Brian Ferguson: Book Festival is chock full of highlights

Quite a few musicians and their followers are mourning the absence of the Fringe's Spiegeltent from St Andrew Square and it was a depressing sight to see its garden locked up after dark at the weekend.

Val McDermid

Fortunately the Book Festival has arrived at the other end of George Street just in time to brighten the gloom, with its late-night Unbound programme of music and spoken word in its own Spiegeltent.

The two-week programme looks chock full of highlights, but a stand-out seems to be the debut of what is billed as “a musical literary incarnation of Avengers Assemble”.

The line-up of authors making up the “supergroup” Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers includes Val McDermid, Mark Billingham, Doug Johnstone, Stuart MacBride and Chris Brookmyre.

Exactly what they will be murdering will be revealed on 23 August.

• Everyone and their dog has been told to be on high alert in Edinburgh this month.

The Traverse Theatre is among the venues warning not to bring any big bags into the venue – or even worse, leave it lying around unattended.

But an entire gallery has been created in its bar to warn of everything from nudity, violence, adult themes, domestic violence, loud sound effects, flashing lights, haze effects, feathers and even pink gunge.

The most extensive list, for the show Wild Bore, which turns the tables back on theatre critics and their bad reviews, includes “strobe lighting, excessive nudity, scatalogical moments, coarse language and irreverent humour”.

It adds: “You will probably be offended… especially if you are a critic.”

• The last big event I’d been at in the EICC was an audience with Hollywood legend Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It was another kind of cinematic experience this week in the vast Lennox Suite, where the star had held court.

Cirkopolis is one of the flagship shows being staged there under a new partnership between the Pleasance and the EICC.

The sequences created by Quebec’s Cirque Eloize for the massive stage in the 
auditorium would be impressive enough, but there is an extra wow factor thanks to one of Edinburgh’s biggest cinema screens and a series of massive cityscapes, inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

The whole spectacle for me wondering whether the Pleasance had accidentally discovered a big new venue for the film festival.