The news that the continued expansion of the University of Edinburgh and building works will see the disappearance of Pleasance Dome as a fringe venue in around two years’ time is unlikely to cause much distress. Building work on the McEwan Hall has already forced Underbelly out of Bristo Square and into George Square, where it appears to be thriving. The university is hardly going to kill the fringe goose that lays it a golden egg each year. The Pleasance will, no doubt, be offered another space, possibly one that serves contemporary theatre – and audiences – rather better than the Dome. The history of the fringe and the spaces it has colonised is one of constant evolution and often that evolution has had a positive effect on the work presented.
In fact, one of the reasons for the success of the Edinburgh fringe is the way it has spread out into different spaces in the city over the years, and one of the things that has been most interesting to observe is the relationship between those spaces and the work presented at the festival. There was a time, a decade or more ago, when pretty much every show took place in a temporary black-box space, and black-box spaces encourage particular types of work, such as the one-person monologue.
Sometimes a space and a piece of work can set up a fascinating dynamic with each other. In the international festival – hamstrung in recent years by contracts with theatres unsuitable for contemporary work – Simon McBurney’s The Encounter worked particularly well this year in the anonymous, blank space of the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. The venue left a vacuum, to be filled by the audience’s imagination. The Summerhall lecture theatres lend themselves particularly well to the kind of work that directly engages an audience, such as the delightful Portraits in Motion. Similarly, the last part of the Jennifer Tremblay Trilogy, The Deliverance, exquisitely performed by Maureen Beattie, plays very neatly design-wise on the fact that Assembly Roxy is an old church.
Summerhall, has of course, been one of the venues that has transformed the work available on the fringe, not just through smart curation, but because of the way it marries shows to the right space, letting the ghosts rise when necessary. Last year’s KlangHaus was a superb example of that. What’s happening at Summerhall is a gradually evolving investigation into performance space and how it operates in dialogue with the work presented there.
As Paines Plough’s travelling performance space the Roundabout increasingly proves, the limitations of a space can also prove a liberation. It’s a wonderful space for a show such as Every Brilliant Thing or Lungs or The Human Ear, and an utterly punishing one for those shows that fail to fully engage with its exposing dynamic. It’s a space in which the audience is as active an element in the show as the performers. When shows are not inclusive or are misfiring you can see the boredom and disappointment on the faces of everyone opposite. It is completely unforgiving.
Paines Plough’s James Grieve told me that the company are still very much investigating how the space works, and at a recent workshop they made some interesting discoveries: you probably couldn’t do Waiting for Godot in the Roundabout, because the space doesn’t respond to inaction, and monologues are tricky, in a 360-degree environment. Hamlet’s To be, or not to be apparently only really worked when delivered by an actor lying flat on his back. One of the purposes of this year’s Roundabout programme is to see whether the space can embrace a full range of work, from plays to standup.
Paines Plough’s understanding that the work and the space can’t be separated from each other, and that one influences the other, is crucial for theatre. This is particularly true in Edinburgh where, too often, work is made to fit the space, rather than creating spaces that reflect contemporary theatre culture. When the Pleasance has to leave the Dome, there could be a fine opportunity to make a new venue with more flexible space, responding to what young theatre-makers want to create, rather than defining it.
