Angela Bartie's excellent book examines the Edinburgh Festival, the Fringe, and, more broadly, the avant-garde and its enemies in Scotland. Bartie treats the events in Edinburgh after 1947 as lenses for examining the cultural and religious shifts of the postwar period and carefully avoids overreaching claims for the festivals as a crucible of “the Sixties.” However, she is properly attentive to the ways the festivals have changed public and private life in Scotland—for instance, by challenging the “moral austerity that Presbyterianism had imposed on Scottish culture” (229)—and the ways the festivals have influenced the arts in Britain, especially in the way the Fringe came to serve as a conduit between the experimental and the established.

The productive tensions between the Fringe and the Festival proper are a recurrent theme of the book. The earliest counterfestivals were organized by Glasgow Unity Theatre, which sought to provide “popular” (as opposed to “mass”) Scottish alternatives to the “elite” European fare on offer at the official Festival and endorsed by the still-new Arts Council. Over the course of the 1950s, the Fringe developed into “an ‘official’ unofficial festival” (68) and threatened to overshadow its formal twin. The Festival fought back. Beyond the Fringe, a signal event in the satire boom of the 1960s, was not a creation of the Fringe but of the official Festival, whose organizers rounded up comedic talent from the Cambridge Footlights and the Oxford Revue and turned them loose on a respectable audience.

Bartie's chief interest is in what might loosely be called the cultural politics of the festivals. She has things to say about aesthetic innovations (especially in drama) but usually insofar as they relate to more general topics such as the competing claims of Scottish nationalism and cosmopolitanism and, above all, the relation between religion, culture, and Culture. The Church of Scotland was a strong early supporter of the Edinburgh Festival, building on the community artistic initiatives (such as church drama groups) it had taken over the previous half century. In the religious services that formed part of the Festival's opening ceremonies, deans welcomed “a new alliance of friendship and mutual trust between religion and art and music and science” (48). This was the sort of thing a dignitary was supposed to say at a big moment (like any event in which civic ambition has been invested, the first few festivals were occasions for bombast), and it is hard to gauge how significant these ideas of spiritual regeneration really were to the Festival project. But, as Bartie's later chapters show, the official Festival, the Fringe, and happenings on the fringe of the Fringe became focal points for discussions of religion and public morals in the 1960s.

In 1963, a drama conference associated with the Festival concluded with a “happening” that featured a naked woman, Anna Kesselaar, being wheeled around on a trolley (the Lord Chamberlain's rules permitted nude performers on stage if they were standing still). The happening led to a set piece obscenity trial. Most of the prosecution witnesses appear to have been members of the local branch of the American-based Moral Re-Armament, which had been active in Edinburgh since the 1950s. When Kesselaar was acquitted, the newspaper that habitually campaigned against artistic immorality in Scotland declared: “[I]t is the Festival itself which must be put on trial” (143). Four years later, the “lust and bestiality play” Futz (178), performed at the main Festival by an off-off-Broadway company, failed to ignite the expected scandal. Avant-garde theatre had become sanctioned as high culture, and the ground of moral discourse had shifted. Bartie quotes a writer for the Scotsman: “We knew that Futz must be a very moral play because all plays that are dismissed as pornographic in intent turn out to have a high moral content. That is axiomatic” (180).

Bartie's book is based on extensive research in Scottish archives and interviews with participants in the festivals and the attendant controversies. Among the secondary works she refers to often are Robert Hewison's surveys, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War, 1945–60 (London, 1981) and Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties, 1960–75 (London, 1986), which historians of postwar British culture have long used to get their bearings. She also quotes other writers working outward from arts journalism or broadcasting, such as Michael Billington and Humphrey Carpenter. It is no disrespect to these authors to say that Bartie's references to them add much less to her discussion than would have been the case if she were writing ten or fifteen years ago, before much archival research had been done on the cultural history of 1950s and 1960s Britain. The Edinburgh Festivals carries this inquiry forward; it makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of a critical time.