Poster 1973 Edinburgh International Festival

Tickets for this August’s Edinburgh International Festival went on public sale last Thursday. Unlike next year’s UK & Ireland tour of Prima Facie starring Jodie Comer, I managed to remember, and booked a few tickets.

This is Festival director Nicola Benedetti’s third year at the helm. Although not as bonkers as I would like (I’m thinking about when the three-week gig was under the stewardship of Frank Dunlop, how I’d love to see Gdańsk’s Teatr Ekspresji perform their ballet ZUN again, stage set: 1 x cast iron bath, nothing else) she has put together an eclectic and interesting programme for 2025.

Brian Cox and Sandy Grierson in Make It Happen © National Theatre of Scotland

The obvious highlight is National Theatre of Scotland’s Make It Happen about the rise and fall of The Royal Bank of Scotland, starring Brian Cox as the ‘founder of modern capitalism’ Adam Smith. Like Jodie Comer, Brian Cox is a well know TV star - political drama Bob Servant Independent, and that episode of Minder where he gave Dennis Waterman a kicking on the top deck of a Routemaster double-decker bus - but he started off as, and still very much is, a stage actor. A nice touch then that before its run at the Festival Theatre, Make It Happen is previewing in late July at the Dundee Rep. It was in 1961, at the Rep’s original home in Nicoll Street that a 15-year-old Cox made his debut in A.A. Milne’s The Dover Road. On the occasion of the Rep’s 80th anniversary in 2019, Cox spoke with great fondness of his early years treading the boards in his hometown: “I owe Dundee Rep everything. It formed and shaped me.”

Elsewhere in the 2025 International Festival programme a new Scottish Ballet production, Mary Queen of Scots ‘imagines a Renaissance where punk meets haute couture’ sounds very Vivienne Westwood; the London Symphony Orchestra have a three-night residency at the Usher Hall including a heavy-duty double bill of Beethoven’s 5th & Shostakovich’s 10th; an Opera Australia production of Orpheus and Eurydice which looks fun, and also only 80 minutes long. And a whole load of music on at the Hub, the likes of which - in fairness - Frank Dunlop would never have touched with a bargepole: to pick one, the haunting folk music of Norwegian trio Østerlide sounds like a welcome escape from the madness of Edinburgh in August. All in all, a lot to look forward to.

Programme 2025 Edinburgh International Festival

My only complaint is the actual physical - paper - programme itself, the cover of which for the tenth consecutive year is an uninspiring combination of yellow and black graphics with nothing, other than the word ‘Edinburgh’, to associate the festival with Scotland’s capital city. While the Festival has always been about looking outwards, it’s as if for the past decade it has been ashamed of its roots. In her introduction to this year’s programme Benedetti talks of being ‘caught in a bewildering swirl of “my truth” and “alternative facts” of manipulated language disguised as information’, seemingly oblivious to being part of the problem by eliminating the very soul of the Festival from the cover of her programme.

Hans Schleger was born in 1898 in what was then Prussia. He studied at Berlin’s Kunstgewerbeschule before moving to New York where he established himself as a leader in the Modernist approach to advertising. In 1932 he arrived in London and for the next four decades worked as freelance designer and design consultant. He produced iconic work for London Underground, ICI, Penguin Books, the John Lewis Partnership, and many more.

In 1966 Schleger was commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival to create publicity material to be used on programmes and posters. Together with his equally talented wife Pat, he designed an iconic image of doves and Edinburgh Castle. These became instantly recognisable and variations on the theme continued to be used until 1978. In the catalogue to a 2007 exhibition of Schleger’s work at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Fiona MacCarthy wrote:

The very early symbol [Schleger] designed for Deutsche Bank in 1929 - the iconic eagle, formalised and threatening - had transmuted by the end of his career into the much gentler and more optimistic symbol of the dove first designed by Schleger for the Edinburgh Festival of 1966. The dove, bearer of peace and cultural understanding between nations, can be taken as sign of Schleger’s personal mythology. It is one of his beautiful and memorable images: the bird above the castle and the city, flying free.

If peace and cultural understanding between nations and the promotion of Edinburgh was important in the 1960s and 1970s, isn’t it still the case - if not more so - now in 2025?

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