Bread and circuses to sedate the masses? Or magic-making to animate this haunted city, soon to disappear like an enchantment? Probably a little of both.
We’re well into the Edinburgh festival season, so some of this has already passed, but many of the shows will continue elsewhere, and the books will still be available. Here’s your guide to the more magical, folkier side of the Edinburgh festivals. Please note: we haven’t been to all the listed events (yet!).
Still from A Wolf Shall Devour Them at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, featuring storyteller Dougie Mackay and artist-musician Jemima Thewes, photograph © Marcin Maternik
Pam Grossman for Magic Maker: The Enchanted Path to Creativity at Wheel of Fate
You blinked and missed it, but Wheel of Fate’s new event series got off to a stellar start with a visit from and Q&A with Pam Grossman, who talked about her new book on how creativity and magic making are interlinked. You can still pop into the shop to pick up a copy – signed if you get there fast – some crafts, and a copy of our current issue.
The Revel Puck Circus: The Wing Scuffle Spectacular – 8th-29th August, 4.10 pm
Echoes of commedia dell’arte resound in the Meadow’s Circus Hub, with clowns hearkening back to the foolish Harlequin and his more devilish, trickster associations. Expect foolish revelry, aerial stunts and to see a bunch of people enjoying being alive; their folly is infectious (if at times, disquieting).
Woody Sez at Underbelly, Bristo Square - Cowbarn – 5th-30th August, 5.30 pm
“Folk song ain’t nothing but singing about what’s wrong … faschism is all around you know, closer than I can make you see.” A musical quartet perform a biopic about Woody Guthrie, icon of the American folk music scene, who inspired figures such as Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, and whose ‘This Land is Your Land’ highlighted the unfairness of privatisation. Expect foot tapping tunes that spirit you back to 1940s America, told via the music and words of this folk legend. It’s mainly serious stuff, but the cast got in a few jokes, ‘Woody hated consumerism, capitalism and commercialism, and we have some merchandise…’. All proceeds go to funding research into Huntington Disease, which Woody’s mother suffered from. 5* Elizabeth Kim
Al Aumuller for the New York World-Telegram and Sun
Naomi Ishiguro & Katalina Watt: High-Octane Folklore at the Edinburgh Book Festival
If you also missed this, you can still buy Naomi Ishiguro’s Japanese inspired fantasy, The Rainshadow Orphans, and Saltswept, the first instalment in Katalina Watt’s epic Southeast Asian duology, and beg the Edinburgh Book Festival to feature more folklore next year.
A Wolf Shall Devour the Sun at the Scottish Storytelling Centre – 7th-31st August, 1 pm
In A Wolf Shall Devour the Sun, storyteller Dougie Mackay and artist-musician Jemima Thewes fill the darkness of the room with the running ghosts of wolves: creatures slipping through light and shadow, ancient avatars of kinship, fear, exile and ecological loss. The show draws on wolf stories from across the north, moving from the Norse Binding of Fenrirto the Siberian tale of Old Woman Kytna, and setting them against the ghostly absence of wolves from the Scottish landscape.
Mackay can hold a room with little more than voice, timing and a well-shaped sentence, but the old stories themselves remain centre stage. Thewes’s shadow puppetry, music and soundscape turn story into spell. Her images are exquisitely simple: flickering light and stylised silhouettes working as perfect visual metaphors for the presences invoked. Her voice and song are tonally strange, with unexpected resonances, like the material itself. The show creates a half-lit threshold in which animal, human and spirit-world feel porous, like the stretched skin of the bodhrán through which shadow puppets loom and fade.
Fenrir’s binding becomes not only a myth of apocalyptic violence, but a story about bad faith: the gods fear the wolf, trick him, and thereby help create the monster they dread. The Siberian material is gentler and more uncanny. Kytna’s transformation into a wolf, as she journeys to recover her daughter, opens the show into something more intimate: wolfness as empathy, survival and maternal courage. Parents of teenagers may find their own swimming eyes add flicker to the light.
Our relation to animals, and especially to those we have most often demonised, could hardly feel more topical. At a moment when ecological politics is increasingly tangled up with fear, the wolf is a useful test case: the creature we made into a monster when we could no longer imagine sharing a world with it. It is precisely the kind of imaginative recovery Elizabeth Sulis Kim calls for in The Book of Beasts, which asks us to look again at the animal wisdom buried in old stories. Mackay and Thewes do something similar in performance: they return the wolf to us as kin. 5* –Brigid Lowe
Art: Olivia Matar
Tarot for Fiction Writers: A Workshop with Jill Dawson
Jill Dawson hit the Edinburgh Book Festival this year not with one event but two. One centres her latest novel, Pixie, about the life of Pamela Colman Smith, who illustrated the Rider-Waite-Smith deck; the other was more practical, about how tarot can be used as a creative tool. You’ve missed it but you can seek a tarot reading or, for those with full pockets, mentoring via her programme Gold Dust.
Dracula: Lucy’s Dream – Lennox Theatre at Pleasance EICC, 6th-29th August, 5.30 pm
From the award-winning Plexus Polaire comes a ‘haunting reinvention of the heart-pounding gothic horror about obsession, control and the demon inside.’ Expect an immersive piece of wordless horror theatre, inspired by Bram Stoker’s gothic masterpiece.
Tales of Haunted Edinburgh – the Arthur Conan Doyle Centre, 11th-25th August, 7.30 pm
The home for Edinburgh’s spiritualists is open as a fringe venue. We apparently live in one of the most haunted cities in the world. Hear ghostly tales of Edinburgh’s dead, as told by psychic and paranormal medium Ewan Irvine.
After a sold out 2025 run, Natalie Lyon returns to this tiny museum of the arcane to tell the tragic history of the Scottish witch hunts, ‘performed with humour and empathy’. Before a visit, you can pay respects to the people accused of witchcraft and killed for it at the Witches’ Witches, an inconspicuous memorial fountain on the Castle Esplanade.
Author talk with Rebecca Tamás at Argonaut Books on 29th August, 7 pm
Come hear Rebecca Tamás chat about her narrative non-fiction debut, The Book of Mysteries: Wild time and the Ritual Year. Tamás is also the author of Strangers: Essays on the Human and Non-Human, and the poetry collections WITCH (Penned in the Margins, 2019) and (forthcoming in 2027) The Fisher King (Fitzcarraldo Editions and Assembly Press). She is co-editor, with Sarah Shin, of Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Silver Press, 2025). Our own Elizabeth Sulis Kim is chairing.