a result of mass migration, both to and from Scotland, in the modern period, Scottish literature has been introduced to a global audience, and has also created an increasingly multicultural Scottish theatre.
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Assembly is a theatre and comedy promotion company, producer and venue operator. It programmes and promotes entertainment events at venues in Edinburgh, London and Brighton, and is the longest-established of the so-called Big Four promoters at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August. Year-round audience numbers at Assembly events are more than 500,000, and the company's artistic director is William Burdett-Coutts.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society is the organisation that supports the running of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the largest arts festival in the world. The Society was established in 1958 to provide a centralised information and box office service for the Fringe, which had grown in numbers since eight theatre companies had effectively "created" the Fringe by performing uninvited alongside the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947.
The 1947 Edinburgh Festival Fringe was the first edition of what would become the world's largest arts festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
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