The Tempest is over and hardly a drop of rain on us or the audience throughout the two week run.

Last night really was a miracle. The rain came belting down at some point in the first half and continued through the interval. We were just finalising plan B to do the first scene of the second act inside the boat when the rain stopped. The audience were hastily summoned from the adjacent bar boat and we did the scene on deck.

As Lene our Czech wardrobe angel said to me, our weather is not actually as bad as we like to think.

We had a very responsive audience for the last performance and a good shindig afterwards. That continued for some to my place where four of the cast didn't find the strength to move on till about 11 this morning and where four bottles of spirits found a new home, replenishing somewhat my depleted stocks. In the afternoon we got the boat shipshape and back to its normal state, even super normal since Bob and Andy managed to repair the tilting mechanism on sections of the board room table that had spent the last fortnight in Home Street.

I abandoned the Fringe in favour of the cinema this evening. The Jacques Tati scripted cartoon The Illusionist which opened the Film Festival this year is now on general release and is a beautiful portrait of Edinburgh, particularly for those who knew the city 50 or 60 years ago. If you want to see the Barony Bar or the East Adam Street of yesteryear then this is the film for you. It's also a touching little story but I shall have to see it again since I had to rest my eyes a little from time to time, no doubt thanks to The Tempest late nights.

It was lovely to be sitting in the Cameo and see the auditorium I was in come up on screen. A similar thing happened to me once before, in Paris when I saw an open air screening of a Woody Allen movie in the Trocadero as the film's actors stood in the celluloid version looking at the same cityscape as I was.