By Roy Luxford, Creative Director
This March we unveiled the 2026 Edinburgh International Festival (International Festival) with a bold, globally minded programme that places American artists at its centre, reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the United States. This year’s edition, titled All Rise, stands among our most ambitious yet, with a slate of international commissions and co-productions that push artistic boundaries and spark cross-cultural dialogue.
On our stages in August, we have 22 premieres, six of them world premieres, from artists bringing timely perspectives from America, Brazil, Palestine and Scotland to the world stage in Edinburgh.
Ten of these are new commissions, works that wouldn’t exist without our commitment to enabling artists to bring their original work to the world stage. Every work has been selected because it matters now, artistically and culturally, but I am particularly proud of the role the International Festival can play in offering a home for original works from across art forms.
In opera, we’ll present the strikingly evocative world premiere of The Galloping Cure, from Missy Mazzoli. Since working with Missy in her festival debut in 2019 with Breaking the Waves, we have co-commissioned this new work with producers Opera Ventures and Scottish Opera. Mazzoli’s bold new opera for the opioid age is a haunting allegory for a crisis that crystallised in the US but has since become a worldwide epidemic.
As creative director, I find it important to keep a balance across the programme each year, in perspectives and through contrasting and complementary works. This year, the full force of Zurich Opera brings Verdi’s A Masked Ball to Edinburgh audiences. With the Orchestra of the Zurich Opera House under the baton of Gianandrea Noseda, Director Adele Thomas’s dazzling production will soar. This work also celebrates the International Festival’s unique role in bringing full, large-scale international opera productions to the UK – if you want to see a fully staged international opera production in its original form, then Edinburgh is the place to be.
Collaboration can come in many forms, and we celebrate our international origins in 2026 through a new multi-year collaboration with Festival d’Avignon and the Holland Festival, both formed alongside the International Festival in 1947. The three festivals’ eight-decade shared histories unite us as the three most significant postwar European festivals, and this collaboration will see a new international work produced and presented at each festival over the next three years, building deeper artistic connections between our festivals. The first commission is with Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy’s A Trial – After An Enemy of the People, an imagining of what happened to Dr Stockmann after the events of Ibsen’s play. With Golden Globe Best Actor winner Wagner Moura as Stockmann, this is not to be missed.
The International Festival is also the lead commissioner of Geoff Sobelle’s Clown Show – a portrait of America and the world, through the lens of a crumbling, big top, clown show, and a show about chaos and things falling apart. This remarkable and surprising new work follows recent memorable presentations of Sobelle’s FOOD and HOME and is one illustration of the International Festival’s nurturing of long-term relationships with artists.
Nurturing a work from commission to premiere is only part of the story. Increasingly, the International Festival has become a launchpad for productions that go on to reach wider audiences, with a growing number of transfers to London and beyond. Recent examples include the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of The Fifth Step by David Ireland, which premiered with us in 2024 before a successful transfer to London’s Soho Place with Jack Lowden and Martin Freeman in 2025. Prior to that, our presentations of Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s productions of A Little Life and Oedipus, both in Dutch, preceded successful new commercial outings in English for the West End. Oedipus has since been presented on Broadway. In 2025, the International Festival, together with National Theatre of Scotland and Dundee Rep Theatre, co-produced James Graham’s play Make It Happen, featuring Brian Cox, alongside London partners Neal Street and Playful Productions. This production played to a sell-out season, attended by over 22,000 people, and was a festival highlight for many.
It’s not only new works: the International Festival is also able to revive full productions for the programme. This year we revive Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer Zora Howard’s play HANG TIME for its European premiere. Produced by The Flea Theater in New York, HANG TIME confronts the legacy of racialised violence in America. Leading a revival enables us to programme directly into our theme and give further life to a work that deserves the widest possible audience.
In any festival season, about 30 per cent of our artists are Scottish or Scotland-based, and the International Festival plays a crucial role in platforming their work on the international stage. This year, When Prophecy Fails, made by a brilliant collective of independent artists under the banner of Groupwork, and co-directed by Vicki Manderson and Finn den Hertog, will be revived for our international audience before embarking on tour. The International Festival’s platform will also bring these works to a wider network of international promoters and presenters who always attend Edinburgh in August looking for work for their own seasons and festivals. In this year’s festival, Scottish artists include the Scottish Chamber Orchestra continuing its opera in concert series with Don Giovanni and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in the pit with San Francisco Ballet’s Mere Mortals.
Commissions stretch across every genre in the programme. Music commissions include a world-exclusive collaboration between the outstanding pianist Yuja Wang and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis; smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul and the genre-crossing Scottish Ensemble exploring Celtic music and mythology; and a world premiere from renowned Steve Reich, In All Your Ways, for the Colin Currie Group. All of these are world premieres, where artists have chosen the International Festival to debut their work, as a destination for the performing arts showcased at its best.
Edinburgh International Festival continues to develop a growing body of commissions and co-productions across the art forms and bringing ambitious new works to the stage. It harks back to our founding principles, as a festival established after the devastation of World War II to bring together artists and audiences from different nations, promoting cultural unity and international cooperation.
The 2026 programme brings 147 performances to Edinburgh stages this August, with many of these exciting moments that could only happen thanks to collaboration and cooperation across borders. It’s part of what makes the International Festival an unmissable moment in the cultural calendar each August, and we look forward to welcoming you to Edinburgh.
The Edinburgh International Festival takes place from 7 to 30 August 2026. For more information, visit eif.co.uk