This year’s Edinburgh International Festival will open in explosive fashion, certainly in terms of the ambition attached to presenting a full staging of the late Sir John Tavener’s masterwork The Veil of the Temple, which the composer described as “the supreme achievement of my life”. Presented in the UK for the first time since its premiere at London’s Temple Church in 2003, the performance will last for eight hours, from mid-afternoon until late evening on the Festival’s first Saturday. The Veil of the Temple will be no act of penance; rather one of transcendence, with suitably spaced refreshment breaks and beanbags supplied. But while its length makes it an oddity in Edinburgh in August, it’s not a rarity. Few other places in the world permit such open experimentation with durational work, and in the International Festival and the Fringe there have been many such experiments over the years. The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today One of the earliest was also one of the most infamous, a production which is still spoken about with wide-eyed enthusiasm by those who experienced it. First performed at London’s ICA in early 1979, The Warp by maverick theatre-maker Ken Campbell also came to that year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, to the now-demolished Regent Cinema in Abbeyhill. A transcendental 22-hour experience, the entrance fee of one pound bought turned-on attendees into a sequence of ten playlets transcribed by Campbell from the thoughts and memories of fellow eccentric and noted poet, painter and jazz musician Neil Oram into a spectacle of live storytelling. Spanning four centuries, The Warp blended science fiction, jazz-rock musical, sex, drugs and promenade performance, with 50 actors playing 200 roles in a non-stop cornucopia of counterculture gig theatre which was as transgressive as punk and as over-stuffed with ambition as prog rock. The Scotsman’s 2025 Edinburgh Festival coverage: everything you need to know In 2011, one of the Festival Fringe’s current key venues was opened in a manner which called back to Campbell’s work. Hotel Medea began at Summerhall at midnight and ran through until sunrise, lasting approximately six hours, during which the audience were encouraged to dance and eat in honour of the wedding of Medea and Jason from Greek mythology, then experience the break-up of their relationship, including being tucked into bed as the characters’ soon-to-be-deceased children. Another promenade spectacular, Hotel Medea was told in three parts. “It's very much about staying up together all night, and that creates that sense of ritual, the sense of community and togetherness that we're always looking for through theatre,” said co-director Persis-Jade Merivala at the time, invoking the same spirit of community ritual Benedetti taps into with her words on The Veil of the Temple. Nor is it just serious theatre which benefits from this endurance-testing format. Mark Watson was already a comedian on the up when he captured the imagination and the headlines in 2004 with Mark Watson's Overambitious 24-Hour Show, a successful attempt to break the world record for longest stand-up performance. “Watson's eclectic show included a blind date, a debate on the existence of God, a Euro 2004 review and readings from his novel, Bullet Points,” reported the BBC at the time. “The comedian began games of Chinese Whispers among the audience to cover his toilet breaks.” Held at the 160-capacity Cowgate Central venue after the nearby Wilkie House proved too small for the opening audience, there were also cameos from Adam Hills, Stewart Lee, Dara O'Briain and Jenny Éclair, and a finale in which Watson proposed to his girlfriend Emily, one of 12 people to remain for the duration. Watson returned to the format every year until 2009, including with Mark Watson’s Seemingly Impossible 36-Hour Circuit of the World in 2006, which broke his own record. Since Watson’s efforts, attempts to grab the attention with long Fringe shows have really needed to pull something out of the bag to register. Neither a comedy nor strictly a piece of theatre, comedian Bob Slayer’s Iraq Out & Loud was very much the epitome of a Fringe concept in 2016 – a consecutive, real-time reading of every word in the then-just-published Chilcot Report into the UK’s role in the Iraq war. Undertaken in a shed next to Slayer’s BlundaBus venue at Potterrow, Iraq Out & Loud took 1,500 comedians and members of the public (including this critic, writing for this paper) 13 days, reading in short chunks for 24 hours a day, to get through the entire 2.6 million words of the report, winning Slayer an Edinburgh Comedy Awards Panel Prize for Spirit of the Fringe. Edinburgh International Festival itself has also been no stranger to staging ambitiously lengthy works in the past, although not one as overtly singular as The Veil of the Temple. In 1994 it hosted the world premiere of Robert Lepage’s The Seven Streams of the River Ota at Meadowbank Sports Centre; or rather, the first three instalments of Lepage’s eventual seven-part, nine-hour investigation into the literal and metaphorical fallout of the Hiroshima bomb. My colleague Joyce McMillan tells me “the event, with intervals, was very long”. Then there were The James Plays in 2016 and Stephen Fry’s Mythos in 2019, both split into three individual play-length sections, but available as one lengthily consecutive viewing experience when seen in order over one or two days. Similarly, presentations of Wagner’s famously lengthy Ring Cycle have been split into its individual operas over days in 2003 and even consecutive years in the late 2010s. Discussing the crescendo that will bering the performance to a close, The Veil of the Temple’s director Tom Guthrie describes “the idea being that you’ve arrived, and of course in this conception of it, this is with dawn, with the night turning to day, and darkness turning to light, and those are universal themes (of) enlightenment. It’s a wonderful, ritualised human expression.” The Veil of the Temple will be performed in five languages and sung by 250 people, in a vocal collaboration between the Monteverdi Choir, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the National Youth Choir of Scotland, with music performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Sofi Jeannin. Across eight meditative, chanting cycles, it takes its inspiration from an all-night vigil in the Orthodox Christian tradition, but its purpose is to find a commonality both between the religions of the world and their practices, and between the worlds of the religious and the secular, which each have their own forms of devotional ritual. Tavener was striving for “an underlying universal truth”, says Edinburgh International Festival’s director Nicola Benedetti, who knew the composer. “I guess it was his wish and his hope that it’s in the patience and the sitting with something for those eight hours that can allow for something transformational. His view of that universal truth was something that binds people closer together.” In the midst of an arts festival in 2025, one which offers literally hundreds of different ways to spend your time, the idea of devoting this portion of your life to one single, focused emotional journey which will take you through the best part of a day feels like something approaching a rebellious act. It’s a rejection of the shareable, dopamine-chasing quick fix of contemporary culture, and a submission instead to a performance which slowly reveals itself in the company of other humans, however you might feel about the religious resonances behind it. The Edinburgh International Festival’s Opening Concert, The Veil of the Temple, is at the Usher Hall on 2 August, www.eif.co.uk