By David Pollock
Published: 6/8/2011

A visually striking new venue with a quirky, eclectic programme, Summerhall’s highlights include an all-night where bunk beds are provided for audience members to sleep in. David Pollock gets a guided tour

The former Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies is a building with history, and – for the duration of this year’s Edinburgh Festival at least – a bright and unexpected future. Tucked away on a corner of the Meadows, a few minutes’ walk from the new Fringe hub around Bristo Square, the rechristened Summerhall will serve as a venue with a difference for the next three weeks, staging an eclectic variety of theatre, spoken word, music and film events.

On a guided tour of the building a few days before opening, these two eras of its life collide with one another in often striking fashion. The venue’s late-night bar is an L-shaped room at the heart of the building, with large, open windows on either side and a balcony framed by an ornate metal and wood balustrade along the south wall. “It was the dissection room,” points out Summerhall’s director Rupert Thomson with relish. “When we moved in it was filled with all these metal tables…”

Opened in 1916 but appearing much older, the building combines the elegant and the institutional in that way Edinburgh’s academic spaces do so well. Thomson points out a grand ballroom-like space, a beautiful assembly hall which will serve as the main performance area, but which will count among its shows one performed to audiences sitting in lifeboats on the floor. Elsewhere, smaller lecture theatres will host one-off events, including this weekend’s Scottish Independent Record Fair, which will feature acoustic sets by artists from labels including Fence and Chemikal Underground.

In a corridor below the grand reception hall, Thomson pauses. “It gets quite spooky when it’s late,” he muses. “I was chased through here by a crazy naked guy carrying a knife the other night, for example.” Alongside him Jorge Lopes Ramos laughs: he’s the Brazilian co-director (alongside Persis-Jade Maraval) of one of the most ambitious shows at Summerhall, an all-night reinterpretation of Euripides’s Greek tragedy entitled Hotel Medea. The “crazy naked guy” was one of his charges in full dress rehearsal mode, as is the room fitted out with a semi-circle of bunk beds for audience members to sleep in, and a “campaign room” with interactive multi-media equipment.

“Everyone knows what happens in Medea,” says Ramos, “we just offer a few surprises in how it’s presented. The length of the show is nothing new, back in the 1960s and 1970s you had 20-hour long performances, seven-day performances. What we do have is a very strong idea, an idea we commit to which comes with a lot of discipline and precision. Anyone who hears about it, they either say, ‘Never!’ or else they share the vision with us. They want that show to exist. They want the possibility of going to an overnight show from midnight to dawn where people take care of you and then share breakfast with you. They hear of it and they don’t want to miss it.”

The three-word mantra Hotel Medea is informed by is “immersion, participation, interaction” – so much so that an audience-responsive event entitled Audience As Document has its own place on Summerhall’s programme and a corridor in the building will be given over to a display from similar past events. One spinner stand, says Ramos, will be filled with past funding applications for the show, “successful on one side, unsuccessful on the other – you can guess which one will be most full.”

“We require long-term collaboration and shared vision from a venue,” he continues. “There needs to be an understanding of the principles of looking after audiences, and a dedication which goes beyond any normal schedule of work. We need to run the whole show for a week before it opens just to tech it, for example. The actors need to get into their night-time sleeping patterns. The show has to be adapted to each new venue. We even have to consider when the sun will come up.” The finale is precisely synchronised with the dawn, the time of which will change by 30 minutes between the start and the end of this run.

Ramos and Thomson, both 29, met each other at a cultural leadership programme at Battersea Arts Centre (a producing partner and sponsor of Summerhall alongside the DeMarco Archive Trust), and they seem to enjoy a shared rapport when it comes to work that’s envelope-pushing, if not outright experimental. “Having seen it, you’ll remember Hotel Medea for the rest of your life,” says Thomson, the former editor of Edinburgh arts magazine The Skinny and the programmer of last Fringe’s Roxy Art House events. “It reminds me of those really big nights out when you were younger, where you would stay up all night and it would be worth it. As you get older those nights would blur into one, whereas this is a similar shared experience that has the same genetic penetration of committing that much of your physical effort to it. You won’t forget it.”

Hotel Medea is just one of many events which Thomson has programmed because they “interrogate their form of choice”, for example readings by authors like Stewart Home, Iain Sinclair and Tom McCarthy, and a series of “cineconcerts” – bands playing over film. “I like the way that challenges your sense of what music’s for,” says Thomson, “and what film’s for, and it’s a very strong overlap. You see the band as well as the film, and you can’t forget they’re there.”

It’s the kind of mouth-watering programme that suggests Summerhall could be a cult hit of this year’s Festival, although the “sold” sign on the billboard outside is a longer term portent. Thomson is entirely unsure if it might return in 2012, but at this point his only responsibility is to lay down a marker.

Thomson says: “Right now, all I want Summerhall to do is inspire people as much as it has the potential to. Our job is to put on a really exciting festival that people talk about and that’s ready to happen again in future, and to work with the building in doing that. It gives a lot, and to try and homogenise that space would be quite wrong.”

• Hotel Medea is at Summerhall until 27 August, Fridays and Saturdays only (plus Thursday 25 August); today at 11:45pm. The Scottish Independent Record Fair is at the venue tomorrow from 1pm. For full details of Summerhall’s Fringe programme, visit www.summerhall.co.uk.