AN opening extravaganza of light and music celebrating 70 years of Edinburgh's International Festival - a free event which will take over an entire area of the capital city - is at the heart of the festival's 2017 programme.

Nine operas, a major new two-work play, The Divide, set in a dystopian future by Alan Ayckbourn and the Old Vic, concerts by PJ Harvey and Jarvis Cocker, late night cabaret by Australian singer Meow Meow, a celebration of the Incredible String Band, evening shows by Turner Prize winning visual artist Martin Creed, and the use of new venues also mark the 70th anniversary festival programme (EIF).

The opening event, Bloom, will take over an as-yet-unannounced "precinct" of the city on August 4, in a free ticketed event - unlike previous opening events under artistic director Fergus Linehan, it will not be fixated on one edifice in the city.

Once again the lightshow will be produced by 59 Productions, who also worked on the Harmonium Project in 2015 and Deep Time, the opening event last year.

The programme says it will be an "immersive environment of colour, texture, sound and sensations."

Linehan, in his third year, said the opening event is inspired by the way Edinburgh blossomed culturally after the Second World War, and how the Edinburgh festival had led to the growth of other cultural festivals around the world.

"It's about going back to 1947 - the whole city was in darkness in the war years, and then suddenly all the lights in the castle were lit up," he said.

"No one put out any flowers, no one wore any colourful clothes, it was just regarded as inappropriate - but there was this Wizard of Oz moment, when everything kind of went from monochrome to Technicolour," he said.

"The second idea of it is that the festival pollinated - suddenly all of these other festivals began.

"So it is a very simple idea beginning to propagate throughout the world, the completely barren landscape just exploding into colour."

He added: "It is also about the sheer fact of beauty, not thinking of any narrative, trying to capture a sense of something that is just gorgeous, and the soundscape will reference the history of the festival in some way."

The actual area of the city for the sound and light show, will be announced in the next four or five weeks.

Linehan added: "We will have the event, and then we will have the precinct for people to walk through after, so we will have 20,000 people at the event itself, and then once you get a few hours of people walking around there will be much bigger numbers."

This year’s International Festival, which returns its yellow 'Welcome World' style from last year, runs from Friday 4 to Monday 28 August, and includes 2,020 artists from 40 nations.

Artists in the programme include Sir Bryn Terfel, conductor Riccardo Chailly, Sitar player and composer Anoushka Shankar, the violinist Nicola Benedetti, the Nederlands Dan Theater and the orchestra of La Scala.

Leading Scottish theatre companies the Citizens Theatre, Royal Lyceum Theatre, and the Traverse Theatre Company present works which look at the origins of European drama.

The work of Edinburgh-based playwright Zinnie Harris underpins three of these productions: Oresteia: This Restless House from the Citizens Theatre, a reimagining of Aeschylus’s 2,500-year-old drama; an new adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s comment on the rise of extremism, Rhinoceros, from the Lyceum Theatre, and the world premiere of new work Meet me at Dawn from the Traverse Theatre Company.

The Divide will be presented in two parts of three hours each at the King’s Theatre over two weeks, with a cast yet to be announced.

Linehan said the Ayckbourn plays are "extraordinary, and unlike anything you have read before."

In the plays, men and women have to live on different sides of a giant wall in a future UK, because of a disease that women give to men.

Because of this, Linehan said, "homosexuality is the norm and heterosexuality is regarded as a perversion, and the punishment that the male side impose on the female side is harsh...the optimism in it is that if you set up something that is fundamentally unfair, it does begin to break apart."

The contemporary music programme features artists including singer-songwriter and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker with Chilly Gonzalez, The Magnetic Fields, Mercury Prize winners PJ Harvey and Benjamin Clementine, Sitar star Anoushka Shankar and a celebration of the music of Edinburgh’s own The Incredible String Band.

The programme has focus on opera, including the first appearance of Scottish Opera on stage for several years (with Greek) as well as Verdi's take on the 'Scottish play', Macbeth, and Puccini's La Boheme, both performed by the Teatro Regio Torino, Don Giovanni directed by Ivan Fischer in a sparse production, as well as Wagner's Die Walkure and Britten's Peter Grimes.

Verdi's Macbeth was the first opera performed at the 1947 International Festival.

"The programme in general is as close to a thematic programme as I would ever do," Linehan said.

"You cannot ignore the 70th birthday...and in terms of programming, opera was at the centre of it in 1947, and was the beginning of it all.

"Opera is also the one genre the touch point for everything that goes on: it's writing, it's choreography, it's theatre, it's visual, it's music, it's everything, so we took the opportunity to put together an opera programme that is not only extensive but is intended to be a popular opera programme.

"Even things like Greek, by Scottish Opera, refers to a Steven Berkoff play, it's a punchy piece.

"It's about delivering at a high level but also starting a conversation about what we can do when we put opera at the centre."

The Festival is also in the third year of a special residency with Castlebrae Community High School, now in its third and final year.

The residency culminates this August with the school gym hall being transformed into a performance venue at this year’s International Festival, presenting hip-hop dance company Boy Blue Entertainment – also performing at The Lyceum - with the world premiere of a new show Project R.E.B.E.L.

Several shows at this years EIF are also being staged at the Church Hill Theatre in Morningside.

Financially, Mr Linehan said there was "good and bad" news for the EIF.

The funding from the City of Edinburgh Council was stand still from 2011-2015 at 2.389m but has declined to £2.22m since then.

Mr Linehan said that audiences were good but "anyone reliant on the public purse now is right to be nervous, and we continue to manage cuts from the city council, year in and year out, and we are managing that, but there is a big swing towards raising more money from the public and sponsors but that cannot continue indefinitely.

"But that won't sustain itself, we cannot be cut forever by the city council.

"There is a point of reckoning where you are riding the other side of it too hard or you begin to change the fundamental fabric of the festival.

"I hope we are coming to the end of the period of cuts. We are actually talking about the material withdrawal of funds - that just cannot go on.

"You cannot salami slice indefinitely."