The Famous Spiegeltent not returning for Fringe 2026
There are venues, and then there's the Spiegeltent.
If you've never been inside it, I'm sorry, because right now it looks like you may never get the chance. Picture a big top that got lost on its way to a Weimar cabaret. Teak dance floor worn smooth by a century of feet. Booths upholstered in velvet the colour of spilled wine. Mirrors everywhere, bevelled and slightly warped, so that wherever you sat you could watch the whole room watching the stage. Marlene Dietrich sang in it. That's not marketing guff, it actually happened, sometime in the 1930s, decades before the tent first rolled into Edinburgh.
And this August, for the first time since its triumphant comeback last year, it won't be here.
The short version of why is almost insultingly boring. Paperwork. New building regulations in Scotland say that any structure standing for more than 28 days counts as permanent, and permanent structures need a building warrant and a structural engineer to sign off on them. David Bates, the Australian showman who has hauled this thing around the world since spotting it at the Book Festival in 1996, made the obvious point: it's a tent. A 106 year old tent made of wood and canvas and stained glass. You cannot certify it the way you'd certify an office block, because it was never meant to be one. The council says the paperwork simply wasn't submitted in time. Bates says the rules were never written with something like this in mind. Both things can be true and neither helps.
The infuriating bit, for those of us who care, is that this is the second time the tent has been shown the door from St Andrew Square. Back in 2017 it was the corporate neighbours who wanted their "relaxation space" back, and the tent vanished from the city for eight long years. Then last summer it returned, La Clique came home for its 21st birthday, the queues snaked round the garden, and it felt like a wrong had finally been put right. Thirty years at the Fringe. One glorious homecoming. And now this.
Spare a thought for the acts. Bates has admitted there's no plan B for La Clique this year, and told the performers booked into the tent, with barely four months' notice, to go find other stages. Some will land on their feet. Fringe folk usually do. But La Clique without the Spiegeltent is like whisky out of a paper cup. You can do it. Why would you.
What stings most is the unfairness of the thing. Assembly's spiegeltent in George Square carries on regardless, sitting pretty on a three year permission that doesn't expire until 2028. Nobody begrudges them that. But it does rather prove the point that this wasn't inevitable, just badly timed and badly handled, by whom depending on which account you believe.
Rules exist for good reasons. Nobody wants an unsafe venue. But somewhere in Edinburgh there is a filing cabinet that has managed what neither war nor a hundred years on the road could do: it has kept the Famous Spiegeltent dark in August.
The council says it's still exploring options with the organisers. Let's hope somebody in that room remembers what this city's festival is actually for. Because a Fringe without the Spiegeltent isn't a disaster. It's worse than that. It's a little bit less magic, and magic is the only thing we were ever really selling.
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