Well this is a real ‘only at the Fringe’ event: the Sauna Theatre is exactly as it sounds, ie it’s an 80-seat theatre that is also a sauna that will pop up in Summerhall for the duration of the festival, presumably located where the old Paines Plough Roundabout used to be. Perhaps unsurprisingly it’s both the UK’s largest sauna and first ever sauna arts centre. The exact logistics of all this are so mind-boggling as to maybe be a ‘well maybe just try it, don’t ask us’ type affair. But yeah: you have to wear swimwear, it really is a sauna, there’s an ice bath too.
The programme is extremely varied, albeit understandably sauna centric, and based around ‘aufguss’ sauna ritual. The shows run the gamut from Mysteries of the Picts – a sensory show that takes place at noon and is designed to conjure the ambience of anicent Pictish sweathouses – to an alarming number of clubbing based events including both morning and evening raves almost every day of the run. But if you want to see a stage adaptation of Virgina Woolfe’s landmark modernist novel The Waves in a sauna, then you absolutely can do that.
For the full Sauna Theatre listing, see here.
