New performer-led venue from Brighton Fringe to launch in Edinburgh this summer

Rotunda is to be situated at George Heriot's School in the heart of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

The venue has three performance spaces - Bubble, Squeak and Pip - characterised by blue domes.

Ross Ericson, co-creator of the Rotunda through theatre company Grist To The Mill Productions, said: “We produced at the Fringe for a while, we’ve been back once since Covid. But we decided if we were going to come back, we need to come back with our venues, because that's the only way we're going to make it work.”

Rotunda splits ticket sales equally with performers after taking a deposit.

Mr Ericson added: “Everybody knows that the costs of putting on a show at any Fringe can be prohibitive. That’s why we do the utmost to keep performers costs down as much as possible.

“It's worked very well for us in Brighton. We have a lot of returning artists and it's nice that at the end of the end of the run, when you're doing your reconciliation that you actually find yourself sending people money.”

“Every year our costs go up and our financial risk grows, but every year we are rewarded by seeing the success of an eclectic mix of new and emerging artists.”

Last year, artists cited the rising price of Fringe accommodation and overall costs of performing at the festival as a barrier for being able to perform. Venues reported many artists were looking to cut short runs to two weeks rather than perform for the traditional month-long run.

The three venues operated by Rotunda range in size from Bubble, which seats an audience of 110 and Squeak, which seats 50 to Pip, a yurt, is a smaller space with 40 seats, marketed as being “ideal” for single performers doing stand up or cabaret style shows.

Running for three weeks and hosting 20 to 30 productions, Rotunda will also be the venue for Grist to the Mill’s own production of Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett and a performance of The Fox, The Slipper and the Severed Head - an adaptation of 18th-century Chinese supernatural stories - by its sister company, Red Dragonfly.

Mr Ericson said: “It’s a lovely site and well located. We are running for three weeks to accommodate the Scottish school holidays, but we’ve found in previous years that the audience has fallen off a bit in that last week anyway, as more visitors seem to be local than before the pandemic.”

George Heriot’s previously hosted the BBC at the Edinburgh Fringe venue from 2016 to 2018. The BBC cut back its coverage of the festival last year after 14 years.

Rotunda expanded from Brighton to Cheltenham and Gloucester Fringe last year and will also launch this year at the Langton Green Festival in Tunbridge Wells in June.

Last year, Fleabag producer Francesca Moody launched a venue which aimed to “flip the traditional Fringe model” by paying performers rather than charging them to perform. Shedinburgh is due to return to Edinburgh College of Art at this year’s Fringe, on a bigger site.