Edinburgh gears up for the Fringe

A THEATRICAL mini-city is taking shape this week, as a small army of tent-builders, riggers and technicians have set about constructing what is rapidly becoming the new "high street" of the Edinburgh Fringe. For years, Fringe venues have plied their trade in the gardens, student centres, and lecture halls around Edinburgh University, but this year the event is seeing a focus on its evolving southern hub like never before.

Approaching a million tickets will go on sale this August in close to 30 performance spaces packed into the quarter square mile, including Bristo and George Squares. The closure of the Assembly Rooms on George Street has seen the Assembly theatre operation leave the New Town behind, and join the other three big Fringe operations centred on the city's South Side. The move was forced on the Assembly by renovations at its home, but "there was no idea of doing things this big," one senior staff member said this week.

A ringing success for the festival this summer is critical to the future of the Fringe, venue bosses say, as the event sets out its stall in the run-up to the London Olympics in 2012, with which it will overlap next year, and hopefully gain rather than lose the tourist pounds. "It is a really important year to get it right," says co-director of Underbelly and Fringe board member Charlie Wood, "with all the uncertainty of the games in 2012 – the concern about where the audiences might go."

Much of that success could be settled in an area where the "high-street" effect, said Wood, is driving the concentration. "Anyone coming up for the first time, who may have been to other festivals in a field, where they would normally expect to find it all in one area, will find it gives it to them. It is not something the Fringe has ever had before. It is really exciting."

Exact figures are hard to come by, but the Assembly expects to offer well over 400,000 tickets in the eight theatres and performance spaces it is to run in and around George Square. Down the road in Bristo Square the Gilded Balloon venue has 254,000 on offer, while the two other major venues, Underbelly and Pleasance, have major spaces in Udderbelly's Pasture, a giant purple cow tent, and in the Pleasance Dome. The BBC has joined them with a first-time festival hub of its own, hosting all its events at the BBC Potterrow, while the Fringe's office is based there in Fringe Central, its centre for performers and press.

Venues offering food and drink run from the revamped Gilded Garden, a medieval-themed covered bar and beer garden in Bristo Square, to gourmet offerings from Edinburgh's Outsider restaurant and Urbanangel in George Square. From the illuminated tubes of the walk-through Mirazozo structure, to family shows or late-night comedy gigs, the area will be the first stop for thousands of Fringe punters. You could watch back-to-back shows here for three weeks, and not see the same one twice.

If there are any questions it might be over the crowds. The Underbelly reckons about 10,000 people a day already come through. But, critically, the McEwan Hall, which has hosted major shows in the past, is closed this year for renovation, taking about 5,000 punters a day out of the equation. It will be back on stream in 2012. Wood says all the venues will be carefully monitoring numbers, and notes last year there was just one reported theft in the entire month, when a woman left her bag in Bristo Square.

Wood says "doom-mongers" who suggest venues elsewhere in the city will suffer as numbers are sucked in to the area are wrong, and that festival-goers will want to explore the wider Fringe, as they always have, including the other venues operated by the "big four" .

In the grim underground parking lot of the university's David Hume Tower, Ruari Cormack, technical director of the Assembly and his team are busy creating theatrical magic. "This is my pride and joy, because it was a car park, it's now a venue and a VIP bar and I drew it," he says.

The convergence on the south side began a decade ago. Fringe veteran Karen Koren moved her Gilded Balloon outfit to Teviot Row House, the university's student union building, after the Cowgate fire in 2002 destroyed most of the venues they used. The Pleasance, which had a long-standing Fringe operation in the Potterrow Student Centre, launched the Dome. The Udderbelly arrived in 2006.

"It will be different, and it will be good, because I think people will come to us for a rest in between running to shows," Koren says, hoping the new venues will both compete hard and help lift each other's audiences. "It's going to be interesting."

George Square and the university buildings around it have been used off and on for years, most notably with the mirrored Spiegeltent in its gardens. But the Assembly, under director William Burdett-Coutts, has brought both gardens and inside theatre spaces together in a unified operation. Incorporating closed roads on two sides of the square, it has multiple entrances, eight theatres, five bars and nine food and drink outlets.

Cormack and his team arrived with eight articulated trucks and ten 40ft shipping containers of equipment. On Buccleuch Place, outside the university's George Square Theatre, three have been used to create an enclosure for the Silent Disco show, where dancers move to music on headsets. In recent days as many as 100 crew have been at work, and there will be 350 staff on site this year.

With teams upgrading power lines into the gardens from 100 amps to 400, "we are investing here for the next five years," Cormack says. There is an understanding with the university, staff say, that the Assembly is here for the long term.

Families can dip into one show, buy a snack and head for another. And a single drinks licence covers the Assembly area, meaning people can buy a drink at one bar and move around.

"There's a huge number of shows here," says the Assembly's programme manager and producer, Michael Harris. "The idea is having a hub where we are really building a destination. It's an experience as opposed to going to a show. You really enter an arena. It's having a performance village."

The gardens space includes three performance areas, with a Spiegeltent and the Dans Paleis on raised platforms, while the gardens themselves are covered with rubber mats covered by astroturf to give a contoured feel. There's a tiny "Mess Tent" being run by burlesque performer Miss Behave, with impromptu rolling shows for only about 20 people, and an Absinthe Bar planned in a horsebox. More prosaically there are four banks of 20 portable toilets.

In the surrounding university buildings, the Assembly is running three lecture theatres as performance spaces. For the 321 Bar, Cormack's team has built a double staircase down into a courtyard covered by a panoply of lights. The performers' Club Bar is taking shape in the car park, along with an intimate theatre billed as the equivalent of the Assembly Rooms' famous Wildman Rooms.

Cormack, who went through a score of different lay-outs, is installing temporary plywood walls that will be covered by deluxe decor, fixed ceiling bars to use in future years and a fire-alarm system for people rather than cars.

Seven months of planning ended in a narrow escape. He arrived to find three inches of water in the car park, after gullies overflowed in the same rains that flooded Morningside streets. "It wasn't what we wanted to see on day one of the build," he says but, had it been August, the same weather could have wrecked the site. As his team mopped up water, the council rapidly cleared blocked drains. "Their response has been phenomenal," he says.