Every year on the Fringe it feels like there are more site-specific pieces of theatre, writes Charlotte Higgins. Grid Iron, a young Scottish company, has been the vanguard of this sort of drama, and its Devil's Larder, set, of all places, in the Princes Street Debenhams, is magical. It does precisely what site-specific theatre should - transform the drama through the qualities of the space, and transform the space through the qualities of the drama.
Who would have thought that the beloved home of the Designers at Debenhams range could become, after hours, a place filled with such spectral spookiness?
Just because it's site-specific, of course, doesn't mean it's any good. Ren-Sa, a dance piece programmed by the estimable Aurora Nova, is staged in a warehouse somewhere in Edinburgh. I can't tell you where, because part of the "experience" of this work, which is supposed to convey the atmosphere of a Japanese horror movie, is being driven to the site in a van with its windows blacked out, which conveys no particular sensation other than that of car sickness.
The show itself contains a lot of writhing on the floor, orientalising gesture, strobe lighting and grimly loud music. But atmospheric it isn't.
Nonetheless, theatre-makers - and visual artists, for that matter - have really pushed the envelope by getting out of traditional environments. So why haven't classical composers and musicians? Surely there's an enormous possibility for original and exciting work to be made in spaces that are outside concert halls.
But the world of classical music is too damn conservative to drag itself out of the recital room. It's also partly the that composers and performers are so often so far removed from each other that the notion of collaboratively devising work for a found space seems pretty unlikely. At bottom, it's a lack of imagination. Shame.
