After years of shifting locations across Edinburgh, The Famous Spiegeltent is set to return to St Andrew Square this summer, marking a significant homecoming for one of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s most recognisable venues. With an extended residence from 10 July to 31 August 2025, the season celebrates 105 years of The Famous Spiegeltent and the 21st anniversary of its house show, La Clique.
It’s centenary came due in 2020…remind me what we were all doing then?
The historic travelling venue, a mainstay of several international festivals, has played a defining role in shaping the cabaret, variety, and new circus scenes at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe since its first appearance in 1996. With its distinctive circular wooden structure, bevelled mirrors, and velvet-lined booths, The Famous Spiegeltent has built a reputation as a hub for innovative and avant-garde performance, hosting a range of acts from underground experimental theatre to world-class cabaret.
This return to St Andrew Square, where it last appeared in 2015, marks a milestone for both venue and Fringe audiences. While The Famous Spiegeltent has remained present during August in various locations—including George Square Gardens and the Meadows—this is its first return to its former home in almost a decade.
A Century of Entertainment in a Singular Space
Built in 1920 by Belgian master craftsmen Oscar Mols Dom and Louis Goor, The Famous Spiegeltent is one of the last remaining venues of its kind still in operation. Originally designed as a travelling entertainment space for fairs and festivals across Europe, it has evolved into a place where old-world glamour meets contemporary performance. Its parquet dance floor has seen generations of audiences experience performances that defy easy categorisation, from intimate acoustic concerts to acrobatic feats performed just inches from the crowd.
Throughout its history, The Famous Spiegeltent has hosted an extraordinary range of talent. Marlene Dietrich famously performed ‘Falling in Love Again’ on its stage in the 1930s, while more recent decades have seen acts such as Tim Minchin, The Tiger Lillies, Eddie Perfect, Meow Meow, and The Cat Empire build their reputations under its antique canopy.
David Bates, creative producer and long-time custodian of The Famous Spiegeltent, has been instrumental in its continued presence at the Edinburgh Fringe and around the world. Under his guidance, the venue has expanded beyond the festival circuit, touring across Australia, Europe, and North America, influencing the widespread adoption of similar Spiegel-style tents at major festivals.
La Clique: The Show That Changed the Game
Alongside The Famous Spiegeltent, its best-known in-house production, La Clique, also marks a milestone anniversary this summer. First staged in 2004 inside The Famous Spiegeltent at the Edinburgh Fringe, the show quickly established itself as a genre-defining spectacle. Mixing cabaret, burlesque, acrobatics, and vaudeville, La Clique set a new standard for contemporary variety theatre and, in doing so, helped to pave the way for an entire movement of intimate, high-energy cabaret circus.
Since its debut, La Clique has played to over one million people across 21 cities in 11 countries, including runs in London’s West End, New York, Sydney, and Paris. The show earned an Olivier Award for Best Entertainment.
This 21st-anniversary edition of La Clique promises retrospection as well as reinvention, bringing together a cast of performers spanning different eras of the show’s run. Bates describes it as “the sexiest, funniest and most dangerous birthday party in town,” adding:
“Leave your troubles at the doors of The Famous Spiegeltent and step into our Edinburgh-born international sensation, La Clique. This will be the celebration to end all celebrations, and we are honoured to share it with the people and the place that has forever changed all our lives.”
Over the years, La Clique has been credited with reviving and modernising interest in the cabaret and variety format, influencing new generations of artists and producers. Its mix of high-skill performance and irreverent offerings set a template for later productions, many of which now populate the modern Fringe landscape.
An Enduring Legacy
While The Famous Spiegeltent has continued to tour internationally, its absence from St Andrew Square since 2015 hasn’t gone unnoticed by Fringe-goers. Its return offers hints of a nostalgia trip and an extra anchor for the Fringe which has progressively migrated out of the New Town and into the Old over recent years.
In the years since, Edinburgh has seen an explosion of venues adopting the Spiegeltent format, particularly in George Square Gardens and Assembly’s Festival Village. Perhaps great minds think alike, or at least have the sense to copy a good idea.
Whatever the case, it’ll be good to see The Famous Spiegeltent back in the square this year where it belongs.
Featured Image: David & Persephone D’Arbela Bates credit: Jacquie Manning
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