Edinburgh fringe’s first sauna theatre packs 80-seat venue with swimwear-clad crowds

Audiences at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe are leaving performances with rosy cheeks and beaming faces, according to the venue’s head of sauna, Deborah Carr. The cause is the UK’s first purpose-built sauna theatre, an 80-seat facility behind the Summerhall arts centre that has drawn sweaty, swimwear-clad crowds since opening this August.

Co-founded by theatre makers James Grieve and Lucy Osborne, the Sauna Theatre is the first project from their new company, Sauna Sessions Arts Club. It combines traditional sauna rituals with theatre, music, storytelling and aufguss, a performance form in which a sauna master infuses ice and water with essential oils, places the infusion on the stove and circulates the fragrant steam with towel-waving choreography.

Grieve said the venue is part of a global tradition. “We’ve done a lot of research over the last few years and art and culture in saunas proliferates the world over,” he told The Guardian. “There’s a great tradition of storytelling, of folk music, in saunas.”

Inside, three tiers of wooden seating surround three stoves that can heat the air to 90°C (194°F). Shows have built-in breaks, and audience members can leave at any point or enter a cold plunge. Showers, mirrors and hairdryers make it easier for visitors to go about their day afterwards.

The programme ranges from morning raves to storytelling, theatre and music events. Mysteries of the Picts, performed at noon daily, features aufguss from two sauna masters set to traditional folk music, with actors telling the story of ancient sweat houses thought to have provided community spaces for Celtic tribes in Scotland during the late Roman period.

Grieve said an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves worked especially well. “Virginia Woolf talks a lot about heat and light and water,” he said. “The aufguss masters perform rituals to that text and really help people feel like they’re inside the language, like they are feeling and sensing the language on their skin, through their nose, as well as listening to the actors perform it.”

Organisers say the main challenges have been around etiquette, such as ensuring people sit on towels. Some attendees arrived assuming the sauna was metaphorical, despite emails reminding them to bring a bathing suit. Those without swimsuits can borrow them, an offer many have taken up.

Grieve and Osborne hope to bring the venue back next year. “This has been a really exciting month for us to experiment with what’s possible in the sauna space,” Grieve said. “What we want to do is try to find the kind of work that only works in a sauna or that works best in a sauna.”

Carr said the response has been positive. “We see these lovely rosy cheeks and beaming faces as they go out,” she said. “And then when people have come back, they’ve said: ‘I just felt so amazing. Not only did I enjoy it, I felt great for the rest of the day.’”