olly MacFarlane always feels nerves and excitement building in her stomach as the train pulls into Edinburgh during the festival, clutching her hula-hoops and spangly leotards as she hurries towards the Royal Mile. MacFarlane is a street performer and cabaret act known as Polly Hoops, and August in Edinburgh was her biggest month of the year. “It’s always exciting and you get the butterflies coming into Waverley,” she said. “It’s so beautiful and quite nerve-wracking doing the fringe but it’s always wonderfully familiar as well.” For the last 70 years, the beginning of August would herald the start of the world’s largest annual arts, drama, literature and music jamboree. But for the first time since 1947, the year the international festival was launched in the aftermath of the second world war, Edinburgh’s theatres will be empty, shuttered by the coronavirus pandemic. The Royal Mile, the medieval, cobbled street where MacFarlane, 30, would perform to a crush of onlookers, will be silent. Edinburgh’s elegant squares, usually submerged under tented cities, beer halls and ticket booths, will simply host pigeons, casual visitors and lunchtime snacks. After several years learning her craft in Covent Garden, MacFarlane quit London for Scotland, having experienced the intensity of the fringe festival; like thousands of festival performers, it was a social and artistic experience without rival.