How, you may wonder, does a city the size of Edinburgh find hundreds of places in which to stage the 2,000 plus performances that go on during the Edinburgh Festival? It's a tight squeeze when you consider that there's the Edinburgh International Festival, the Film Festival and The Book Festival going on at the same time.
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The fact is that the organizers of the Fringe Festival have had more than 60 years of practice in fitting it all in. For every elegant 18th century hall or Victorian Church, there's also a room over a pub, a restaurant with the tables pushed aside, a hidden walled garden or a tent in a field.
These are some of the stranger venues that have been, or continue to be, performance spaces during the Edinburgh Festival:
- A public toilet At the 2003 festival, audience members stood in line at the St James Public Toilets to watch a Dublin-based theatre company Semper Fi in a tale of murder and blackmail called Ladies & Gents. Audience members were pushed into the toilets a few at a time and different people saw the play in different orders.
- A private flat The Grid Iron Theatre produced Those Eyes, That Mouth, a play for an actress and a musician, in a private apartment. The audience eavesdropped on the private world, between sleeping and waking, of the play's main character.
- The Famous Spiegeltent About a million miles away from the tiny venues above, The Famous Spiegeltent is one of the last of the mirror-lined Belgian tents that housed traveling cabarets, dance halls and salons in the early 20th century. A magical creation of wood, mirrors, canvas, leaded glass, velvet and brocade, The Famous Spiegeltent was built by master craftmen in 1920.
Marlene Dietrict sang Falling in Love Again on the stage of this very spiegeltent in the 1930s. For the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Famous Spiegeltent is erected in the George Square Gardens for everything from nightly cabaret to day time tea dances and dancing lessons. The BBC often broadcasts from The Famous Spiegeltent.
