Where To Begin, Edinburgh International Festival review - 'the magic is in the details'

After opening last year’s Edinburgh International Festival with a weekend of music in Princes Street Gardens, Nicola Benedetti has opted for son et lumière spectacle this year, with an ambitious large-scale expression of the festival’s theme of Rituals That Unite Us. The creative team, led by outdoor events specialists Pinwheel, includes theatre-maker Simon Sharkey, writer Davey Anderson and designer Becky Minto.

As darkness falls on the grounds of George Heriot’s School, the audience are welcomed by hundreds of flaming torches. Actors man installations which look like giant chemistry sets but are in fact to do with the production of whisky (the sponsor is The Macallan, after all). Volunteers are picked from the audience to lay a coal on a fire, a nod to the fact that the citizens of Edinburgh donated their coal rations to light up the city for the first festival in 1947. Coloured lights cut through smoke creating shafts of solid colour.

Having observed all this, we gather at the back of the school for the main projection, which makes the building’s facade wobble and blur, inhale and exhale. Drone footage of Edinburgh’s seven hills pitches across the building while a voice contends that the city is “one of these thin places where the other world is close”.

Then it conjures the depths of that other world, of spirits and monsters, myths and imagination, “the Hogwarts to our Heriots”. The music crescendos - Roma Yagnik’s score giving way to blasts of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Verdi’s Requiem - and the voice describes inspiration. The piece concludes with a beautiful, specially commissioned song by Karine Polwart, members of the chorus singing where they stand, mingled among the audience.

It is in details like this, rather than in flawless technical wizardry, that the magic lies. Designed to inspire wonder, to talk about where art comes from and what it does, the spectacle is too general, too broad-brush, too determined to explain the mysterious.

The power of creativity is to be felt rather than understood, and it happens on a human scale. However sincere the intention, we don’t need a ritual to conjure it back. It’s here because we are.

Until 4 August