One of the most talked about shows at the 2026 Fringe isn’t a show at all, it’s a new venue, the Sauna Theatre. There is absolutely no euphemism at work in that name: it’s a big sauna that is also a theatre, designed by the people behind Paines Plough’s iconic Roundabout venue and occupying its space at Summerhall while it’s getting a refurb. Like the Roundabout, it can be packed up – it’s hoped there will be future stops in Manchester and London.
With a capacity of 80, it’s built around three wooden tiers of seating, three massive sauna stoves, and the art of aufguss, a sauna ritual involving scented ice and elaborate towel flapping performed by ‘sauna masters’. This is Britain, so obviously you don’t go in naked: you need swimwear and a towel, both of which can be rented if you don’t have your own.
I won’t lie: I do not like saunas: I find the whole process of deliberately getting overly hot and sweaty faintly insane, and for that reason – and because I only saw two shows of its lively daily programme – I’m not going to do a traditional starred review here because one, I spent the whole time mildly bugging out, and two, I think judging some of this stuff out of five is a bit weird as to some extent I’d be rating the concept of saunas.
The main thing you need to know is that while the shows have a 90-minute-plus running time, you get turfed out every 12 minutes or so to cool down in very cold showers and a plunge pool. This stops you dying of sauna, although it made for a slight glancing take on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: you simply cannot adapt her visionary modernist novel into approximately 36 minutes of actual show. There are in fact no live actors involved at all, but rather two sauna masters twirling around and lobbing scented ice on the hot stones, while an original pre-recording gallops through some of the more abstract poetic bits of the book. You are not getting the story of The Waves (like it doesn’t even get to the point that a single character is named) and essentially it’s cool artsy wallpaper for a sauna experience but there’s something to be said for that, surely.
There is also the nightly Sauna Sessions Arts Club, which seemed like an interesting contrast to The Waves, so I visited that as well. There is a techno DJ (in a little booth that is shielded from the heat) and apparently on the festival’s opening on Saturday there had been a lot of actual dancing from punters who came along ‘pre-served’ (boozing is discouraged in the sauna, which has a little outside bar selling only zero-alcohol beer and kvass, a traditional sauna drink).
On the sleepy Wednesday I went, nobody danced but we did enjoy a three-act cabaret style set, the same deal as a million shows at the festival except of course did I mention it was in a sauna? The first two were artists who’d been drafted in to do a bit: comic Shaparak Khorsandi offered a stand-up style solo slot on the themes of her work-in-progress Summerhall play Kismet, while the two actors from the Underbelly’s The Jolly Fishermen rather gamely did a scene from it in their swim shorts. After the second break, we saw a British aufguss guy do a performance that involved him wearing a full silver NASA suit and helmet to play the role of an astronaut saving the Earth (via the medium of dropping fragrant ice on hot stones, natch) but then getting stranded in space, at which point he did a big towel dance to ‘Sign of the Times’ by Harry Styles. To state the obvious, it was one of the more insane things I’ve seen at the Fringe, with a real whiff of Eurovision to it.
I don’t think there was a point where anything I saw (and there are lots of daily shows I didn’t get to see) made me think ‘wow, this is a perfect artistic marriage of sauna and theatre’. But I think if you love to sauna then the Sauna Theatre adds a pretty astonishing series of bells of whistles to your experience. And if you don’t love to sauna but do love interesting and unusual experiences - well honestly if I can make myself do it (and I have zero regrets) then you have no excuse.
For the full Sauna Theatre listings, see here.
