Edinburgh International Festival 2025 preview supplement: e-mag

The theme of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival is “The Truth We Seek”, and given the current state of our post-truth world, it could hardly be more timely.

Of course, an arts festival can’t fix our broken public discourse overnight, but what it can do is invite us to reflect on the concept of truth on a deeper level, and perhaps in doing so, equip us to better navigate our increasingly compromised and complicated information space.

EIF director Nicola Benedetti has spoken about the way in which the arts can “take us into realms of timeless truths that are more nuanced and precise than literal fact”, and there are certainly some good examples of this in the shows previewed in this supplement.

In their production Figures in Extinction, for example, previewed by our dance critic Kelly Apter, Simon McBurney and Crystal Pite explore some difficult truths about the ways in which humanity has become increasingly disconnected from the natural world.

In a similar vein, in Works and Days – previewed by our theatre critic Joyce McMillan – the FC Bergman collective of Antwerp transport us back to a time when most humans still survived through a communal process of working the land, thereby forcing us to confront the extent to which we have now become cut off from the natural rhythms of nature, and from each other.

Meanwhile, speaking to our classical music critic Ken Walton, Yaron Lifschitz explains how he went about creating a radical, circus-inspired reimagining of Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Eurydice by finding his own version of the universal truths at the heart of the tale.

Lifschitz also reveals the very basic truth that underpins all of his work – the circus commandment “Thou Shalt Not Bore!” Small chance of anyone getting bored in Edinburgh over the next few weeks.

READ MORE: The Scotsman’s 2025 Edinburgh Festival coverage: everything you need to know