Festival 2026 Week 1

FESTIVAL DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

Welcome

Now that we’ve put the summer of sport firmly behind us (fun as some of it was), we’re heading towards the real clash of the titans and battle of the behemoths. No, this isn’t about a student theatre group calling up their New Town landlord to fix a leaky tap/stinky drain (though it could well have been). It’s not even about that age-old face-off between performers and critics (more of that in a forthcoming issue of the mag). It’s a nod to the fact that this year, like every year at the Edinburgh Festival, future giants of the entertainment world will be walking among us, planting the first artistic seeds in what will hopefully be a fruitful and long career in something they love. Apologies in advance if we give them a terrible review.

EDINBURGH

For now, we’re giving you a taste of the excitement to come across the next few weeks as the world’s biggest arts festival explodes into action. Our cover stars Yllana will appeal to flamenco lovers as well as people who like to see that sort of thing given a gentle ribbing. We travelled to Madrid and met a typically passionate set of Spaniards. Everyone’s after the next Fleabag or Baby Reindeer: could Roleplay be the latest one-person theatrical triumph to translate onto a bigger canvas?

Any legends on our pages? Yep, there’s none other than Stockard Channing who’s making a stage directorial debut in her 80s with a Beckett classic; there’s a cabaret double header about Liberace, Liza Minnelli and her mum; and Chrissie Hynde is in town with her latest art exhibition. Meanwhile, fortysomething Fringe debutante Madeleine Brettingham is laying on a show which is actually called Legend. But the Edinburgh Festival, and in particular the Fringe, isn’t really about star names and box-office draws. It’s about finding a new generation of creative talent. Get back to us at the end of the month and see how many gems we’ve uncovered.

Brian Donaldson EDITOR

CEO Sheri Friers

Editor Brian Donaldson

Art Director

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Subeditor Paul McLean

Advertorial Designer

Bradley Southam

Print

Murray Robertson

Head Of Commercial

Jayne Atkinson

Online News Editor

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Business Development Manager

Lachlan McMaster

Head

Leah Bauer

Marketing & Events Executive

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Marketing & Events Assistant

Paighton Scott

Publishing Assistant Juliette Pepin

Writers

Afreka Thomson, Alice Fraser, Ananya Patankar, Brian Donaldson, Claire Sawers, Danny Munro, Dom Czapski, Dominic Corr , Evie Glen, Fiona Shepherd, Isy Santini, Jay Richardson, Jo Laidlaw, Kelly Apter, Kevin Fullerton, Louise Holland, Lucy Ribchester, Marissa Burgess, Megan Merino, Murray Robertson, Neil Cooper, Nicola Meighan, Paul McLean, Rachel Morrell, Robyn Bell, Zara Janjua

FRONT

WMouthpiece

Comedian Alice Fraser considers, via the medium of PowerPoint and a robot vacuum cleaner, what it takes to be a man these days

ho am I to talk about men? ‘Nothing about us without us’ is the catchcry of the modern era, isn’t it? Don’t we need more men talking to men about being good men? Well yes, of course. But I am at least 50% man on my grandfather’s side and I’ve heard the male half is meant to be the dominant half. Also, I’m a veteran of the days when they would only ever let one woman on a stand-up lineup (they were worried if they booked two or more, we’d start talking about the rapists, which indeed we did).

Moreover, I’m in the news satire comedy podcasting space, which means I’m talking to statistically more men than most women do on a day-to-day basis. Podcast listening stats are about 50/50 men to women, but the breakdown of the numbers is that women tend to listen to more true crime and pop culture podcasts, while men tend to listen to more news and comedy.

Me? I listen to manosphere podcasts for the same reason as most women listen to true crime; I want to know what’s coming for me! I’m a bro-prepper. So I talk to a fair few men (unless there’s a significant group of Bugle listeners who turn on the

In this weekly series, we ask Edinburgh Festival veterans which shows or performers have touched their hearts or pushed their buttons. For the opener, actor and comedian Mike McShane tells us which things . . .

podcast while making a smoothie and press ice-crush while I’m talking) and I really take that responsibility seriously. Masculinity is a much more complicated situation than I see most people address; you get these really dominant stories about what it is to be a man that I don’t recognise as representative in men who I know and love.

That said, I have a twin brother and a two-year-old son, and I can see in both of them the ways in which their biological leanings get wound into plausible stories about ‘what men are’. Those stories can work to make people feel empowered and useful, as well as being horrible oppressive traps that shrink the human experience to a parody of itself.

I want to write a show that engages with the real questions about what it is to be a man wrestling with masculinity in the modern world, rather than some cartoon, straw man, manosphere punching bag. I want it to be silly and light and philosophical, and full of rage and hope. So I’m using a PowerPoint presentation to teach a sentient Roomba what it is to be a man. Should be fun.

n Alice Fraser: Oh Man!, Monkey Barrel Tron, 5–30 August, 8.40pm.

Made me cry: Gregory Burke’s play Black Watch. I’m a Vietnam-era army veteran and can be quite cynical about my own and others’ takes on service. But the script and the staging . . . oh the staging! It bound every person who served in that regiment through an amazing timeline and deepened the powerful, tragic cost, the ephemeral nature of the glory of war. There wasn’t any jingoism which deepened its effect.

Made me angry: Mark Thomas in England & Son. I spent a little time in a state institution when I was a kid and Ed Edwards’ play, written for Mark, gave Mr T a fast-track emotional ride of how a kid can get set up to fall into a system, to never climb out. Mark’s a powerful, gleeful, angry antagonist in his own work, but he was heart-wrenching and crazed with abuse in that role. His acting was like early Pacino.

Made me laugh: Stewart Lee, during a set in Udderbelly, decided the audience wasn’t coming along with him, so he climbed under the bleachers, laid down and, in a weary ‘no it’s not you, it’s me’ voice, broke up with the audience. It just made me laugh so hard.

Made me think: Red Bastard. A man dressed in a skin-tight, bright-red leotard with enormous breasts and an equally enormous ass. He was street-clowning the walking crowd, imitating them, pushing them around with his great large ass, gangly and intrusive and mocking. I thought, ‘I really would like to do an act like that.’

Made me think twice: Then I thought, ‘how could I get an ass that big through customs?’ and relented.

n Mike McShane stars in The Event, Pleasance Courtyard, 5–31 August, 12.30pm, and appears in Paul Merton And Suki Webster’s Improv Show, Pleasance Courtyard, 13–23 August, 3.30pm.

festival

TIP OF THE WEEK

Festival folk choose one Edinburgh show that is getting them properly fired up. First in line is stand-up Susie McCabe

I always send people to see Rosco McClelland’s show and they always love it. He’s at Cab Voltaire: a vibe that completely suits him. If you’ve never seen Rosco, let me explain: this long skinny ginger man is one of the finest comics I get to work with. I never know what’s going to happen when he is on a stage but I know I will laugh; I know it will be silly; and I know that no one will be offended. As unpredictable as Rosco is, he is never cruel or unkind to the audience and he will always be the butt of the joke. A truly wonderful act and one of my favourite clowns.

 Susie McCabe: Coming Of Rage, Assembly George Square, 5–30 August, 8.45pm; Rosco McClelland: The Bones, Monkey Barrel Cabaret Voltaire, 5–30 August, 8.05pm.

weird pic of the week

For this image-based slot in 2024, we highlighted the weirdness abounding at Festival time. Last year, we chose to go all wholesome. Well, we’ve reverted to weird for 2026, dedicating this item each week to a jaw-dropping oddity in The Worst Record Covers In The World exhibition as curated by Steve Goldman who began collecting albums 40 years ago based purely on their appalling artwork. Here, he discusses the first of a truly terrible trio

Fofáo: Disco Do Fofáo 2

Fofáo was a Brazilian TV children’s character who became a media icon during the 80s. His creator had imagined various possibilities for how he’d look, including a dog, a pig, a clown, a teddy bear, an extraterrestrial or a human being. And then created a mash-up of them all. With the result having the appearance of a scrotum. An urban legend gripped the children of Brazil about the cuddly, plush Fofáo toy. It was supposed to have a dagger inside its body (actually a hard plastic spine) with which evil rituals could be performed, including killing parents. No parents were killed.

 The Worst Record Covers In The World will melt your eyes all day long at Assembly George Square Studios, 7–31 August; see more monstrosities at instagram.com/worstrecordcovers

from the festival archive

In 1989, The List may have been a mere pup of four years old, but it was still teaching the auld yins a thing or two about covering the acts and stories that make the Edinburgh Festival an annual August delight. Take the opening issue of that year’s cultural beanfeast where our intrepid reporter, with photographer in tow, hung out in a Copenhagen commune with Archaos, the daring circus troupe which may have switched off its chainsaws, but still featured as many motorcyclists as trapeze artists. We spoke to both Merchant and Ivory as the period drama experts took on the 80s (as in 1980s) for a look at the Big Apple’s art scene in The Slaves Of New York, chatted to Communicado’s Gerry Mulgrew, and explored an operatic production of Salome at Leith Theatre.  Head to list.co.uk/magazine-archive for our past issues.

PlayList

2026’s Edinburgh Festival is upon us and reviewers will soon be released to sniff out the very best of this year’s delights. Get a feel for our first selection of shows through this ever-eclectic (and occasionally tangential) playlist, featuring music by Belle And Sebastian, Britney Spears, Pale Waves, Nia Archives, David Bowie, Scouting For Girls and more . . .

Scan and listen as you read:

A Public Display of Affection Big Stuff Glob

9:20 @ Gilded Ballo IG STU aram and S 4:55 Asse E

@ Edinburgh

PUBLIC DISPLAY onathan Wilson / Rh

Aug 24-29 17:55 @ theSpace Surgeons' Hall L OF AFFECTION hymes with Purple d oon Patter Hoose G UFF a Snieckus

14:55 @ Assembly Roxy GLOB

Underbelly & Les Foutoukours

15:00 @ Underbelly Bristo Square

HOMECUMMING

Magalie Rouillard-Bazinet

16:15 @ Summerhall

JOSIAH

Thousand Miles of Bricks Productions

Aug 17-22 21:05 @ theSpace Triplex

VENUE 13

Three weeks of Canadian performance

Photo credit: A Public Display... - Dahlia Katz; Glob - Alex Guillaume

Festival Fringe

The High Commission of Canada in the UK and the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation celebrate all the Canadian talent on show across Edinburgh this August.

– scan the QR code to check out the online listings!

Gas Station at the Edge of the Universe @ Venue 13

Josiah

Photo credit: Homecumming - Brennan Mar tin; Gas Station... - Maggie Stempt

Sex

ual

CWhen Hannah Reilly started hosting a steamy podcast in Australia, her provocative on-air persona began to leak into her personal life, ultimately inspiring one-woman show, Roleplay. She chats to Isy Santini about rising misogyny, contemporary feminism and learning to embrace earnestness

arrie Bradshaw meets Bonnie Blue in Roleplay, a provocative new one-woman show from Australian comic Hannah Reilly about a struggling feminist podcaster who rebrands as a provocative ‘slutfluencer’. Her new brief: sex up the podcast, pump the erotic capital, and fame and fortune will surely follow. ‘It’s a real rollercoaster ride,’ says Reilly. ‘I’ve heard it described as a freight train and it feels like that to perform.’ Roleplay walks a tightrope of tones in its dissection of sex, power and the economics of attention. ‘It sort of begins as what feels like stand-up, takes a turn into psychological thriller and makes a deep descent to hell by the end.’

It’s a familiar story for Reilly, whose own experiences in podcasting laid the foundations for Roleplay. Early in her career, she was offered a position hosting a sex and relationships podcast on one of Australia’s biggest radio stations. ‘Pretty much overnight I became the sex girl,’ she recalls. ‘I’m like an A-type theatre kid who knows how to fulfil a brief, so I was like, “you want me to be this really provocative, slutty, ragebait character? I can be that.” And that persona kind of leaked out into my real life and had this massive ripple effect on my life and my relationships.’ Ten years on, Reilly is finally in a place where she can explore the experience through her art with the fearlessness and honesty it deserves. ‘When you have to crawl into bed for an entire weekend after submitting a draft, you know you’re onto something.’

A co-production between Francesca Moody Productions and Global Creatures, whose prior works include Fleabag and Moulin Rouge! The Musical respectively, Reilly’s creation is in experienced hands. Roleplay is ‘incisive, uncomfortable and irresistibly current’, says Carmen Pavlovic of Global Creatures. ‘Reilly has created something that speaks directly to the moment we’re living in, where identity, economy and performance are in constant negotiation.’ Likewise for Francesca Moody, taking on Roleplay was a no-brainer: ‘It is a piece of theatre that I just knew we had to produce and I can’t think of anywhere better than the Edinburgh Fringe to start its journey. It’s bold, unflinching, achingly funny, prescient and, above all, entertaining, made with artists who are daring to take risks.’

While written and performed by Reilly, the final product is a collaboration with director Paige Rattray whose other works include the award-winning Fangirls. ‘Paige is such an experienced dramaturg and a brilliant mind,’ gushes Reilly. ‘She really helped support me in taking bigger risks than I ever thought I could.’ In fact, it was Rattray who nudged Reilly to star in Roleplay. ‘It’s written very much in my voice and we made the decision that authenticity was potentially more

healing

Others To See podcast shows

Wanging On

important than polished craft,’ explains Reilly. ‘It’s so important for direct connection with the audience. It’s not a traditional play format; it’s closer to stand-up in that way.’

Though there’s an autobiographical seed within the show, it is equally inspired by the modern rise in misogyny, with both Donald Trump’s nasty presidency and the horrific revelations of the Gisèle Pelicot case influencing Reilly’s writing. ‘It’s becoming more relevant by the week and by the day. Unfortunately, I think this is going to be evergreen for a while.’

Roleplay also takes a hard look at the contradictions of contemporary feminism and its role as an unsteady bulwark against the current rise in global misogyny. In the age of the personal brand where everything from identity to intimacy is commodified, does third-wave feminism have what it takes to fight back? ‘One of my favourite things the show has been doing is starting a really honest conversation between mothers and daughters who have both experienced different waves of feminism,’ says Reilly. Those relationships play a core function in Roleplay, interrogating the intergenerational conflicts between different schools of feminism. ‘A part of growing up for me has also been learning about the ways in which my mum has been right about so many things.’

The state of the world may be dire, but Reilly refuses to give in to defeatism. Without giving too much away, she says: ‘It ends on this beautiful little candle of hope and resilience, the idea that you can go through something that you think would destroy you and it doesn’t.’ In a meta twist, working on a show about resilience has helped Reilly realise her own capabilities. ‘Being from a comedy background, I’ve been kind of allergic to earnestness for most of my life, and gaining the confidence to be able to write something that is both really funny but earns its moments of complete sincerity has been such a cool thing.’

Josh Cab plays New York’s prime rapper/ landlord/podcaster who is about to celebrate 250 episodes of The Darren Podcast Show Live! (Greenside George Street, 7–15 August, 11.10pm). A heavily requested guest comes along for the ride. What could go wrong? Plenty, probably. In a dark comedy play which examines toxic masculinity and herd mentality, How My Hormonal Imbalances Killed My Friends (Space Symposium Hall, 24–27 August, 10am) features six pals who drop out of uni, plan a heist and, obviously, launch a new hit podcast. The true-crime podcast industry comes under the microscope in Big Dog (Gilded Balloon Patter House, 5–31 August, 6.20pm) when Eve is handed a ghostwriting gig for a major podder in that field. In Badgers (Traverse Theatre, 6–30 August, times vary), podcaster Meles has a dying mother and a career that’s barely showing signs of life (did we mention they’re a podcaster?) but stumbles upon something that might change the whole game.

There are, of course, live recordings of podcasts or a live stage show of a popular ’cast, including the Ewart Brothers with their Fraudcast, Graham Norton and Maria McErlane who will be Wanging On, an exploration of cringe in Chris Forbes’ Stop Watering Dead Flowers, the All Killa No Filla serial killer pod with Kiri PritchardMcLean and Rachel Fairburn, Welcome To Hell helmed by Daniel Foxx and Dane Buckley, fun chat about parenthood with The Edinburgh Society Of Unapologetically Imperfect Mothers, and chills galore through the spooky portal of Unexplained

Playing their roles: Paige Rattray and Hannah Reilly

"If you’re not promoted right, you won’t be remembered."

The Sound Within with Eisenberg and Stern United States

Andy Warhol

3 Times I Killed United States

Aditya Mayya Pretends to Be Sad United States

Tom Waits War Songs United States

Inspiring , ramshackle , joyous; I couldn’t take my eyes off Stuart Murdoch and the gang onstage “

Indie-pop icons Belle And Sebastian celebrate 30 years of their classic If You’re Feeling Sinister album by performing it in full at Fringe By The Sea, followed by a set of fan favourites. Writer, broadcaster and mega fan Nicola Meighan looks back on her first encounter with their music and why she’s still smitten three decades on >>

‘Hypnotic masterpiece’

Chicago Reader

6–29 AUG • 5:30PM

Directed by Yngvild Aspeli

Plexus Polaire presents

FOthers To See at Fringe By The Sea

or a band so lovingly woven into the fabric of Glasgow, it’s maybe strange that I first discovered Belle And Sebastian in London. I was living there in the late 1990s, and my office was on the floor below their record label, Jeepster, in a bygone chocolate factory in Ladbroke Grove. I was running a happy hardcore imprint and frequently had my windows flung open: all the better to hear the glorious music blaring out of Jeepster HQ and the sounds of a fabled collective who’d been making a stir back home in Scotland, thanks to an album called Tigermilk (released in 1996 via Stow College’s in-house hit factory, Electric Honey) and a formative glowing review in The List by the legendary Fiona Shepherd.

Belle And Sebastian later signed to Jeepster (as would fellow Electric Honey alumni Polar Bear aka Snow Patrol), and so it was that I first encountered the familiar/haunting fever-dreams of If You’re Feeling Sinister (1996) and the Dog On Wheels and Lazy Line Painter Jane EPs (1997), carried on the breeze via the acoustics of our shared courtyard by the canal. When I wasn’t importing helium-vocalled Rotterdam gabber (DJ Paul Elstak’s ‘Rainbow in the Sky’, anyone?), or promoting an improbable roster that included The Outhere Brothers, Living In A Box and Cora Bissett’s folkpunk trio Swelling Meg, I was otherwise engaged, quite literally, in that tiny London office. I was logging on constantly, via dial-up internet, to an early B&S message board called the Sinister Mailing List, wherein devotees shared guitar chords, arranged meet-ups, discussed the magic of Stuart David’s ‘Ink Polaroids’ prose portraits and swapped illicit cassette copies of an LP that everybody knew about but few of us could ever hear (the limited first-run of Tigermilk had long sold out). I used to write and post micro-stories anonymously on the Sinister board, never letting on that this smitten wordslinger was lurking underneath their record label, flogging rave tunes. What a creep. Impassioned praise towards the band extended far beyond their virtual fan hub, however. An NME review of an early London date at Union Chapel in the summer of ’97 described B&S as a ‘phenomenon’ and, right enough, they put on an incredible show that night: inspiring, ramshackle, joyous. I couldn’t take my eyes off Stuart Murdoch and the gang onstage, which was really quite the feat, given that I was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Jarvis Cocker and he had the longest hands I have ever seen. This was maybe a year or so after Jarvis’ Brit Awards controversy (gatecrashing Michael Jackson’s performance; dodging court on account of impromptu legal representation from Bob Mortimer), and it would be another 18 months before Belle And Sebastian had their own provocative Brits run-in, when they vanquished fellow nominees 5ive, Steps and Billie Piper, and were crowned 1999’s Best Breakthrough Act. Pete Waterman was raging. He accused B&S of staging a coup in the online vote, thus purloining the award from his beloved Steps. But the fans had spoken and our enigmatic Glasgow pop coterie quietly, brilliantly, got what they deserved, on their own terms. That’s been their hallmark ever since.

Three decades on from those strange and distant young/old days, Belle And Sebastian are celebrating If You’re Feeling Sinister at Fringe By The Sea. Thirty years! I wonder what I’d tell my homesick 20-yearold self in London about all this. I’d never buy the story that I’d end up working with the band on a Tramway all-dayer at Triptych once I’d moved back to Scotland, nor that I’d take my kids to see them light up the sky at Doune The Rabbit Hole, let alone that I’d chair an event with Stuart Murdoch and Michael Pedersen at Byres Road Book Festival, where Stuart would break into some Jeepster-era songs. I’d have laughed myself right out the window. But I might have believed . . . no, I would have believed that this beautifully inconceivable band just kept, and would keep, getting better.

Belle And Sebastian perform If You’re Feeling Sinister, Big Top, North Berwick, 6 August, 8pm.

Nicola Meighan presents her weekly Saturday Social at 2pm on Central FM while a live version of her Scottish culture podcast A Kick Up The Arts is at Edinburgh Futures Institute on Friday 25 August at 6pm; akickupthearts.org

There are plenty of other music highlights in North Berwick for the final stretch of Fringe By The Sea including legendary soul funksters Kool And The Gang (Big Top, 7 August, 8pm) who formed in New Jersey way back in 1964. Unsurprisingly, they’ve gone through many line-up changes and a bunch of band name tweaks with Robert ‘Kool’ Bell the only survivor from the original gang. Also in the vet camp are blues guys Dave Kelly & Paul Jones (Famous Grouse Lodge Stage, 8 August, 7.30pm) who will charm us with originals and classics.

Supported by Edinburgh duo Sarah/ Shaun, Maribou State (Big Top, 8 August, 8pm) aka Chris Davids and Liam Ivory will drench their crowd in lush soundscapes, soulful melodies and innovative production Bombskare (Big Top, 8 August, 4pm) may well frighten the horses (if any are allowed into the Big Top) with the ska shenanigans which have served them excellently for over 20 years, while Drexler (The Dome, 9 August, 4.15pm) provides something of a contrast, delivering a cinematic experience with his audio-visual palette. Meanwhile, there’s a whole load of music-related fun across the festival’s duration with the Wavelength strand, including a screening of documentary Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story (The Dome, 8 August, 1.15pm) which is followed by an in-conversation event with The Selecter icon and Vic Galloway, and a dive into the sounds and visuals of Boards Of Canada (The Dome, 5 August, 7.30pm).

Drexler

‘It’s like a laboratory where you work with very dangerous material

IThink you know flamenco? Think again, as tradition is challenged in Flamenc Oh!! with physical theatre, comedy and modern music all thrown into the mix. Dom Czapski heads to Madrid for a sneak peek

consider myself an entertainer more than a director,’ says David Ottone, creative director of Yllana, the Madridbased physical theatre company. It’s a billion degrees outside as we walk to the theatre for tonight’s show. Ottone talks animatedly about his work; he is fighting off a summer cold yet still seems more energetic than me. We’re on our way to see Yllana’s latest work, Flamenc Oh!!, which premieres at Madrid’s La Estación theatre before its Edinburgh run and then heads to the Peacock Theatre in London this autumn. It’s the story of a flamenco family dominated by the father (played by singer David Bastidas) who wants tradition above all. Alas, a stranger (Luis Gallo) arrives and he has a guitar. He lures the father ’s two children (dancers Raúl Ortega and Anabel Moreno) and wife (dancer Raquela Ortega) away from the well-trodden paths of tradition and towards the more alluring chords of modern music.

In a fusion of physical theatre and flamenco, this story about an outsider turned the entire creative crew into outsiders themselves: Ottone, a comedian, didn’t know much about flamenco and immersed himself in

research; meanwhile, his highly skilled flamenco cast had to turn into clowns. Guitarist Gallo found the process understandably nerve-wracking, having never acted before. ‘It’s not my job!’ he exclaims. ‘Sometimes I was like, this is too many things, the show is this evening, and they’re still changing things on me!’ Ottone called the rehearsal process ‘pure chaos but completely focused . . . like a laboratory where you work with very, very dangerous material.’

In some ways, the narrative is modelled on Gallo’s own. At the age of 12, he was desperate to find some guitar classes. The only teacher his mother could find taught flamenco, but Gallo also loved rock and jazz. ‘I just wanted someone who knew how to play,’ says Gallo. ‘He told me: “Luis, you love the guitar, you could be a great guitar player. But if you play flamenco, play flamenco. If you want to play jazz, play jazz. If not, you’re taking the risk of being a beginner at everything and a master of nothing.” That line got into my head. But I always did it the way I felt it.’

You might imagine that watching flamenco is a national pastime, but Ottone insists it’s quite niche in Spain. The evening’s show indicates otherwise with the recently renovated Estación practically sold out. And the audience is alive to the comedy, dancing and music (carried almost singlehandedly by Gallo with mind-blowing speed and precision), punctuating the performance with frequent collective shouts of olé! At 85 minutes

long, the show needs to be pruned for Fringe audiences. ‘It has to be one hour. Next Friday we’re meeting . . . taking notes, timing, seeing how we shorten it, which number we take out.’ But with 35 years of performing physical comedy around the world, they feel ready. ‘Edinburgh, here we come!’ says Ottone, slapping me on the back.

With all its high jinks (including a boxing ring flamenco showdown between brother and sister), the show’s heart lies in how seriously it takes its flamenco. It opens with the father’s singing, a summoning of the famous duende, a mystical feeling in the performer that goes beyond technique, reaching from the darkest recesses of their soul. The audience should feel it too. The poet Federico García Lorca said it was duende, for example, that pushed the great painter Francisco Goya to create his famous black paintings. It then picks flamenco apart with comedy but keeps returning to the virtuosity and charisma of its performers in their natural habitat, with the kicking and swaying of their long, ruffled dresses (known as batas de cola). How do you even begin to extract comedy from such dramatic material? ‘If you watch the big flamenco artists, there’s a huge theatrical influence,’ says Gallo. ‘And that’s what makes it so easy to parody,’ adds Ottone. ‘All those gestures. We knew there was a lot we could do comedically around the flamenco codes.’ Flamenc Oh!!, Assembly Rooms, 6–30 August, 2.15pm.

Burning up the floor: (from left) Luis Gallo, David Bastidas, Anabel Moreno, Raquela Ortega, Raúl Ortega

THE GALLOPING CURE

Don ’ t speak

Theatre is traditionally viewed as a textbased medium. But there can be many reasons to abandon spoken words in favour of telling stories through other forms of language. Lucy Ribchester chats to three directors bringing nonverbal works to the International Festival

As any dance fan or choreographer will tell you, a story needs no words to tell it. Character, emotion and narrative can all be powerfully projected straight from the body. And yet theatre still feels inextricably linked to text and speech. Even the name of the place we usually watch it (an auditorium) projects an idea of listening as theatre’s dominant sense. This year’s International Festival, however, has three theatre pieces that defy reliance on verbal speech, opting instead, with very different reasons, for stories told via the body: through gesture, action and non-verbal language.

Mario Banushi, creator and director of Taverna Miresia: Mario, Bella, Anastasia, which explores memory and grief, did not begin with the intention of making a silent performance. ‘We simply kept following the images, the bodies and the memories. Every time words appeared they somehow felt smaller than what we were trying to express.’ Language, Banushi says, does exist in the piece but in subtler ways; gesture, music, even the breath between two actors looking at each other.

The piece is personal to Banushi, set in an imagined version of the Albanian restaurant his family once owned (Taverna Miresia translates as ‘restaurant of kindness’). ‘I think there are moments in life that become too important for words,’ Banushi says. ‘When you lose someone or when you remember your childhood, language often arrives too late. I wanted the audience to experience those emotions directly rather than having them described.’

It was these same intimate unspoken family connections that sparked the idea for Belgian company Olympique Dramatique’s new interpretation of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Director Stijn Van Opstal had been keen to direct a play for Flanders’ d/Deaf communities for some time (‘with whom we live but whose language I did not speak’, Van Opstal says), but hadn’t landed on the right piece. Then he began to consider The Seagull’s themes of intergenerational misunderstanding.

In the play, the unfolding drama is triggered by a disastrous theatrical performance, delivered by a young playwright and an ingenue actress, whose older relatives and neighbours react with scorn. ‘There’s the younger generation of theatre makers, who are searching for a new form, a new language, a new worldview,’ Van Opstal says. ‘And alongside them, the older generation who do not quite understand this and perhaps feel somewhat threatened by it.’ The uncertainties of communication both break and remake relationships in the play. ‘Because it all takes place within a family context, the love is strong enough to make them want to understand one another. In that respect, The Seagull was the perfect meeting place for this production.’

In a first for Edinburgh International Festival, the play will be performed with sign language as its primary medium, specifically Flemish Sign Language (FSL). Van Opstal cast a mixture of fluent FSL-speakers and established actors who are beginners at signing. He has also retitled the piece as [seagull] to reference the closed-caption subtitles theatres often use to make plays accessible for d/Deaf audiences. ‘The closed captions in the title serve as a reminder that people view things from different perspectives,’ he says. ‘The hearing audience will be welcomed into a language and a community that are not naturally accessible in everyday life, whilst the sign language-using audience will experience a performance in their mother tongue.’ In essence, the production turns accessibility on its head, placing hearing audience members in the position usually experienced by d/Deaf audiences. ‘The brackets here are not optional,’ Van Opstal says, ‘but a reminder. There are people who see things differently.’

There are already longstanding and beloved genres of theatre though, where stories told through body language have always had a home, such as silent cinema and clowning. French theatre company Bakélite’s Hostile is a family-friendly show which builds on established traditions of non-verbal comedy. Creator and performer Olivier Rannou was drawn to the very physical genre of spaghetti westerns, which emerged from Hollywood in the 1950s under directors such as Sergio Leone, full of swaggering cowboys, smoking campfires and stubborn horses. In approaching the piece as a wordless show, Rannou wanted to reflect and recreate ‘the taciturn, violent and cynical characters who are more akin to anti-heroes’.

Letting the body speak for itself allowed Rannou to keep the appeal of the show broad. ‘Above all, I want the audience to experience the adventure in real time, with the action unfolding right before their eyes, as if they were actually there,’ he explains. ‘You can literally see the character suffering from the sun and heat, witness his desperate quest for water or follow his frantic flight. It is an entire universe that I enjoy evoking and subverting, and whose imagery I attempt to reinvent on stage.’

Banushi also found visual images formed his starting point for Taverna Miresia. ‘Before rehearsals, I draw a lot,’ he says. ‘I imagine very precise pictures, almost like photographs or paintings. Then, together with the performers, we slowly search for the physical life inside those images.’ But ultimately a story told without words all comes down to actions, which operate as a catalyst for the characters’ emotions. ‘We ask very simple questions,’ Banushi says. ‘How does this body breathe? How does it carry memory? How does someone touch another person when they know it might be the last time? When a gesture is truthful and necessary, the feeling follows naturally. I trust the body more than I trust psychology.’

Taverna Miresia: Mario, Bella, Anastasia, Church Hill Theatre, 26 & 27, 29 August, 8pm; 28 August, 5pm & 8.30pm.

[seagull], Studio Theatre, 7 August, 4pm; 8–11 August, 7.30pm.

Hostile, Church Hill Theatre, 8–11 August, 2pm; 9 & 10 August, 6pm.

Lost for words: (this page and previous, top to bottom) Taverna Miresia, [seagull], Hostile TAVERNA

festival showcase

Whether you want to laugh or cry, sing and dance, or marvel at the wonders of the human body, you’ll always find the perfect show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Explore our showcase and get booking!

TRUTHMACHINE

THEATRE & DANCE

C alto

7–30 August (not 17, 18, 24, 25), 3pm, 3.50pm, 4.40pm, 5.30pm, 7.20pm, 8.10pm, 9pm, 9.50pm counterpilot.com.au

Would you take a lie detector test in a room full of strangers? Watch on or be interrogated as we seek out truth in a world of fake news and alternative facts. Using biometric sensors and live voting systems, Truthmachine, is the multi award-winning social experiment from techno-troublemakers, Counterpilot. The polygraph machine used to be regarded as a legal instrument, but today we think we can cheat it . . . let’s see if your heart rate can lie as effectively as our leaders can. ‘No one else is making work quite like this’ **** (The Age).

DOOM AND GLITTER: A TRIBUTE TO TOM WAITS

CABARET & CIRCUS

The Street Nightclub, 9, 10, 13, 15, 23, 25, 27, 29 & 30 August, 9pm; Voodoo Rooms, 16–22 August, 5.30pm instagram.com/mrbrakedown instagram.com/doomandglittermusic

In its fifth year at Fringe, Mr Brake Down’s incredible live band explores the wit, wisdom, and unstoppable force of cult icon Tom Waits. This award-winning live experience gathers outcasts, oddities and visionaries for a soulful fever-dream. Gloriously odd and experimental, the show takes audiences on a melodic journey through Waits’ seminal works, where you get to be part of the music and enjoy special guests from the world of drag and burlesque.

THE UPSIDE DOWN CABARET

CABARET & CIRCUS

The Street Nightclub 10, 12, 14, 16–21, 24, 26, 28 August, 9pm; 9, 11, 23, 30 August, 10.15pm mrbrakedown.weebly.com/upsidedown-cabaret.html

A jewel in the crown of Cheshire’s cabaret scene, the Upside Down is finally making its way to Fringe! Led by Channel 4’s narrowboat drag king Mr Brake Down, local divas, naughty newbies and established icons meet on a joyful variety stage that celebrates LGBTQIA+ talent. Join the fun nightly for a lively showcase from the worlds of drag, burlesque, comedy, music, circus, and

OLYMPIC HOPEFULS

THEATRE & DANCE

The Royal Scots Club 10–15 August, 3.20pm hortensegerardo.com

ITALO CALVINO’S INVISIBLE CITIES: A TOY THEATER ATLAS

THEATRE & DANCE C alto | 5–30 August (not 17), 7.30pm toy-atlas.com

‘A tour-de-force of ingenuity, encapsulated in miniature . . . tiny portraits evoking longing with an elusive, unaccountable sense of recognition.’ Calvino’s stunning language springs to life in a cascade of trap doors, surprises and reveals. This adaptation in miniature casts a dreamlike spell over the audience, using live projection, puppetry, paper mechanics and living sculpture as two performers manipulate tiny cameras on a small table. Chicago International Puppet Festival’s artistic director calls it ‘an exquisite and beautiful show that audiences loved seeing, many for a second time.’

Olympic Hopefuls is an uplifting ensemble comedy about four lifelong friends navigating midlife upheaval who make a wildly improbable decision: to form the first Filipino women’s curling team and chase Olympic gold. Fueled by grit and just enough delusion to keep going, they hurl themselves onto the ice to chase a dream that feels both urgent and absurd. Part underdog sports saga, part diaspora comedy, Olympic Hopefuls asks: who’s allowed to dream big and who’s expected to stay in the stands?

SEE YOU TOMORROW

COMEDY

Greenside George Street 7–15 August, 5.15pm; 17–22, 24–29 August, 11.25am instagram.com/seeyoutomorrowplay

Harrie’s workday ends like any other . . . until her journey home takes a sudden, unthinkable turn. In the following days, she’s swept into a system of police reports, questions and courtrooms demanding clarity from a memory that isn’t there. See You Tomorrow is not just a story about trauma; it’s a darkly comic odyssey through the absurd machinery of justice, where truth is slippery and certainty feels out of reach. When reality hits like a shower of shit, sometimes the only thing left to fight for is your version of the story — whether it can be proven or not.

Icon artist

She may be making her stand-up debut but Madeleine Brettingham has a long history in the business we call show. The respected comedy scribe talks to Jay Richardson about stepping out of the writers’ room and into the limelight, and why she feels a need to apologise to Michael McIntyre

Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Paul McCartney’s ‘Yesterday’. Landmark achievements that came to their creators in dreams. And to this illustrious list you can now add Madeleine Brettingham’s Legend . . .

‘I had this dream where Michael McIntyre told me to do stand-up,’ the Kent-born comic explains. Slumbering, she demurred, batting away the floppy-haired entreaties. But, says Brettingham, ‘he looked really angry with me, he was arguing. Over the next couple of years I kept thinking, “why did I have that dream? What sort of deep, subconscious message was he sending me? Maybe that I should just try stand-up?” I honestly thought I’d do a couple of gigs and never tell anyone because I’d be crap.’

But instead, she flourished. Brettingham emerged triumphant from a succession of new act competitions, including last year’s So You Think You’re Funny?, and, like former winners Aisling Bea, David O’Doherty and Maisie Adam, she’s delivering her debut Fringe hour a mere 12 months later. She’s no ingénue though. Over the last 20 years, Brettingham has been a comedy writer for Harry Hill’s TV Burp, Frankie Boyle’s New World Order and That Mitchell And Webb Look, as well as topical radio with The News Quiz, The Now Show and Breaking The News

Still, as a seasoned Fringe punter, she admits ‘it’s so crazy to me that I’m doing this’. ‘Genuinely, if you’d told me two years ago, I would have been in a state of utter disbelief. It’s exciting and terrifying after being behind the scenes for so long.’ No ‘natural extrovert’, Brettingham says she doesn’t crave attention and has never felt envious of performers she’s worked with. ‘I’ve never made a decision that was less strategic or planned.’

Nevertheless, at 44, she wonders if she might have tried it earlier. ‘It did go quite well from early on. And I get great satisfaction saying things in my own voice and not having decisions made by committee.’ Greater life experience than most newcomers means that she’s also less scared of audiences.

‘I really care about doing a good job. But if 50 people dislike me for one evening, it won’t ruin my life as it might have in my twenties. I’m more accepting of myself. If I’d started younger I’d be more contrived, more worried about being different. I’ve come to realise it’s not distinctiveness that makes you interesting. It’s about how much barrier between yourself and the audience you remove, allowing them to truly see you. Of

course, some aspects are playfully exaggerated. But what’s funny comes from the truth, at some level, of who you are. The older you get, the more at peace you are with that.’

Legend introduces her as a ‘female geezer’. Before attending a ‘posh university’ (Cambridge), Brettingham had an eventful adolescence in Bournemouth, raised in a pub after her parents divorced, by a dad who liked a drink. That experience, as a girl in a man’s world, has prompted exploration of an ‘archetype of male bad behaviour that we pretend to disapprove of but slightly glamourise. I’m not immune to that,’ she acknowledges. ‘A lot of it is about how much I imitate him. There’s some quite serious and dark subject matter. But it’s got loads of jokes; it’s a show that’s funny above all else.’

Naturally enough, lively gigs in pubs and working men’s clubs don’t phase her. ‘Ten blokes being a bit gobby has familiarity for me,’ she insists. Similarly, her earliest TV writers’ rooms were fairly close to all-male environments, ‘some lovely and welcoming, though, inevitably, with some awkwardness and sexism. Most women my age didn’t want to get involved. But because of my background, for better or worse, I took it for granted.’

Pitching topical material proved a great training ground for stand-up, churning out dozens of jokes a day on sometimes unpromising topics. ‘Your ideas are not treated as precious works of genius. You learn humility. If an idea doesn’t bang quite quickly, put it aside and work on something else.’

Writing for comics as unique as Hill and Boyle was ‘the best escapism’, says Brettingham. But adding stand-up to a CV that also includes her own play, Dear Martin, and prospective sitcoms, everything fed into each other. ‘I really love the freedom that stand-up brings, the creative energy and confidence it instils. I want to keep doing all of it. I’m someone who has lots of ideas and needs lots of outlets.’

As a gagsmith for Michael McIntyre’s Big Show, could it have been his Midnight Gameshow and Unexpected Star segments mingling in her drowsy mind that suggested standup to her that fateful night? ‘I don’t know him well enough to discuss it with him. But I am slightly worried he thinks I’m crazy now,’ she admits. ‘Michael, if you ever read this, I’m sorry. I hope it doesn’t make you feel weird. You did a great job of persuading me, I’m very grateful. But I’m also aware that I sound insane.’

Madeleine Brettingham: Legend, Gilded Balloon Teviot, 5–31 August, 8.20pm.

More To See debutantes

First up is unfiltered storytelling from Jennifer Jane (Just The Tonic Mash House, 6–30 August, 7.15pm) in a show directed by the estimable Stuart Laws. Happy Tea covers a wide variety of everyday topics, such as sleeping in an elk and enjoying an encounter with ghost sperm. Ultimate victor in the first season of The Traitors, Hannah Byczkowski (Gilded Balloon Teviot, 5–30 August, 5.10pm) brings us Killer. Definitely not a miserable hour, despite featuring family ashes, serial killers and funeral disasters. Brooklyn-born actress, model, podcaster and comic Sydnee Washington (Monkey Barrel Cabaret Voltaire, 5–16 August, 3.50pm) is here to discuss My Black Barbie Story. An Emmy nominee for her role in digital comedy series Bridesman, she has toured with Chelsea Handler and worked as a bottle girl in New York nightclubs. She has tales to tell. In Pushing 30, Abby Govindan (Pleasance Courtyard, 5–30 August, 9.35pm) will be fretting over getting older (she’s 28), chatting about dating and musing on generational curses. She might also talk about that time she lied about being the creator of Emily In Paris. We’ve all been there, right?

Hannah Byczkowski

With a spanking new single homing into view and album number five on the horizon, Pale Waves enter virgin territory during the Fringe with their first ever gigs in Edinburgh. Vocalist/guitarist Heather Baron-Gracie chats to Fiona Shepherd about bonding musically with her dad and becoming a more thoughtful songwriter >>

Uncharted

waters

Pale Waves frontwoman Heather Baron-Gracie takes the notion of a songwriting retreat so seriously that she’s not entirely sure where she is right now; except that she’s staying in a converted farmhouse ‘in the middle of nowhere’ about half an hour outside of Edinburgh. ‘There are hills everywhere,’ she offers. ‘It’s very remote and very beautiful. I love escaping and being in nature. If I could pick to live in a busy city or isolated in nature, it would definitely be in nature every single time. I can think here, I can breathe here; whereas when I’m in a city I just feel stressed out all the time.’

Brace yourself, Baron-Gracie. Very shortly, she and her band will find themselves 30 minutes up the road in the home town of her ‘badass’ influence Shirley Manson, playing their first ever Edinburgh shows (matinee and evening) as part of La Belle Angele’s impressive programme of Fringe gigs. Also on the August agenda is the Rising North Festival in Shetland, which should float her remote boat. ‘I’ve always wanted to go but the only way to get there is either 11-hour ferry or a tiny plane. And I don’t enjoy flying on tiny planes.’

Elsewhere on the Pale Waves musical tour around Scotland is their 2024 single ‘Glasgow’ which Baron-Gracie is happy to confirm is based on personal experience. ‘I fell for someone in Glasgow and it was fire with fire. It was never going to work out but it was fun while it lasted.’

For now, however, her focus is on material for the band’s fifth album. ‘I don’t want to take forever to release an album, that’s why I’m disappearing and trying to get a big chunk of it done right now,’ she says. ‘It’s been way too long without music, I’m getting

bored playing these old songs. I just want to play new music but, to be fair, I’m the one that writes the songs so it’s probably me being slow. We’re finally getting there; we’re finally on a path.’

Baron-Gracie’s musical path was set in unlikely circumstances when a spinal injury forced this sporty teenager to slow right down and ditch some of her physical pursuits. ‘So I picked up the guitar instead because I always like to be doing something, and that felt like the right fulfillment for me.’ Initially, she practiced with her father. ‘That was a bonding moment. We had a book of songs from the 60s, 70s and 80s that we would play. A lot of the time I’d be hearing those songs for the first time with my dad singing them. They were much better when I listened to the actual recordings!’

Suitably educated in the musical rudiments, Baron-Gracie went on to study at performing arts school BIMM Manchester where she fell in with drummer Ciara Doran and formed Pale Waves just over a decade ago. Four albums of indie rock and synth pop down the line, Baron-Gracie has adopted a more conscious style of songwriting. ‘When you’re young, you’re super excited by everything, whereas now I like to sit down and think about what I’m saying and how I’m presenting it. There’s more weight to it. There are so many songs these days you turn on and think, “what are you saying?”. It’s just bad noise.’

The first fruits of her latest writing session will be a new single (title tbc) in September, but Baron-Gracie is keeping her cards close to her chest for now. ‘It’s still too early to say exactly what it is. It definitely sounds like Pale Waves. I’ll say that.’

Pale Waves, La Belle Angele, 11 August, 1pm & 7pm.

It’s Britney , bitch!

Britney Spears is back! Well, sort of. With at least five hugely diverse shows at this year’s Fringe inspired by the troubled pop megastar, Zara Janjua explores why she still resonates so strongly with a whole generation

When I message Jess Robinson to say I’m chasing her publicist to arrange a chat, she doesn’t text back: she voice-notes me as Britney Spears. The warbles are all there.

The breathy over-enunciation of words that don’t need enunciating. I’ve known Robinson for years but even I did a double take.

That’s the thing about Britney Spears in 2026. She’s less a person than a language everyone in their 40s speaks fluently, one Robinson can apparently switch to in a heartbeat. Which is hardly surprising. Britney was one of the first impressions she ever learned. ‘My mates and I would practice in the school playground,’ she laughs. ‘Everyone wanted to be Britney.’

A truth, it seems, that plenty of people have refused to grow out of. There are at least five Britney-inspired shows at this year’s Fringe. For a performer whose last album arrived in 2016 and who, by even her most devoted fans’ admission, is unlikely ever to return to the stage, Britney is enjoying an unexpected renaissance. This August, she’ll appear in a sci-fi drag adventure, a solo confessional, an impressions cabaret, a Y2K circus spectacular, and a sketch show.

Talk to any of the artists behind them for more than five minutes and one word keeps surfacing without prompting: justice. Baby Lame, the ‘gender-bending punk horror’ drag clown behind Hit Me Baby One More Lame!, puts it simply: ‘It’s her body, it’s her life, but people feel ownership over what she’s doing. Everybody has an opinion.’ For Lame, that’s exactly why the show exists. ‘I think what we’ve lost is the celebration of what she’s actually contributed as a performer and the joy she’s brought so many people.’

The solution is to dial the celebration up to 11. The show is, in Lame’s own words, an intergalactic sci-fi odyssey in which Britney is abducted, exiled, pursued across the galaxy by an evil spaceship captained by her own sister, and eventually

rescued by Sigourney Weaver. It features a giant prosthetic bottom and a space duck called Billy Ray. Lame argues that Britney’s legend has expanded with every retelling in much the same way scripture does, describing it as ‘very Jesus-coded’. Or, more succinctly, ‘batshit’.

Jess Robinson’s affection for Britney is quieter but no less fierce. ‘She’s a tragic character. She’s been used and abused and we’ve watched her be publicly humiliated. I feel a huge amount of compassion and respect for her.’ That affection has earned Britney pride of place in Elton Reimagined, where audiences hear ‘Bennie And The Jets’ delivered in the unmistakable staccato purr of ‘ . . . Baby One More Time’.

Technically, Britney is one of Robinson’s favourite voices because she’s never developed a vocal ‘split personality’. As Robinson explains: ‘The singing voice and the speaking voice are the same instrument; unlike Adele, who goes from this really brash cockney speaking voice to something completely different when she sings. Britney feels accessible. It doesn’t feel too far away from us mere mortals.’

For Shereen Roushbaiani, who directs and performs in Saving Britney, inspiration arrived during lockdown after she and writer David Shopland disappeared down the Free Britney rabbit hole. Out came Jean, a Spears-obsessed millennial who copes with a difficult childhood and an ADHD diagnosis by filling a notebook with uncanny parallels between her own life and Britney’s.

‘A lot of millennials are going back to nostalgia to keep their brains alive,’ explains Roushbaiani. ‘It’s pretty tough in the old world right now.’ The production leans fully into that longing. There’s barely a smartphone in sight: instead, a pink boombox sits beside stacks of CDs and WKD bottles on a bedroom floor plastered with posters. ‘It’s a real millennial hug,’ she adds. Perhaps that’s why Britney still resonates so deeply. Lame believes queer audiences recognised something painfully familiar long before everyone else did. ‘A lot of queer people

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know what it’s like to be critiqued by society, battered down and told what we should and shouldn’t be doing. To see Britney come through that, people relate to it.’

Robinson sees something slightly different. ‘For me, Britney conjures up simpler times. Maybe it’s nostalgia for when the world wasn’t constantly at war, or at least we didn’t know about it all the time. Before social media became everything. It’s an escape. I want to create a bubble of joy where people don’t leave feeling confronted.’

Even the Fringe’s Britney-adjacent shows are mining the same emotional territory. Naughties, the acrobatic spectacular from Yuck Circus which will feature her music, promises ‘Furbies, flip phones and terrible fashion’, with director Georgia Deguara calling it ‘a celebration of the good and the bad of 00s pop culture’.

Meanwhile, Britney: Holy Mackerel!, the latest sketch show from comedy duo Charly Clive and Ellen Robertson, has arguably the loosest connection of the lot. There are no schoolgirl pigtails, snake performances or conservatorship storylines. Instead, the title is a nod to the duo’s origins. Their first show, Britney, was inspired by Clive’s brain tumour,

which she nicknamed after Spears. The logic? If Britney could survive everything life had thrown at her, then so could she.

To some she’s a queer icon. To others, a feminist touchstone, a cautionary tale about celebrity or simply the soundtrack to growing up. Britney may never set foot on a stage again. But Edinburgh, it seems, still can’t stop giving her an encore.

Jess Robinson: Elton Reimagined, Assembly George Square Gardens, 5–30 August, 7.15pm.

Baby Lame: Hit Me Baby One More Lame!, Pleasance Courtyard, 5–30 August, 10.50pm.

Saving Britney, Underbelly George Square, 5–30 August, 6.15pm.

Yuck Circus: Naughties, Assembly George Square Gardens, 6–30 August, 4.40pm.

Britney: Holy Mackerel!, Pleasance Courtyard, 5–30 August, 4.50pm.

Hitting us one more time: Baby Lame (previous page), Saving Britney, Jess Robinson (below)

RON MUECK

The scale and detail of ‘A Girl’ last astonished Edinburgh gallerygoers in 2012 and, barely looking a day older, she’s back after all those years away. In the interim period, the five-metrelong fibreglass sculpture has been all across Europe. Australian artist Mueck’s creation is finally coming home, accompanied by more than 50 other works of modern and contemporary art that have just gone on show at Modern One. (Brian Donaldson) n National Galleries Of Scotland: Modern One.

Absolute bangers

Statues surround us in cities but how many of those immortalised do we actually still recognise? In his new exhibition, Memorials To Sausage Politics, Duncan Of Jordanstone alumnus Jamie Fitzpatrick asks what purpose these monuments serve and tells Afreka Thomson why humour is key to getting his message across

Most of us walk through Edinburgh without paying much attention to its (roughly 200) public monuments. Cast in bronze, philosophers, generals and politicians (almost all of them men) loom over streets and public squares, attracting more pigeons than a human’s second glance. Occasionally, a confused tourist will rub David Hume’s toe: the rest aren’t so lucky. But Edinburgh-based artist Jamie Fitzpatrick wants us to start taking more notice. In his new exhibition, Memorials To Sausage Politics, he fills Edinburgh Printmakers with sculptures and screenprints inspired by the city’s overlooked Victorian monuments. Twisting familiar civic symbols into giant, grotesque figures, the show asks what these statues are really doing in the streets around us and what purpose they continue to serve, if any.

‘They’re just all these big hams standing around the city,’ says Fitzpatrick The invisibility of these ‘big hams’ fascinates him. ‘People don’t even know who they are anymore. They become this collection of rhetorical symbols, placed around a city to reinforce social hierarchies . . . a kind of proto-CCTV that watches over you from all these different places.’

The sculptures in Memorials To Sausage Politics exaggerate those ideas until they become satirical. Bulging torsos, elongated limbs and fractured surfaces transform the familiar imagery of heroic public sculpture into something absurd and broken. ‘I’m aiming for this thing that both looks like it’s in the process of falling apart whilst also bursting into life at the same time,’ explains Fitzpatrick.

In the Edinburgh Printmakers gallery, monumental screenprints climb the walls while sculptures perch on unusually tall plinths, forcing visitors to crane their necks awkwardly. ‘These things do stand up really high, but they also kinda look like they could topple over at any minute,’ says Fitzpatrick. The exhibition itself has been carefully choreographed to echo

the experience of encountering Edinburgh’s monuments while making visitors feel uncomfortable in their presence. One towering figure stands confrontationally close to the gallery entrance. ‘The first thing you’ve got is this object that you have to navigate. I like the humour in the statues . . . but I also want people to be a little bit scared.’

Fitzpatrick leaves fingerprints, footprints and thumb marks pressed into the surfaces of his sculptures, allowing the labour behind each work to remain visible. ‘It feels like it’s a bit of a fight between the object and me,’ he says. ‘You start to see this huge object in relationship to a body. It puts that human scale into something that is monumental.’

The exhibition also marks an important moment in Fitzpatrick’s practice, bringing sculpture and printmaking together following his residency at Edinburgh Printmakers. During that time, he explored how printed images could become part of sculptures. ‘The print isn’t documenting the sculpture; it’s another sculpture in the room.’ Print has historically been used to circulate messages and ideologies, while public monuments have fixed those same values into the fabric of the city. Despite the intention behind it, Memorials To Sausage Politics never feels like a lecture.

‘I don’t think artwork radically changes people’s points of view,’ argues Fitzpatrick. ‘I think it’s about making people see more.’ Humour, he believes, is a far more effective way into difficult conversations. ‘When things get very serious, it’s a barrier for a lot of people to engage with work. I want to draw them in with the sort of fun-ness. But then I want them to leave having been provoked into thinking about what we’re saying about ourselves when these are the civic monuments that are supposed to show the character of Edinburgh.’

Jamie Fitzpatrick: Memorials To Sausage Politics, Edinburgh Printmakers, until 25 October.

Whether you want to laugh or cry, sing and dance, or marvel at the wonders of the human body, you’ll always find the perfect show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Explore our showcase and get booking!

STAYIN’ ALIVE

THEATRE & DANCE

Gilded Balloon Patter House 5–31August (not 12, 19, 26), 3.40pm instagram.com/stayinaliveplay, instagram.com/vickyoxley instagram.com/onemadamproductions

Maggie’s nan is dead, her therapist is useless, and her sister is threatening to knock her out. Maggie? She’s still in her nan’s house. The walls are closing in, but somewhere between the Blue Anchor pub, a couple of dodgy tribute acts and a broken Alexa, she might figure out how she got here and find a reason to stay. A darkly funny, brutally honest show from Victoria Oxley, told with biting wit, and the heart and humour of Liverpool.

PORTRAITS OF AMERICANA

THEATRE & DANCE

Space Niddry Street

7–9 August, 1.35pm

edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/ portraits-of-americana

A raw and intimate theatre piece exploring what it means to come of age in contemporary America. Inspired by portraits created by local LA photographers, the production uses ensemble storytelling to bring the imagined lives behind each photograph to life through original monologues and movement performed by 20 young actors. Each actor blends imagined narratives with their own experiences, reflecting the emotional realities of a generation navigating social pressure, economic uncertainty, political tension and the search for belonging.

FRAMES

MUSICAL THEATRE

C aquila

10–16 August, 9.40pm instagram.com/frames_show

Join Jon Andrew Franklin, a Seattle-based singer-songwriter, violinist and live-looping performer, on an inspirational musical journey spanning different frames of his life. Bridging folk, Americana and indie-pop traditions, this one-man show encourages us all to remember the moments and the extraordinary people that have formed us, and to express gratitude for where we are today. Come and experience nostalgic waves through unforgettable songwriting, interwoven with evocative storytelling, as Jon reminds us all why the best memories are kept in frames.

DYSTOPIA 26: THE ROCK OPERA

MUSIC

Bedlam Theatre

7–29 August (not 10, 17, 24), 5.25pm dystopiarockopera.com

In this immersive gig theatre production featuring an excellent live band, hummable tunes, colourful projections and scarily realistic masks, narrators Beldon Haigh (a disgraced spin doctor being punished by the system he helped to create) and incendiary rebel Helen Raiser guide the audience through the story of the rise and fall of President Blame and the dawning of a new hope. It is a show about happiness for those who believe music and laughter are acts of resistance; for those who feel the world has gone mad, yet still want to laugh, sing, shout and survive it together.

WHO WE BECOME: ONE-ACT PLAYS BY LANFORD WILSON

THEATRE & DANCE

Space Surgeons’ Hall

7–29 August (not 16, 23), 2.05pm DeepFlightProductions.com

Award-winning, five-star production of oneact plays by Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson. Three deeply human stories of love, identity, memory and change, brought vividly to life. Presented in two alternating standalone productions: The Moonshot Tape or the double bill of Breakfast At The Track / A Poster of the Cosmos. ‘Perhaps one of the best performances you will see at the Fringe this year’ (Broadway Baby). ‘Incredible’ (Independent).

PENELOPE

THEATRE & DANCE

Underbelly Cowgate

5–30 August, 3.45pm penelopemusical.com

Penelope waited 20 years for Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. Now she’s ready to share her side of the story — but she’s going to need a drink first. Starring Broadway’s Grace McLean, this contemporary chamber musical brings one of history’s greatest epics to life through a Richard Rodgers Award-winning folk-pop score. Sharp, funny, and unexpectedly moving: this is Penelope’s Odyssey.

festival showcase

KATIE PATERSON

AFTERLIFE llll l

The 197 reconstructed ancient amulets that comprise Katie Paterson’s latest artistic and environmental excavation are laid out on a bespoke round table, designed by international architects Zeller & Moye and made from sycamore by East Lothianbased Silvan Studio. The display may evoke the sort of hipster emporium where magic happens after dark as demons are invoked, but each intricately constructed piece that makes up Paterson’s sculptural installation has a story of its own.

Made from materials drawn from landscapes and environments under threat, the five sections (Biosphere, Hydrosphere, Cryosphere, Place & Climate, and Wildfire) cast Paterson as a Scheherazade-like figure. As she breathes new life into old forms, it’s a reminder of their strength gathered across centuries. Collected as both memorial and homage, Paterson’s labours bring home the fragile eco system each piece has sprung from, as a brand new set of myths is conjured into view. (Neil Cooper)

n Collective, until 6 September.

WENDY MCMURDO THE DIGITAL MIRROR lll ll

Wendy McMurdo has an impressive portfolio. One of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hundred Heroines, her work exploring childhood’s malleable reality has shaped minds in prestigious art institutions for two decades and her latest exhibition is no less impactful. Modern images, juxtaposed with artworks which echo McMurdo’s own Edinburgh upbringing, give The Digital Mirror an initial sense of beauty and unease. Taking her portfolio from the 90s to today, she charts a child-centred relationship with the digital environment at a time when technology, once confined to science fiction, became the norm.

The photographs, digitally altered to create an invisible void where devices are held, illustrate a timely picture: a childhood which slips through the fingers of new generations. Trips to the museum, touching the ice at Dynamic Earth and dressing up for Halloween sit beside tapping fingers on new classroom computers and an empty room with a school kid swiping a blank space. Both nostalgic and despairing, the subjects shape the world around them, despite being inconstant and distorted. In the centre of the images, a screen shows a classroom with a translucent digital object, an uninvited guest. Yet as the exhibition continues, so does a reminder of the unflinchingly playful nature of childhood that lives between the real and the imagined, even in our hyper-digital present. (Rachel Morrell) n National Galleries Of Scotland: Portrait, until 25 October.

EVA ROTHSCHILD THE VOID PRESSES THE WALL llll l

Among the hard angles and minimal grid lines, there is softness woven through this tactile show by the Dublin via Glasgow then Londonbased artist, Eva Rothschild. Her visual vocabulary sings in the Italian accent of the Memphis Group, founded by Ettore Sottsass and active in the 1980s. Rothschild borrows from the collective’s joyful take on design and architecture, using their signature zig zags, squiggles and triangles, but clashing them with tough urban materials: steel, rebar, graffitied breeze blocks made from resin that looks like polystyrene.

Tricks are played on us with textures; the floppy jumpers in ‘Houdini’ are solid after being dipped in resin and the lovers’ padlocks in ‘New Romantix’ are cast from polyurethane rubber, in a vibrant, rainbow Benetton palette. On both floors we find studies of black tones, exploring its slippery, glossy and matte surfaces, curving in licorice knots, sliding floorward in slick paint ribbons. The fabrics of ‘Soft Play’ and ‘The Grit’ look like inviting 90s duvets to roll into. The latter is a towering stack of lushly patterned mattresses, bulging and bending over a stone base; almost hiding the difficulty beneath, it deliberately calls to mind the anti-resilient fairytale of The Princess And The Pea, with its famously delicate protagonist.

‘Safe’ in the Warehouse is a highlight, a film in collaboration with Sadler’s Wells that delights in upending notions of toxic masculinity. We watch a group of young boys dance, hug and swagger over Parsloes Memphis, a yellow sculptural playpark pyramid in Dagenham, based on Rothschild’s memory of a stepped, stone folly in Killiney Hill, Ireland. Glorious. (Claire Sawers) n Fruitmarket, until 11 October.

ESTHER CASTLE

Abundant Parts is an installation which draws comparisons between non-normative body types and garden weeds, with surreal images of failures in controlling the latter leaving the natural world to reign supreme.

n Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, until 27 September.

JEAN F WATSON

From the 1960s through to her death in 1974, Watson made significant financial contributions to ensure Edinburgh developed an outstanding collection of Scottish art. This showcase features work by JD Fergusson, Elizabeth Blackadder, Alison Watt and Eduardo Paolozzi.

n City Art Centre, until 4 October.

JILLIAN EDELSTEIN

From world leaders in reflective pose to regular folk going about their ordinary business, Edelstein has captured them all with her camera. South Africa-born and London-based, her work from across four decades is gathered here for the first time.

n Stills, until 24 October.

GIANTS

A showcase of the colossal prehistoric creatures that lived after the extinction of dinosaurs a mere 66 million years ago. Giants features the largest shark to have ever swum the oceans and (shudder) the biggest ever snake.

n National Museum Of Scotland, until 14 September.

ART HIGHLIGHTS

FROM TRAQUAIR TO TIREE

From Scottish artist Moy Mackay comes a luminous world of landscapes in fibre and colour, wielding inspiration she’s gleaned from the Tweed Valley all the way up to the Hebrides in order to create richly textured artworks.

n Dundas Street Gallery, 5–13 August.

CATHERINE OPIE

To Be Seen marks the American photographer’s debut solo exhibition in Scotland and contains over 70 of her images across 30 years, including children, surfers, high school footballers and political crowds as well as a number of self-portraits.

n Royal Scottish Academy, 8 August–1 November.

This lavish exhibition celebrates 60 years of Cosprop, the design company which has crafted outfits for film, TV and theatre including Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy and Helena Bonham Carter in A Room With A View n Dovecot Studios, until 9 January.

EIGHT

A little nod here to the barnstorming numerical musical which focussed on the Tudor king’s ill-fated spouses, Hannah Clift’s cabaret turn has Henry attempting to clear his name. And what better way to attempt such an implausible feat than through a One (Wo)Man Drag King Musical Parody and the music of Meat Loaf, Celine Dion and Ed Sheeran. (Brian Donaldson)

 Gilded Balloon Patter House, 5–18 August, 9pm.

When it comes to Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, naturally it’s a family affair. But two cabaret shows featuring the mother-daughter duo at this year’s Fringe also have ties that run deep. ‘We met in undergraduate school 20 years ago,’ says Adin Lenahan of co-performer and co-creator Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin (or Soda Pressed and Xena Fauxbia to give them their respective drag names). ‘The genesis of Judy Garland Is Fat At Carnegie Hall was a short play we wrote together in 2012 when we both played Judy Garland at different ages,’ adds Garvin. ‘Our shared love for Judy is something we’ve come back to over and over.’

Similarly, David Saffert and Jillian Snow have been performing as Liza Minnelli and Liberace for over 12 years. Billed as ‘a show that never was’, Liberace And Liza: A Tribute started small. ‘I used to do a variety show to celebrate my birthday,’ recalls Saffert. ‘Jillian had been performing as Liza in New York and I asked her to join in. I had a friend that suggested I play Liberace and people really liked the mix.’

Both shows take different approaches. ‘When we were listening to the album Judy At Carnegie Hall together, one thing that stood out was how often Garland talks about her body; how she feels about her body and the public’s perception of her body,’ explains Garvin. ‘We started having conversations about the real estate that took up within this incredible performance and the show started from there. It’s trying to examine the crossroads between performances and bodies . . . and the way Judy’s relationship with weightloss drugs was shaped by the industry and her mother.’

Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland and Liberace: it’s practically a holy trinity of gay icons. Jo Laidlaw goes behind the candelabra to discover how these entertainment legends are being brought to life at this year’s Fringe

Get happy

Lenahan and Garvin’s drag show is also rooted in the queer community’s enduring love for Garland. ‘Drag is like exploded performance in a lot of ways,’ says Lenehan. ‘It allows you to be transgressive, and I think it’s a nod to Judy’s legacy: much of what keeps her alive are drag queens.’ Garvin adds: ‘But we’re doing very stupid things the whole time with snacks.’

Minnelli and Liberace never actually performed together, although they did meet at least once, explains Snow, describing a photograph they spotted in Liberace’s archive (held in the basement of Michael Jackson’s Thriller Villa, in possibly the most Liberace thing ever). Liberace And Liza: A Tribute imagines what might happen if they were touring together today, incorporating new songs along the way.

‘I think what we do on stage is 100% plausible,’ says classically trained pianist Saffert, as he discusses pre-show rituals that involve watching endless YouTube videos of the pair. Snow adds: ‘We’re doing Chappell Roan songs, we’re doing Lady Gaga; but that’s what Liberace did, that’s what Liza did. The times and music were changing; they adapted and did their thing.’

Momentarily diverted by the thought of Liberace turning up with a cabin steamer full of furs to play a grimy scout hall for three weeks in August, Saffert says: ‘There was actually talk of him doing the Fringe in the late 60s! But he got offered a Las Vegas residency instead.’ The scout hall’s loss is our gain.

Judy Garland Is Fat At Carnegie Hall, Space On The Mile, 24–29 August, 10.45pm; Liberace And Liza: A Tribute, Underbelly Bristo Square, 5–30 August, 8.25pm.

PICTURE: ANDY BATT

Chip off the old block: Liberace And Liza – A Tribute (above), Judy Garland Is Fat At Carnegie

GOOSE’S BIG GAME SHOW

Andrew Wildgoose is an Edinburgh-based quizmaster so prolific he’s achieved single-name status, known simply as Goose. In his latest Fringe offering, this Kylie of quizzing combines 15 years of experience with stateof-the-art technology that will let his audience dictate the show. Goose began working on the new format on the last day of his 2025 Fringe run, when a company approached him with innovative quiz torches designed to maximise audience interaction. He has been perfecting it ever since, alongside the not-insignificant task of preparing for the birth of his second child at the end of July.

With two new Fringe babies this summer, Goose is reminiscing on Augusts past. ‘This will be my fifth Fringe show and every year there are stories that make me laugh, cry and smile,’ he says. ‘One that always sticks with me was when we were performing in a spiegeltent during high winds. Lots of shows had to cancel, but we managed to go ahead. The only problem was the tent kept moving, so our projector was constantly slipping out of alignment. Our brilliant tech team must have adjusted it around 30 times during the show just to keep everything running. That’s the Fringe in a nutshell: everyone pulling together to make live theatre happen.’

Bestowed with their torches, Goose’s quizgoers are invited to contribute their energy to the alchemical process that produces a successful show. Left in the their hands, each night will be different from the last. ‘The moment I always look forward to most is listening to the audience as they leave the venue’, says Goose. ‘Hearing them replay the moments they loved, chat about the answers they almost got right or celebrate the ones they nailed is the best feeling.’ (Evie Glen)  Assembly George Square Studios, 5–30 August, 10.05pm.

FEMPATHS: TRANSISTOR RADIO HOUR

Transistor Radio Hour is a warts-and-all celebration of being trans, as well as an act of much-needed defiance. ‘It’s a kaleidoscopic cabaret fantasia combining live music, storytelling, comedy and political performance featuring original music and lyrics taken from found texts by famous trans icons (and their foes) throughout time,’ explains Mari Moriarty aka Fempath. Those quoted voices are an eclectic mix of the trans community and their haters, including, says Moriarty, ‘Marsha P Johnson, sexual assault survivors’ rights activist Emma Sulkowicz, Kim Petras [trans singer-songwriter], 12-year-old trans kid Ari Bowman, my brother, my mother, the Reform Party, the RNC [Republican National Committee], twitter trolls and me, to name a few.’

The show is simultaneously a balm and a call to arms given the political toxicity surrounding trans people. But it is the trans allies and their appeasement of the bigotry that Moriarty is particularly disappointed in. ‘The last time I performed this show, that same weekend the American and trans flags were flown at half-mast to honour Charlie Kirk’s death. The bigots have always been there, but it’s the betrayal and acquiescence to fascist hate by allies and members of our own community alike that’s the most painful.’

Moriarty’s response is a show that holds nothing back, keen to represent trans people as they truly are. ‘Trans stories that are told are usually inoffensive and palatable to cis audiences. If the world wants to see us as less than human, all we can do is to celebrate our humanness in response: the slutty, difficult, egotistical, rageful, mystical, loving

(Marissa Burgess)

 Underbelly Bristo Square, 5–30 August, 8.45pm.

How the

Fringe

did we get here already?

Just like that, it’s Fringe season again. Time flies when you’re having… fabulous fun

Every August, Edinburgh transforms into magical moments when a show leaves you laughing, crying or questioning every life decision that got you into the front row. For LGBTQIA+ audiences and allies, 2026 is shaping up to be another bumper year.

At the very top of my must-see list is My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me On Instagram (Underbelly Cowgate, 5–30 August, 8.20pm), Yoz Mensch’s award-winning autobiographical journey through grief, family and queer joy. It’s heartfelt, beautifully crafted and one of those rare shows that lingers long after you’ve left the theatre.

If you’re looking for a celebration rather than contemplation, Big Gay After Party (Just the Tonic at La Belle Angele, 14 & 28 August, 11pm) promises exactly what it says on the tin. For something with a little more bite, Heated Rivalry (various dates and venues) is generating plenty of buzz, while Skank Sinatra (Assembly George Square Studios, 6–30 August, 6.30pm) returns with the kind of unapologetic cabaret chaos that Fringe audiences adore. No Fringe would feel complete without the incomparable Reuben Kaye (Assembly George Square Gardens, 6–29 August, 8pm), who

returns with his latest offering. Expect razor-sharp wit, powerhouse vocals and the sort of social commentary that’s delightfully difficult to swallow. And speaking of icons, can we really do Edinburgh without at least one dose of the legendary Julian Clary (Assembly Rooms, 14–23 August, 5.30pm)? I think not.

There are also a handful of shows firmly on my radar. Bottoming For Jesus (ZOO Southside, 7–30 August, 10.40pm) has one of the most irresistible titles of the festival and is already generating plenty of conversation, while boobytrapped (theSpace on the Mile, 7–29 August, 9.30pm) looks set to deliver sharp comedy with plenty of surprises. Add ROLEPLAY (Summerhall, 6–31 August, 5.50pm) and Furniture Boys (Underbelly, Bristo Square, 5–30 August, 2.30pm) to the mix, and you’ve got four productions that could easily become this year’s breakout queer hits.

Whether you’re after belly laughs, big emotions or something wonderfully weird, this year’s Fringe has queer stories in every colour of the rainbow. My advice? Book early, take a chance on something unexpected and prepare to fall in love with theatre all over again.

THE BREAKUP VARIETY HOUR

Ariana DiLorenzo, aka Ariana And The Rose, finally arrives in Scotland having charmed the world with a glitter-soaked, poppowered one-woman experience tracing the six stages of getting over heartbreak

n Assembly George Square Studios, 5–31 August, 5.20pm.

FLOP!

A welcome update for Arthur Hull’s show all about the great songs that are buried in the lousiest musicals of all time. Matter of opinion all this, of course, but Flop! is a joyful ride, nonetheless.

n Gilded Balloon Teviot, 6–30 August, 6.45pm.

BERNIE DIETER

The irrepressible Bernie and her band of Bohemians return once more to bring us a powerhouse night of variety that puts the rest in the shade. All that and she helps promote a message of peace, love and understanding.

n Underbelly Circus Hub, 7–29 August, 7.20pm.

NAUGHTY CABARET

A queer feminist extravaganza packed with energy, absurdity and ridiculousness, featuring a changing line-up of clown, character comedy, boyband and burlesque, hosted by Norway’s Anna Marie Simonsen and Marie Kallevik Straume.

n Underbelly Bristo Square, 6–15 August, 11.20pm.

CABARET HIGHLIGHTS

JAMES PHELAN

This magic show aims to celebrate making the impossible possible and is dubbed, by its inventor, as ‘a love letter to everything I’ve spent years making, told through the pieces that have stayed with me’.

n Underbelly Circus Hub, 8–29 August, 5.15pm.

ELLIOT BIBBY

Most parents will have had a mishap/ disaster on that journey which they’d probably prefer to forget. Not many of them use such cringeworthy incidents and turn them into a magic show. This father-of-two has done exactly that.

n Gilded Balloon Teviot, 5–30 August, 1.40pm.

Featuring some rising international stars of the form, this Fringe staple was one of the events that had to be moved due to the Princes Street fire and subsequent rejigging. The burlesque show must go on.

n Assembly St Andrew Square, 6–30 August, 10.15pm.

Abandoman: Afterglow

Alfie Brown: The Entertainer BATSU!

Edinburgh Comedy All Stars

Georgia Polly-Taylor: Very Hot. Very Messy.

Aarian Mehrabani: How’s Your Head?!

Bilal Zafar: Rubicon

Freya Parker: An Hour Of Decay!

LIZZY HOO

After a successful Melbourne Comedy Festival, Hoo brings her latest show and stylish new bob to Edinburgh. Says Hoo? details her new obsession with golf, reflects on her rescue greyhound now having a stepmum, considers why she’s giving off ‘big second wife energy’, and tries (but fails) to not say lots of borderline stuff about her increasingly eccentric family. (Brian Donaldson)

 Assembly George Square Studios, 5–30 August, 8pm.

Oh my darling

Look out boys: crazed aristocrat Clementine is back and she’s still on the hunt for love. Promising an unholy mashup of influences for her second coming, creator Rosalie Minnitt talks to Claire Sawers about the character taking over her brain and scaring away the menfolk

Back in 2023, London comedian Rosalie Minnitt brought unhinged, Regency-era heroine Clementine to the Fringe and crowds went wild for her laudanum-guzzling, parasol-twirling, neurotic alter ego. Clementine was unhappily single at the societally unacceptable age of 27 and Minnitt’s debut show took a deranged look at her attempts to attract a suitor, with 21st-century nods to feminism, via Beyoncé, tarot cards and TikTok. Clementine’s frenzied mission to find her true love ultimately led to selfacceptance: turns out she’s the one she’d been looking for all along.

After selling out Edinburgh two years in a row, then London’s Soho Theatre for three runs, Minnitt took Clementine on a UK tour last year, which also sold out. The illiterate leading lady, with neither sense nor sensibility, is returning to Edinburgh in a brand-new show, Clementine II, plus a one-night reprise of the original Clementine hour. ‘Part two is War And Peace meets HBO’s Girls meets Sex And The City in Les Mis,’ explains Minnitt, who has been busy with a Radio 4 Valentine’s special of Clementine, and co-writing Literally, a BBC sketch comedy show which aims to help high school students with their English literature GCSEs. ‘I’m having so much fun bringing more of Clementine’s world to life,’ says Minnitt. ‘You can expect more C-plot characters that add absolutely nothing to the storyline, unnecessary props and a banging soundtrack. It’s about dreams, nostalgia and wanting to matter in a world that’s on fire.’

Something about Clementine’s blend of zany, restless energy and complicated yet emancipated life goals struck a chord, and Minnitt was bowled over by the reaction. Some women watched the first show multiple times, messaging Minnitt to praise her for writing an insane, empirelined character who caught butterflies in nets, yet somehow made them feel seen. ‘I love it best when I win people over. That’s gratifying. Sometimes people don’t really know what to do with her at first, but then once they let their guards down, they really buy into her world, which is so exciting. My favourite Fringe memory is getting my first review. I had no idea whether people would like it. I was really nervous about the whole process. Seeing that someone connected with what I was trying to do was such a special moment.’

Three years down the line, after much time-travelling with the frilly-bonneted spoof, can Minnitt still remember where she ends and Clementine begins? ‘She absolutely takes over my brain and body. Sometimes I come off stage and genuinely can’t remember what I’ve said during the show; it’s almost like I’ve completely blacked out. I know it’s been a good performance when I can’t quite remember it afterwards.’ Besides writing the new show, Minnitt got her first TV credit playing a receptionist with zero awareness of Alan Partridge in How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge). ‘I feel like I learned a lot by watching it all come together,’ she says of her experience working with Steve Coogan. ‘My best memory was watching how they improvise. It’s such a specific chemistry that comes together to make that character work.’

As well as performing Clementine by day, Minnitt will be appearing in the cast of drag musical comedy Margaret Thatcher Queen Of Hollywood at night. ‘Having time away from Clementine is actually what keeps the character alive; stepping away allows me to come back to her with fresh energy and makes the performance stronger.’ Clementine II has a message of falling in love with your life, though Minnitt thinks men may be mildly terrified by her association with the violent, chaotic spinster. ‘In general I think it’s repelled men! I would say that if I went on a date with someone who does what I do, I’d be scared too.’

Rosalie Minnitt: Clementine II, Pleasance Courtyard, 5–30 August, 3.35pm; Clementine, Shedinburgh, 11 August, 6.45pm; Margaret Thatcher Queen Of Hollywood, Assembly George Square Gardens, 5–30 August, 8.40pm.

festival showcase

Whether you want to laugh or cry, sing and dance, or marvel at the wonders of the human body, you’ll always find the perfect show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Explore our showcase and get booking!

THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF A RAT RACER

THEATRE & DANCE

Space On The Mile, 7–15 August, 11.40pm; Space Niddry Street, 17–22 August, 9.30am linktr.ee/extraordinarylifeofaratracer

Ever wondered what the person next to you is thinking? Eva is just a regular rat racer. Single mother to a six-year-old boy, she is desperately trying to play the game. But her mind has different plans. On the way to an important job interview, Eva gets bombarded by ever-worsening intrusive thoughts. So prepare for the uncomfortable and dive into Eva’s mind. Guided by Arthur, a sadistic, half-real figure, this two-hander surreal dark comedy will shift your concept of normality.

I BOUGHT A FLIP PHONE

THEATRE & DANCE

Zoo Playground

7–30 August (not 19, 26), 3.35pm zoofestival.co.uk/programme/ i-bought-a-flip-phone

Charlie’s sick of his iPhone. His best friend never replies, his mum nags him and everyone else’s life looks better than his own. Sick of scrolling, for his 27th birthday he’s buying an old-school flip phone. No more five-hour screen time days. That’ll fix everything . . . won’t it?

‘Stop doing what you’re doing. Book the ticket. You won’t be disappointed.’ AAAAA (A Young(ish) Perspective)

AAAAA (North West End)

ELVIS IN CHAOS

SPOKEN WORD

Greenside George Street

7–15 August, 5.15pm

MichaelAndersonBoston.org

Hallucinatory PowerPoint raves on: Elvis’ branching timelines / romance in the Multiverse / the Top Five Gods of All Time / the politics of the Oreo cookie / the constellation Orion as modern art/ how bagpipes caused the Black Death. Manic, hilarious TedTalks on acid with a firehose of images that will overload your senses and rumple your mind! Michael Anderson is a two-time winner of the Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses Festival at MIT and Imperial College London. All proceeds go to immigrant defence networks in Boston, US.

TO DO LISTS

THEATRE & DANCE

Pleasance Courtyard

5–31 August (not 12, 17, 26), 5.15pm pleasance.co.uk/event/do-lists

Ever since she can remember, Amy has written a to do list. And every day she must get through it to meet her goals. Until one day, she is forced to ask herself, what does it mean if you can’t complete your to do list? Who are we without them? It’s time she gathers the mounting years of to dos and comes face to face with the truth. Obsession, grief and the rocky transition from childhood to adulthood: join Rainy Day Theatre for an hour of confession, warmth and laughter.

‘A writer to keep an eye on’ (The Stage)

THE HYPOCHONDRIAC

THEATRE & DANCE

Space On The Mile

8–28 August (even dates only), 3.05pm instagram.com/rebrandtheatre

A satire comedy about a wealthy eccentric, Argan with delusions of illness. His greed for answers has led to him arranging for his daughter, Angelique, to marry a doctor to selfishly fuel this obsession, while she pines for her true love. Hilarity ensues as Argan’s family and his witty maid attempt to make him see reason as he falls further into his hypochondria due to a capitalistic healthcare system feeding his fantasies. Will Argan break away from his gold-digging wife? Will Angelique end up with her true love? Or will Argan succumb to his hallucinations?

5 HEADLINERS FOR £10

COMEDY

Hoots @ The Apex, Hoots @ The Wee Red Bar and Just The Tonic At The Caves| 7–31 August | Daily at 1.30pm, 3.50pm, 6pm & 7.30pm rgb.monster/headliners

Five top-level stand-up comedians and strictly no picking on the audience! The biggest-selling line-up show at the festival, now with four daily performances and four different casts of headline-level acts. No MC asking you where you’re from, and no banter with the front row: stand-up comedy as it should be. A great way to have a giggle, many festival-goers use these shows as a way to discover new acts, all of which have solo shows in their own right.

THE TEARS OF NERAKHIS

THEATRE & DANCE Space Surgeons’ Hall 24–29 August, 1.10pm studioplatero.com

SWAN SONG

THEATRE & DANCE

Space Surgeons’ Hall 7–15 August, 9.45pm instagram.com/swansongtheplay

ULYSSES OF SCRANTON

THEATRE & DANCE

Bedlam Theatre

7–29 August (not17, 24 & 25), 11am newvintageensemble.com

The Tears Of Nerakhis is an epic new fantasy musical telling the story of Calanthe, a human girl who runs away to the mythical castle of the god Nerakhis. There she meets his daughter, Alea, and their love will trigger a war between gods and shake the foundations of Creation itself. A modern myth adapted from a fantasy novel, this fully sungthrough musical features a sweeping score, iconic characters and merges timeless themes of love and freedom with urgent environmental concerns. In the end, it asks one nal question: why is there dew on the grass?

HOLE!

COMEDY

Underbelly Bristo Square 5–30 August, 9.30pm instagram.com/americansingsong

Plug up thy hole! A religious sect in Nebraska wears butt plugs at all times because they believe a wrathful God shall suck the unplugged up, ass- rst, to burn on the face of the sun. The crazy thing is . . . they’re right. HOLE! is an epic love story set in the apocalyptic aftermath of The Great Sucking, when the only people left on Earth are the fanatical Nebraskans – and anyone else who happened to be doing butt stuff at the time.

When a disgraced director launches a show to secure his return to the spotlight, he will spill the secrets of some powerful people he ought not to fuck with. Boasting divas, deceit and Sarah-Jessica from HR, Swan Song bristles with comedic absurdity! With a distinctly abstract and wacky style, this show promises to bring fun, drama and much-needed criticism of mainstream media to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe!

MR BERGMANN OF DEADMAN’S POINT

THEATRE & DANCE

Paradise Green @ The Vault 8–30 August (not 16 & 23), 5.30pm instagram.com/nth_degree_productions

A new play based on the extraordinary true story of Ireland’s most famous unidenti ed man, the so-called Peter Bergmann, who spent three days in Sligo mysteriously erasing his identity. Told through the eyes of an embalmer who is in a race against time to cement his own legacy, using half-mask, magic and physical theatre. This is a spellbinding and comic tale exploring reputation and what it is to live close to death. Brought to you by the award-winning Nth Degree Productions. ‘Remarkable’ AAAA (The Arts) Review, ‘Unforgettable’ AAAA (The Advertiser)

An ensemble of actors rehearse their new production of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but as they progress through the infamously ‘impossible to adapt’ work, they nd the line between text and real life starts to dissolve. A theatrical remix of Joyce’s classic novel that keeps the heartbeat of the original while layering in contemporary stories to produce a fast-paced, funny and emotionally direct work. Knowledge of the original book is not essential for enjoyment!

BILLIE AND THE BIG TURN ON

THEATRE & DANCE

The Speakeasy At The Royal Scots Club 10–15, 17, 20 & 21 August, 12.35pm; 18 & 19 August, 4.05pm purpleopossum.org/featured-projects

Step into a wildly off-beat audience-powered adventure where you’re part of the story. Featuring an international cast, this immersive theatrical show blends live music, singing, comedy, dance, unusual acts and audience play. This true-ish story is about becoming who and what you’re meant to be and the curious ways to get there. Join Billie as they transform into Sniffany, a ‘scent-sational’ super-cycling hero. This isn’t just a show: it’s a playful, inspiring invitation to discover and develop your own superpowers.

festival showcase

Perhaps surprisingly, audiences may well discover more than a splash of visual art inspiration across this year’s comedy line-up. Afreka Thomson digs deeper and finds herself in a world of fruit, fainting and fangirling

TYoung masters

he Fringe has never been afraid of a little surrealism, and, come August, half the people mooching around the beer gardens look like they went to art school, even if they didn’t. This year, though, visual art has made a bizarrely significant mark on the comedy programme. From Bob Ross and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to a pair of duct-taped bananas, comedians and theatremakers are raiding galleries and art history books for inspiration. Whether they’re interrogating the male gaze or poking fun at the absurdities of the contemporary art world, these shows prove there’s plenty to laugh about.

Bebe Cave returns with Swoon, the final instalment of her trilogy exploring what she calls ‘historical female main character syndrome’. This time, she turns her attention to the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood and the women immortalised in their paintings. ‘We remember these men as super-romantic, wistful characters, but the women around them were discarded and abused after being used to create their most famous works. It left a trail of destruction that’s so opposite to the serene, peaceful, beautiful nature of their paintings.’

For Cave, the show is also about the way those ideas continue to shape modern womanhood. ‘I’m trying to make comedy about how crazy it is that we think being sexy, sad and dead is more interesting than being alive and healthy.’ The title itself captures that contradiction. ‘I’ve always wanted to faint in public,’ Cave jokes. ‘To swoon must mean that you’re the most delicate, beautiful, fragile little creature. But in reality, fainting is something that happens when your body is not very well.’ Swoon asks why we’ve spent centuries romanticising women’s suffering: might not sound hilarious, but in Cave’s hands it almost certainly will be.

PICTURE: SOPHIE HOLDEN

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masters

Elsewhere, Sarah-Louise Young looks to television’s most comforting artist. The Bob Ross Effect celebrates the beloved painter behind The Joy Of Painting, but Young’s fascination began at a giant Bob Ross watch party in 2015. ‘They screened all 403 episodes of The Joy Of Painting back to back, which was nine days,’ she laughs. ‘We slept for some of it, but we basically attempted nine days of Bob Ross with five million other people.’ Years later, following the death of her friend, the comedian and artist Lynn Ruth Miller, Young found herself returning to Ross’ philosophy of creativity without perfection. Her show grew from ‘a desire to explore how art can help us heal and how people live on when we still tell their stories,’ she says. Audience members are handed crayons but there’s no pressure. ‘The show is also an invitation for the audience to explore their own creativity,’ says Young. ‘If you think you can’t draw, this is the show for you.’

New Zealanders Katie Burson and Georgie Llewellyn take a decidedly more absurd route in How To Art. Inspired by Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous 2019 artwork ‘Comedian’, their awardwinning ‘clown-fruit mash-up’ imagines two bananas waking up

duct-taped to the wall of an art gallery. Burson is keen to stress the show shouldn’t be taken too literally: ‘Of course it’s not autobiographical . . . we play two bananas.’ Behind the wacky premise, though, is a surprisingly relatable message. ‘The work is kind of one big metaphor for how it feels to be an artist trying to do your thing in a world that’s not really built for us,’ Burson explains. There’s real life art in there too; the onstage gallery set is packed with bespoke works by New Zealand creatives. And if existential bananas don’t scratch your art itch, Lisa!: The Mona Lisa Musical, When Vincent Met John and Coco’s Art History Comedy Highlights Tour are all adding their own brushstrokes to this year’s Fringe too.

Bebe Cave: Swoon, Pleasance Dome, 5–30 August, 5.40pm.

The Bob Ross Effect, Assembly George Square Gardens, 5–31 August, 4.05pm.

How To Art, Underbelly Cowgate, 5–30 August, 9.40pm.

Fish out of water

Kate Dolan insists her latest show isn’t as sad as it sounds, even if Trout does touch on suicide, body issues and sobriety. Jay Richardson catches up with the absurdist comedian as she reflects on injecting silliness into taboo subjects and the role of loneliness in her live performance

Kate Dolan rolls her eyes at Fringe performers who liken a month in Edinburgh to surviving a war. While acknowledging stand-up can be tough, she tuts, ‘honestly though, I’ve had and done so much shit in my life, let’s have a bit of perspective.’

A case in point: when a baby started crying in the audience during her 2017 show, Idi-chums, a triple-hander with Joseph Emslie and Joseph Parsons, the erstwhile au pair dived on the grenade. She asked the mother that if she didn’t mind the swearing, would she allow Dolan to continue with the infant strapped to her chest. She soon got the child to sleep: a bittersweet early review. ‘Nothing like that really bothers me,’ the Midlands-raised, Sydney-based comic shrugs. ‘Being there in the moment: isn’t that what makes this so electric?’

Dolan began stand-up in London a decade ago while studying. But, as recounted in her 2024 solo Fringe debut, A Different Kind Of Unhinged, she then took four years off to care for her terminally ill, disabled mother. Going to Australia in 2020, getting married and settled there, she reinvented herself, ‘tried weird stuff and failed’. In the six years since, she’s collected a clutch of awards and considerable acclaim for her powerhouse absurdist style. Her director, comedian Emma Holland, describes her act as if ‘Miss Trunchbull had a soft spot for karaoke and Wind In The Willows’. Trout is her third ‘hyper-personal’ show, a typically expressive, multimedia assault of mouth and movement, directly inspired by Frederick Ashton’s ballet version of Tales Of Beatrix Potter and other choreographers such as Crystal Pite. Emerging in a giant silicon fish head, Dolan dextrously cycles through vocal inflections and channels her youthful dancing dreams, with the premise that she would ‘rather be a fish than a woman, from the first time I was made to feel less. Over time you’re like a fish bone; every part of you picked apart until there’s no flesh left. It’s a metaphor for not wanting to be here anymore.’

Encompassing such suicidal thoughts, body issues, a tumultuous childhood and sobriety, ‘it sounds sadder than it is because it’s comedy’, she smiles wanly. As with her hero, the open yet artful US stand-up Maria Bamford, Dolan aims to ‘normalise fucked up things’, with her show ‘a moment to fully step into who I am and not feel shame’. Her previous hour, The Critic, about her persecuting inner voice, deeply resonated with audiences. ‘I often get messages on social media where someone tells me they’ve not stopped thinking about a specific joke; because even though it’s a joke, it’s the truth underneath they’re connecting with. I would struggle to do a show that was just silly. Maybe the reason I like doing this so much, doing it live and seeing people, is because I’ve felt alone for so much of my life.’

Despite being instinctively daft and contrarian (‘I push against restraint; I keep pushing myself’), Dolan requires genuine grit in the oyster. ‘I’ve been able to touch on topics that are quite taboo, make it silly with huge juxtaposition between dark and light. They aren’t hammered over your head, and sometimes people don’t even necessarily catch them. But if they touch you or you recognise them, hopefully you connect with them. And if you find it joyful for me to talk about them with reckless abandon, I’ve lots that I want to get off my chest.’

Kate Dolan: Trout, Monkey Barrel, until 30 August, 8.35pm.

Others To See 'animal' shows

Using the animal kingdom as a metaphor has long been a trope in the arts. Here’s another set of Fringe shows which have a creature in the title for symbolic (or other) reasons. Firmly in the ‘other’ camp is Pink Rabbit (Underbelly Bristo Square, 5–30 August, 4.15pm), Farah Ashraf’s tale of faith, female desire and validation. Same colour, different beast, as one-woman piece Pink Dolphin (Space Surgeons’ Hall, 24–29 August, 9.45am) reflects on a boring life and trying not to repress or overthink things. Similar but quite different is Giraffe (Pleasance Courtyard, 5–31 August, 1.40pm) about a woman who believes she may well be a sociopath but needs to convince a court of law that she’s ‘normal’. But can she convince herself at the same time? A bee dies (boo!) but a pigeon is saved (yaaay!) in Pigeon Syndrome (Space Symposium Hall, 17–22 August, 12.10pm), which features a couple trying to rescue their fragile marriage. Animalwise, it doesn’t get much more metaphorical than the big flightless bird that pops its head in the sand. Ostrich (Gilded Balloon Patter House, 5–16 August, 1.20pm) is another solo show, this time about a woman who runs away from Fife to London, trying to escape her grief. Not going to work, is it?

Pink Rabbit

The gatekeepers are gone; and that is wonderful “

Irish actor and comedy queen Deirdre O’Kane celebrates three decades at the Fringe this year. She looks back on how the comedy industry has changed since the 90s and chats to Marissa Burgess about Christmas catastrophes, acting ambitions and why stand-up blew her mind

You’re doing a work-in-progress week at the Fringe this year. What sort of topics are interesting you so far? When you sit down to write a show, you never know where you’re going to end up. Essentially you do just mine your own life. I have quite a large chunk about two separate stories that are about Christmas, because I think every time Christmas passes, I am just astounded by what a car crash it is. Every time, I just go, ‘Jesus Christ, are we never going to do this differently?’ And every year, I think it’s like childbirth; you forget. You go at it again with renewed enthusiasm.

It’s been 30 years since you first set foot on stage at the Fringe in the final of the BBC New Comedy Awards, the same year you started stand-up. What was that like? I was very rookie. I really wasn’t experienced enough to go. I don’t know how I ended up there as a little finalist. I mean, Peter Kay was in the finals with me. I had had virtually no stage time. I was too rookie. I should have left it until a year later. I don’t know what I was doing. I must have been naturally quite good to have gotten that far, because I really had very little stage time. Well, I’ll tell you what I did have was I had been an actor for ten years at that point. So I had stage time, but not stand-up time: they’re wildly different.

What were those early years at the Fringe like for you? The first couple of times I went, I was actually paid! I was part of a line-up because Karen Koren always produced line-up shows at the Gilded Balloon. I got a salary, a small salary, but I was paid and I was given accommodation. When I think of it now, well, how lucky was that? What an extraordinary thing.

You started at a time when there weren’t many women doing stand-up. How has that changed the scene? I think one of the huge differences is that women are going to see comedy. Women are finally buying tickets to watch women. Thank god! There used to be a huge resistance to that. And I think it was just because they didn’t see it, honestly. I think there weren’t women in the business, so they went to see men. I think the women are flying at the moment. My god, they’re doing so well, and christ, I really love to see it. I didn’t see women doing stand-up, and if I had earlier, I would have started earlier.

So what was the turning point? What made you, as an actor, want to do stand-up? The first time I saw it . . . mind blown. And it was pure chance. My husband was working on the Cat Laughs Festival in Kilkenny and

he said, ‘why don’t you come down?’ I went and watched live stand-up for the first time in my life. I will never forget that weekend as long as I live; I was so excited by what I was seeing. I think there were 40 men on the bill and there were three women. I made a point of going to see the women, and I was just like, ‘oh my god!’. I started writing material in the car on the way home.

What other changes have you seen in stand-up over the years? The other big change is what social media does for people. Anybody who’s got some healthy social media can sell themselves, and that’s new. I was in the same room as Troy Hawke, played by Milo McCabe, and he was sold out. He had been sold out before he got to Edinburgh. This is new to me. So I went, ‘you’re sold out for the whole run?’ and he’s going, ‘yeah, it’s TikTok, it’s the followers’. People are selling out from having made it online. That’s the biggest change.

The gatekeepers are gone; and that is wonderful. You used to have to get on the telly or just work the roads relentlessly and do it old school, word of mouth.

Is there anything you’d still really like to do? I still just want to be in a very, very successful Amazon or Netflix show. That’s where I want to go. And I don’t want to stop doing stand-up. I’m loving my stand-up. But it’s nice to break it up and have somebody else write for you. I’ve done quite a bit of telly, series like Moone Boy, for example, but they’re relatively small. I haven’t had a shot at a big streamer show. I want to just have that experience.

Deirdre O’Kane: Work In Progress, The Stand 3, 11–17 August, 7.25pm; The Stand W Edinburgh, 15 & 16 August, 5.30pm.

Still dazed from last year’s critically acclaimed run, Creepy Boys are back at the Fringe for a reprise of Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated Slugs and a politically germane work-in-progress show. Kevin Fullerton speaks to the duo about a wild year, their status as outsiders and betting it all on creative freedom

Stranger things

E‘verything that happened at the Festival felt like a wave that crashed into us and kept going.’ That was the experience of SE Grummett and Sam Kruger, the duo behind Canadian absurdist queer theatre duo Creepy Boys, as they took their latest bag of ideas, Slugs, to last year’s Fringe. ‘We’d done a few preview shows in Canada,’ says Grummett, ‘but we were walking into Edinburgh like, “is this anything? Is this a mess? Does it make any sense?”’

‘We sometimes call it the darkness of the creative soul,’ agrees Kruger, ‘where you’re just lost and you’ve gone through too much, and it’s not fun to you anymore. And so we weirdly tumbled into everything.’ The ‘everything’ in question was a wellspring of positive acclaim from critics and audiences alike, who loved the group’s frenetic multimedia creativity, featuring Joni Mitchell puppetry, masticating slugs, songs about garbanzo beans and costuming that would make Vince Noir salivate. Word of mouth soon spread to the judges of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, who deigned to place Slugs’ outré spectacle on their shortlist of nominees.

Speaking via video call, the effusive duo (who radiate the positive gleam of a couple who seem perfectly matched in both personality and creative sensibility) still seem grateful but puzzled by the nomination. ‘It was strange,’ recalls Kruger, ‘It was like stand-up, stand-up, stand-up, stand-up, standup, stand-up and us, and we’re there with our little Dollarama blow-up shirts.’ ‘But also, everybody’s there with their agents, and then there’s just us,’ remembers Grummett. ‘We’re so new to this that we don’t have agents in the market who’ll strategise for us. We’re just two guys from Canada. It was such a wild ride and it still feels surreal, like it didn’t happen.’

The broad welcome of the British comedy establishment is perhaps more of a surprise because, despite Slugs’ high gag rate and leftfield humour, Creepy Boys remain steadfastly difficult to pigeonhole. ‘We are a little bit too theatre for the comedy scene and a little bit too comedy for the theatre scene, and queer but not in a cool way,’ claims Grummett. ‘We’ve always been outsiders to things like awards, so I’m really excited to come back this year and see how that recognition actually comes to fruition.’

Their return to the Fringe will be a victory lap of sorts, with a reprise of Slugs as well as a work-inprogress called Nude Parade, a solo show from Grummett (with behind-the-scenes contributions and sound design from Kruger) about the contemporary obsession, fetishisation and commodification of trans bodies. Their punk aesthetic, one that’s breathing the air of Valerie Solanas as much as Gaulier clowning, looks unlikely to dim because awards judges might be in the room, particularly in an era grown increasingly hostile to the queer experience.

‘Comedy is a Trojan horse. It’s the way of getting an audience laughing, laughing, laughing, and then it’s a way of disarming so you can go deeper,’ says Grummett. ‘My favourite type of work that I see and make is like, if I didn’t laugh I’d cry. I mean, we have to laugh at the absurdity of the world that we’re living in right now.’

Creepy Boys: Slugs, 6–17 August, 10.40pm; Nude Parade,19–24 August, 10.40pm; both shows at Summerhall.

Sisterly double act Siblings (Shedinburgh, 10 August, 6.45pm; 15 August, 8.30pm) are back once more with a version of their Dreamweavers show which had crowds rolling up last Fringe: a sketch comedy delight from the Byes. Hard to challenge the following description of Otto & Astrid (Assembly Roxy, 5–30 August, 9.20pm): ‘White Stripes mated with Laurel And Hardy in the Black Forest’. That just about sums up this sibling duet whose Stages tour aims to tap into Taylor ‘Eras’ Swift but, well, do they even have a hope in heck of replicating such global fame? Although the title of Folk Marry Kill might suggest Couplet (Assembly George Square Studios, 5–30 August, 4.35pm) are at each other’s throats, nothing could be further from the truth as utterly delightful wedded pair Marnina & Micah charm more of our socks off in this bawdy musical comedy hour about sex and stuff. Proving that double acts don’t have to be related to work here, Those People (Pleasance Courtyard, 5–30 August, 11pm) are merely good mates who now find themselves in the Attic for some clowny comedy.

Others To See duos

Otto & Astrid

The genocide in Gaza has prompted Sami Abu Wardeh to fundamentally change the way he performs, transitioning from clowning to standup. The Palestinian comedian tells Murray Robertson how that shift has challenged him as he explores the concept of hate in his new show

WThe world is being taken over by hateful people “

hen Sami Abu Wardeh brought his debut solo clown show Bedu to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022, his Palestinian identity was, as he puts it, ‘very lightly sprinkled across it’. Now, he says he can no longer separate his comedy from the world around him. ‘I’ve had to recalibrate how I approach my comedy because we live in a new world order,’ he says, referring to the war in Gaza. ‘I realised quite quickly after it started that I can’t go on stage and continue to do silly character clowning. When you’re seeing a live-streamed genocide, it would be incongruous.’

In his new stand-up show Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You, he asks audiences to consider who society permits us to detest and why. ‘It’s an exploration of hate: what it means to hate today, the value of hate politically, specifically for people who would call themselves leftleaning or left wing. I think it’s become a taboo in our circles while the world is being taken over by hateful people.’

The spark came from ‘Hatred Has Become A Political Taboo’, an essay by the late anthropologist David Graeber. ‘He makes this argument that throughout the whole of recorded human history, hate was a very normal part of society. It was very bog-standard to hate the people who ruled over you.’Graeber opens his essay by arguing that, since the end of the 20th century, hate ‘is the one emotion that is considered intrinsically illegitimate’.

Abu Wardeh believes we are now living with the consequences of that. The hour also draws heavily on his own experiences, particularly over the past two-and-a-half years. ‘It’s a lot of stories about my childhood, stories about performing comedy, what it’s like to have been performing comedy since Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and what it’s like to be the only professional Palestinian comedian based permanently in the UK.’ It’s a position he describes as ‘quite isolating’.

The biggest change has been learning to perform as himself rather than hiding behind characters, and he describes his transition to stand-up as ‘a really good challenge’. He recalls how a joke he told about Benjamin Netanyahu a few years ago provoked a strong negative reaction from some audience members, prompting him to turn on his crowd. Now, he feels he can revisit that moment from a different perspective. ‘I can now go on stage and talk about the story back then. That actually is a lot more fun because it gives everyone in the room distance from that thing that happened when I was on stage two years ago.’

He’s also developed a healthier relationship with the Fringe itself.

‘I’m learning how to have fun while putting on a show,’ he smiles. ‘That was the thing I struggled with the most. I’m at the biggest English-language arts festival in the world: have some fun!’

Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You, Pleasance Courtyard, 5–30 August, 10pm.

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DYLAN WOODLEY

AYO ADENEKAN: HOMELAND INSECURITY

Ayo Adenekan used to do a bit in his stand-up about wanting to be the first queer, black Scottish Dr Who and being gutted when he discovered Ncuti Gatwa had beaten him to it. He joked that he had to kick Gatwa out of the WhatsApp chat group he was in with Edinburgh’s nine other black people. Fairly nuts, then, that Adenekan ended up writing a sketch for Gatwa in the first series of Saturday Night Live UK. Gatwa hadn’t heard of Adenekan, or his Dr Who joke, but the pair ended up hanging out, with Gatwa sharing career advice.

To say Adenekan has had a crazy year is an understatement. His debut show, Black Mediocrity, sold out at the 2025 Fringe, he was signed to United Agents and then snapped up for the writing team and cast of SNL UK. Although the number of black Scottish comedians remains woefully low, it was a reassuring confirmation that young, working-class talent can still catch breaks at the Fringe.

Aged 24 when he did all this, that made him SNL UK’s youngest writer and cast member. Not bad for a boy who’d been living with his mum in Newhaven before doing the Fringe. Now based in London, he’ll be coming back up the road to perform his second show, Homeland Insecurity. It’s about unrequited love, summer flings, fast food jobs and starting out in stand-up. ‘It’s a romantic show about love in all its forms; friendship and family too. I’ve only really performed in Edinburgh and London, I’ve not toured yet, so I’ll still be introducing myself a bit.’ Navigating his bisexuality will continue to be a theme in Adenekan’s own writing. ‘Straight women question my masculinity and gay men aren’t necessarily fans either! Luckily queer women are so accepting; the majority of my friends are queer women.’ (Claire Sawers) n Monkey Barrel Cabaret Voltaire, until 30 August, 1.30pm.

SCOUT BOXALL: GOD’S FAVOURITE

‘After surviving the worst night of your life, everything feels easy,’ states Scout Boxall of the state of their mind after spending a whole night away from home without crucial medication, an experience that forms the crux of their debut Fringe show. ‘Forgetting your meds, going into withdrawal, going back in time to meet god and then realising no one else is coming to save you? It’s very generative. It’s all you can think about and write about.’

That said, surviving that horrific experience isn’t making the prospect of performing at the world’s biggest arts festival any less nerve-wracking. ‘I am so excited and so scared. I’ve been to the Fringe once, before I started comedy. It was utterly overwhelming, a sensory and artistic overload. From a professional point of view, it’s a highly saturated field that I’m completely new to. I’m starting from scratch after spending a long time finding my niche in the sweet, small pond of Melbourne.’

Boxall originally started out as an ‘alt-comedy girlie’ carrying lots of props and costumes. ‘I could say that stand-up is the ultimate stripped-back artform. But a big part of it was I simply got tired of bumming lifts to gigs and touring with a giant plastic tub full of bullshit.’ Now, they’re just hyped for their Edinburgh debut. ‘I can’t wait to see the full scope of talent at the Festival, to stay up late, and have too many coffees and smoke too many cigarettes and kick on to show after show until I collapse back in my ten-bedroom student flat.’ Sounds like a fine plan. (Marissa Burgess) n Assembly George Square, 5–30 August, 4.20pm.

DISCOVER THE MONKEY OLD FASHIONED

ROBIN GRAINGER: LEMONADE

When life gives you lemons, perform a one-hour stand-up show about optimism. It may not be the phrase we all turn to, but it’s a winning interpolation where Robin Grainger is concerned. After years tackling subjects such as grief, body issues and low self-esteem, he’s taken a different tack with Lemonade by writing about happiness. There’s always been an undercurrent of hope in his shows; he’s simply bringing it to the fore now. ‘By the end of each show, there is an optimism and everyone leaves having laughed a lot and realising we aren’t alone in our insecurities,’ says Grainger. ‘I still get messages from audiences telling me that my show gave them a positive outlook, or describing how hard they laughed, which is all I can ask for.’

Grainger has risen steadily through the Scottish comedy scene ranks across the past decade, making headlines when his Fringe show in 2022 was attended by a single audience member (what Grainger memorably described as an ‘audient’) and slowly expanding both his repertoire and his following with each successive year, even winning plaudits from an impressed Kevin Hart.

His packhorse mentality has made him a regular at the top of comedy bills and helps him arrive at this year’s Fringe with a honed performance. ‘I pride myself on having the show ready to go on the first preview night. Even if the tickets are cheaper, people have chosen me out of all the shows they could see, bought tickets, argued about who’s driving, who’s drinking and what not. I’d better give them the show they deserve.’ (Kevin Fullerton)

n Assembly George Square, 5–31 August, 8.20pm.

JAMIE KILSTEIN: CAN’T TIE KNOTS

Eighteen years after debuting at the Fringe, having burnished his credentials as a snarkily intelligent firebrand heir to Bill Hicks, Jamie Kilstein is trying to salvage that reputation and his life. In 2017, the outspoken US stand-up was dropped from Citizen Radio, the progressive, left-wing podcast he hosted with his former wife Allison Kilkenny, after she shared allegations from several women that he had been ‘manipulative, emotionally abusive and predatory’.

‘It was my fault,’ Kilstein admits. ‘I yelled at people on the internet about doing immoral shit, then went and had an over-year-long affair. It was pretty fucking stupid, selfish and all the other bad things I have been beating myself up about for the last decade.’ Maintaining that ‘a lot of untrue shit’ was alleged, the 44-year-old says he was ‘too beaten down and broke to defend myself’. Unwilling to publicly trash his ex-wife, ‘suicide seemed the smartest option’.

Ironically though, as he discloses in Can’t Tie Knots, Robin Williams had counselled him against it. The legendary comic who took his own life in 2014 ‘was my biggest supporter, my friend, and I miss him every day’. Kilstein was also persuaded by Tim Minchin that the experience could translate to stand-up, recalling Minchin telling him: ‘Your life is fucking insane and you need to talk about it, even though you don’t want to.’

‘One day it came pouring out of me,’ recalls Kilstein, ‘stuff I swore I would never talk about on stage.’ Unlike Louis CK, Kilstein won’t be on Netflix anytime soon. As a ‘pro cancel-culture feminist comedian that had an affair’, he admits his ‘little left-wing fanbase’ disappeared overnight. So is he a better stand-up for it? ‘Fuck that!’ he laughs. ‘I mean, I guess in the sense that it snapped me out of this ego trip I was on. It’s made me more humble, more patient, grateful for the opportunities I do have, and a little more fearless. I literally have nothing to lose.’

(Jay Richardson) n Gilded Balloon Teviot, 5–31 August, 9.50pm.

MARK THOMAS

Time certainly flies for the comedic rabblerouser as he now marks (sorry) 40 whole years in the stand-up game. Albeit some of those have been spent creating poignant and powerful theatreadjacent productions.

n The Stand, 5–30 August, 6.05pm.

SAMMY J

Hero Complex marks a return to the Fringe arena for Mr J after 14 long years away and he appears to be Randyless (his puppet was called Randy). This time he’s in the storytelling game recalling an incident from the 90s which had quite the knock-on effect.

n Underbelly Bristo Square, 5–16 August, 7.40pm.

COMEDY HIGHLIGHTS JOHN-LUKE ROBERTS

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: this guy is a bona fide Edinburgh Fringe institution. And what a corker of a title: What I Talk About When I Run About, Talking . Hard to argue.

n Monkey Barrel, 5–30 August, 2.10pm.

BRIDGET CHRISTIE

Two dates warming up for something bigger down the line, but any appearance from the 2013 Edinburgh Comedy Award winner makes the Fringe an altogether better place.

n Monkey Barrel, 5 & 6 August, 8.30pm.

HR THE MUSICAL

Writer Amy Mansfield drew inspiration for this workplace satire through years of slogging away in arts organisations, local government and legal publishing. All worth it in the end.

n Gilded Balloon Patter House, 5–31 August, 6.30pm.

STAMPTOWN

Promising to behave and keep this to its allotted 80 minutes so as not to bother the subsequent act might well turn out to be a staggering feat of unforeseen discipline. Zach Zucker and co are set to unleash the chaos.

n Assembly George Square Gardens, 6–30 August, 9.50pm.

Fresh from glorious success in Melbourne, this former Edinburgh favourite brings us a new show, Gift Horse, all about the people we love and the things they give us that we absolutely hate.

n Assembly Roxy, 5–14 August, 6.15pm.

CELIA PACQUOLA

Tweedy’s Massive Solo Show

BY A THREAD

If there’s no risk in an acrobatics show, then there’s little jeopardy for an audience. On stage, what has to accompany that risk is trust and One Fell Swoop have that in yards. Seven acrobats and 30 metres of rope equal one thrilling show that is now celebrating its ten-year anniversary. By A Thread is not all about a sense of fear as there’s also playfulness, friendship, confusion and romance. (Brian Donaldson) n Assembly Rooms, 6–30 August, 3.55pm.

DANCE & CIRCUS

Think Fringe and peaceful is not the first word that springs to mind. But with their latest show Glob, Quebec-based company Les Foukoutours plan to transport audiences to a serene and wordless universe, as Rachel Morrell discovers

From first impressions, the minds behind Glob are exactly the kind of energetic and charming characters you would expect from a circus show. But for Rémi Jacques, the founder of Les Foukoutours, and his co-creator Jean-Félix Bélanger, there is more to the experience than a few laughs and a funny costume.

‘It’s a pause, a break in this crazy life. It’s not a show, it’s an invitation,’ explains Jacques. ‘Just relax and go into this beautiful world. For me, it’s very important to present this show for all people. It’s not a children’s show: the children love it, but I think it’s important that the adults can find their imagination and creativity. Children are already in their imagination, but for adults it surprises them to be attracted by this simple journey of two characters. You forget the rest of your life and find this little sparkle.’

As the fur-clad characters appear in a snowy starlit scene, there is an emphasis on visual encounters that inspire a serene and silent world. Collaborating on everything from the performance to making delicate globes that light the stage, Bélanger emphasises the duo’s artistic goals, noting that the process of creating such a multifaceted production and adding new depth to the circus genre is precise and time-consuming.

‘Glob is different from other shows, in general, because of its pace,’ he explains. ‘We really worked on slowness, on calm, which we wanted to put in everything. So the set is peaceful, the lights are peaceful and the costumes are soft. During the creation of a show, we take three years and our focus is on the movement. For us, the whole show is like a music sheet and we have specific rhythms for every movement that we have. So even if it is just one finger, I’m pointing fast, I’m pointing slowly. And when we do the show, it’s always like this.’

Their movements combine dance, acrobatics, performance art and traditional circus. And Jacques, having developed different aspects of circus performance since the company’s inception in 1997, hopes to steer away from the commonly perceived notions of ‘the clown’. ‘That’s the mission of the company, to bring back a new idea of what a clown is. These characters are more the representation of the human in this world, not a horror or McDonald’s clown. The clown or acrobat has to be more clear with the rhythm because that precision is the picture you present. There’s no language in all the shows that we present, just sound and expression of the body. You already know, physically, exactly what is happening, and then you can enjoy listening to the audience, and take in this pure, unique moment.’

After more than 260 international performances, what is the reaction to their new form of storytelling? ‘It’s a beautiful trip because I don’t explain anything. The characters appear in the beginning of the show and just disappear at the end,’ says Jacques. ‘So each person receives a different story with their personal background of life. Sometimes people think, “oh, it’s a beautiful angel on the stage” or sometimes, “oh, it’s a beautiful cow”. But it’s very interesting because everyone who watches the show around the world has the same reaction. Everyone at the end of the show cries, but with joy. For me, it’s pretty important that they took a moment to go into this wonderful universe.’

Glob, Underbelly Bristo Square, 5–30 August, 3pm.

THE

THAT SATISFIES

WHERE WE CHOOSE TO STAND

Dancer and choreographer Penny Chivas has never been a stranger to protests. As an Australian, she always attended the annual ‘Invasion Day’ rallies, which take place every January on Australia Day. But it was 2019’s Extinction Rebellion action, where giant boats were placed in UK cities, that stands out for her as a galvanising moment. ‘Being part of a much larger movement felt exciting. On that day it really felt in Glasgow that we could make change and that we would grab attention.’ While she helped out by leading games for children at the Wee Rebellion in Glasgow’s Saltmarket, others shackled themselves to the boats. ‘We found ways to be involved with the skills we had. To me this felt like an inclusive and inviting environment.’

The experience stayed with Chivas, eventually sparking ideas for a dance theatre piece built around the choreography of protest and climate activism. That in turn evolved into the show Where We Choose To Stand. As part of her research, Chivas undertook non-violent direct action training with Extinction Rebellion and This Is Rigged. She also interviewed fellow course participants about their experiences, gathering together a palette of voices to inform the show. Sometimes this led to unexpected creative decisions, such as how Chivas would style her hair in the piece (‘very practical and unlikely to get caught by anything in a crowd!’).

Other conversations helped her reframe her ideas about activism. ‘I think the most significant thing I learned was about the power of kindness and generosity.’

From making sandwiches and co-ordinating food to staging dieins or occupying buildings, Chivas is clear that protest takes many forms, including dance itself. ‘Currently anything involving our bodies in real time is under threat. Dance and performance have the potential to support imagining new ways or new ideas, and to bring people together.’ (Lucy Ribchester)

n Assembly Dance Base, 7–16 August, 8.30pm.

EVERYBODY’S GOT A BOMB

Australian choreographer Riley Fitzgerald confronts our present hyperreality with his latest dance work, Everybody’s Got A Bomb

The piece, which premiered internationally in Mexico City in 2025, explores our contemporary state of in-betweenness: politics is polarised yet factional, knowledge is broad yet erroneous, isolation belies extended possibilities for human connection, and the world seems on the brink of civilisational collapse or reconstruction. It’s a lot to face in dance yet Fitzgerald does so by rooting his choreography in deeply personal experiences. ‘I was first inspired to create this piece many years ago after returning home from an adventure,’ he says. ‘I was filled with confusion, rage, joy and excitement for the future, along with an unstoppable urge to create. The energy of Woodstock ’99 hit a nerve and I became infatuated with the collective energy of individuals coming together for a common goal.’

As the contrast between that fated festival and its stoned predecessor goes to show, the collective energy of humans can be both affirming and destructive. Keen to interrogate that dual possibility, with more nuance than the revenging crowd of Woodstock ‘99, the work is preoccupied with the contradictions of contemporary society. It brings eight performers from Sydney Dance Company together with an original score composed by Victoriabased folk artist Dawson Mansell, a combination that Fitzgerald promises will ‘grab you with both hands and push you into a journey of discovery, as life did to me all those years ago’. (Evie Glen) n Zoo Southside, 7–16 August, 12.30pm.

PRIME

Dance Base’s in-house company for performers over 60 premieres new work from artistic director Kally Lloyd-Jones and choreographer Malcolm Sutherland. We Are asks a number of existential questions. n Assembly Dance Base, 6–9 August, 2.40pm.

TALE OF THE FIREBIRD

Composed by Chloé Charody, this concerto for violin fully integrates modern circus, contemporary music and physical theatre, with its narrative conveyed through movement and physicality.

n Assembly Roxy, 6–30 August, 6.15pm.

THE PALESTINIAN CIRCUS

Can’t imagine Boy George will be heading along, but this show promotes hope and positivity through circus. A Step And A Half combines the traditional Palestinian dance of dabkeh with circus.

n Underbelly Circus Hub, 8–29 August, 2.05pm.

AFRONAUTS

The award-winning Circus Zambia perform this piece which takes us back to 1964 with the space race in full swing. The newly independent Zambia couldn’t produce a team of moon-bound astronauts . . . could it?

n Underbelly George Square, 6–31 August, 1.55pm.

DANCE & CIRCUS

BORDER BODIES

Part of the São Paulo Showcase, acclaimed Brazilian dance company TF Cia De Dança presents a collaborative ‘urban contemporary’ dance piece, centred on exploring the intrinsic need for humans to connect.

n Assembly Dance Base, 7–30 August, 5.15pm.

HK SOUL

This showcase of contemporary movement from Hong Kong features Justyne Li’s ‘Gemini’ which tackles the weight of mental overload while Blue Ka Wing’s ‘Romantic 4:48AM’ uses household sounds to connect those awake through the night.

n Assembly Dance Base, 7–16 August, 5.30pm.

THE GREAT CHEVALIER

From the Ballet

National Folklorique Du Luxembourg comes a performance from ‘The Bad Boy Of Folklore’ aka Chevalier as he dedicates his time on stage to mark the 50th anniversary of the company’s truly iconic ‘Pigeon Dance’.

n Summerhall, 6–29 August, 3pm.

ESCAPE Edinburgh Festival Frenzy

with a foodie oasis in the city’s coolest neighbourhoods this August

BARRY FISH

62 The Shore, Leith, Edinburgh, EH6 6RA Michelin-acclaimed Barry Fish is located on Edinburgh’s waterfront at the Shore in Leith, showcasing the best fish and seafood from Scotland. The Good Food Guide’s ‘100 Best Local Restaurants 2026’. n www.barryfish.co.uk; 0131 625 0000; hello@ barryfish.co.uk

THE

VOYAGE OF BUCK

29-31 William St, Edinburgh, EH3 7NG

A concept cocktail bar and restaurant centred around fictional character William ‘Buck’ Clarence and his many voyages to far away cities. Showcases cocktail styles from the golden age of bartending (1900-1935).

Located on a beautiful 19th century cobbled street. n www.thevoyageofbuckedinburgh.co.uk; 0131 225 5748; info@thevoyageofbuckedinburgh.co.uk

THE BLACKBIRD

37-39 Leven Street, Tollcross, Edinburgh, EH3 9LH

Located just two minutes from King’s Theatre, The Blackbird is home to a unique garden terrace, which offers a green urban oasis on warm summer evenings during the Festival. Enjoy summer cocktails and bites as part of its new summer glow-up. n theblackbirdedinburgh.co.uk; 0131 228 2280; info@theblackbirdedinburgh.co.uk

COLD TOWN HOUSE

4 Grassmarket, Edinburgh, EH1 2JU

Edinburgh’s most iconic rooftop bar experiences high up above the city streets with a stunning backdrop of Edinburgh Castle. Cold Town House is the ultimate alfresco destination in the heart of the Grassmarket during Festival come rain or shine.. n coldtownhouse.co.uk; 0131 357 2865; blether@coldtownhouse.co.uk

THE LIGHTHOUSE RESTAURANT & BAR

Fingal Hotel, Alexandra Dock, Leith, EH6 7DX

Permanently berthed in Edinburgh’s historic Port of Leith, Fingal is Scotland’s only five-star luxury floating hotel and is a world-class foodie destination with a nautical twist. Step aboard Fingal’s top deck for Champagne and cocktails with stunning waterfront views.

n www.fingal.co.uk/lighthouse-restaurant-bar/fingaldeck; 0131 357 5000; reservations@fingal.co.uk

MCLARENS ON THE CORNER

8 Morningside Rd, Edinburgh, EH10 4DD

A stylish neighbourhood bar and restaurant with a large outdoor terrace for social gatherings during the day or on light summer evenings. Situated on the corner of Bruntsfield and Morningside, this family and dog friendly venue has a corner for everyone.

n mclarensonthecorner.co.uk; 0131 370 3322; reservations@mclarensonthecorner.co.uk

MAX FULHAM’S MONKEY BUSINESS

Can you imagine a company which has a dog on reception, a monkey in management and a mouse running IT (insert tech joke here)? Ventriloquist Max Fulham certainly can because he’s written a show about one. With mischievous sidekick Gordon The Monkey to hand (literally), he attempts to avoid chaos breaking out while maintaining some standards. Luckily there’ll be a very willing audience in the room every day to help him out on this unlikely quest. (Brian Donaldson)

 Gilded Balloon Teviot, 5–16 August, 11.50am.

PICTURE: KARLA GOWLETT

N ext level

With her music/gaming mash-up for kids, Delea Shand wants to break down the barriers that surround opera. Robyn Bell finds out how interactive adventure Madame Chandelier’s Grand Theft Opera is deploying action and arias to entertain the whole family

Opera and video games might seem like worlds apart, but for Canadian soprano and comedian Delea Shand, the two have far more in common than you might think. Returning to the Fringe as her wonderfully eccentric alter ego Madame Chandelier, Shand is inviting audiences to step into a world where ‘Mozart meets Mario’. Madame Chandelier’s Grand Theft Opera mixes operatic heroes, video game quests and audience participation into a family adventure unlike any other.

For over a decade, Shand has been using Madame Chandelier to make opera feel accessible to audiences of all ages. Through a blend of comedy, cabaret and audience participation, she’s transformed an artform often seen as intimidating into something playful, welcoming and interactive. In Grand Theft Opera, audiences aren’t just spectators, they’re players.

Drawing inspiration from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, the show follows Madame Chandelier after her teenage daughter is sucked into a video game by the villainous Queen Of The Night. To rescue her child, she must enter the game herself, taking on legendary opera heroines including Carmen, Tosca and Madame Butterfly before facing the game’s ultimate boss battle. Audiences who saw Madame Chandelier’s Opera Party For Kids may recognise some of the characters, but Grand Theft Opera tells an entirely new story. ‘My previous show was really an introduction to opera,’ Shand says. ‘This one has some of the same characters come back but they are doing something completely different.’

The story unfolds much like a player progressing through increasingly challenging game levels and is Shand’s most interactive production yet. ‘All of my shows have had audience participation before, but this show is the most interactive. I use it as a way of drawing people into opera and breaking down the barriers.’

Audience members are invited to take on roles within the game itself, such as an NPC (non-playable character eg narrator, quest giver or even shopkeeper) helping guide Madame Chandelier throughout her quest, while others assist in powering up characters or taking part in a series of mini games. Despite its unmistakable video game-inspired premise, Shand admits she wasn’t always immersed in that world. Before creating the show, she knew very little about computer games beyond encouraging her own children to switch them off. ‘My son is really into video games,’ she laughs. ‘And we ended up playing lots together while I was making the show.’

Those sessions soon revealed surprising similarities between two worlds which at first glance appear to be complete opposites. ‘The more I worked on it, the more I realised there was loads of crossover,’ says Shand. ‘There are weird epic plots, dramatic death scenes and these huge quests. If there’s one thing that’s longer than opera, it’s probably video games!’

Rather than treating opera as something that needs explaining, Shand lets audiences experience it naturally and discover just how entertaining the artform can be. Familiar opera songs have been rewritten in English to fit the new story, allowing children and parents to follow the narrative without needing any prior knowledge of opera itself. ‘It’s not really an introduction to opera,’ she explains. ‘It’s just a fun show that happens to have opera in it.’ Aimed at ages five and over, Shand says it is ‘perfect for those around 9 to 12’. For those curious about the genre but unsure where to begin, Madame Chandelier’s Grand Theft Opera may prove the ideal place to press ‘start’.

Madame Chandelier’s Grand Theft Opera, Pleasance Courtyard, 5–16 August, 12.15pm.

FLOAT

Actor Kerry Cleland recalls the anxiety of taking her baby to kids’ theatre shows as a new mum: ‘It would take forever to get the baby ready, get there and get settled. Just as we were relaxing, it would be over.’ Those pressures meant she wanted to spare her own audience that feeling. Through Starcatchers, Cleland works every week with families in the Edinburgh suburb of Wester Hailes, bringing art to under-fives, making sure babies and toddlers experience quality live performances and their grownups feel involved too.

Cleland’s work with communities over the years has helped shape Float, a wonderfully tactile, immersive show for 0–12-month-olds. It’s part soothing sensory meditation, part mesmerising dance performance. Cleland salvaged a Perspex tank from the Circular Arts Network store and began developing a show, inspired by the healing qualities of water and relaxing experiences in birthing pools and baths.

Crawling and lounging on rugs and cushions, babies and adults are bathed in purple light, watching as soporific droplets of water are poured into the tank creating a hypnotic swirl. Alongside performers Maddie Broad, Rachel Laird and Shiori Usui, Cleland takes turns to dance in sequins or share glowing objects for the babies to touch. Sound designer Kim Moore adds a zen ambient soundtrack of lapping waves and cosmic synths, giving way to bouncier electronics for some dancing.

The team creates a blissful, bioluminescent, underwater world with five interactive stages (Drip, Dook, Silver, Ocean Club and Waves) repeated multiple times. The show lasts three hours, a deliberate decision to allow families to nip outside if they need to change a nappy or heat up baby food, for example. ‘I wanted to create a playful, mischievous, relaxing space,’ says Cleland, ‘where the world around is slowed down, adults are invited to rest, and babies are invited to be heard.’ (Claire Sawers) n Pleasance EICC, 9–22 August, times vary.

THE LISTIES: 110% READY

All parents have been there. You’re already running ten minutes late and the kids’ lackadaisical attitudes to bladder relief and footwear are beginning to tip you over the edge. This familiar scenario has inspired the latest show from Aussie family comedy duo The Listies, aka Richard Higgins and Matthew Kelly. Their style of clowning has been branded ‘kidult’ comedy and they hope 110% Ready will appeal to both sides in the battle of leaving the house. ‘The inciting incident belongs to a friend of Matt’s, a mum of three,’ says Higgins. ‘Every single time it’s time for this family to leave the house, one of the kids would be down a shoe. Not a pair: one shoe.’

The show, described as a ‘high-energy comedy disaster movie’, offers a handy musical number which Kelly says sums up ‘the entire philosophy of parental logistics in five words: phone, keys, done a wee’. It’s the latter that’s apparently the most crucial bit. ‘It’s always the wee,’ says Kelly. ‘If someone announces they need a wee when everyone’s just belted into the car, a day’s already fragile equilibrium can be thrown forever off course!’

Despite this, the duo have sympathy for the plight of kids. ‘We don’t make it easy for them,’ says Higgins. ‘Have you seen what they’re expected to cart around? Next time you clock a schoolkid on the bus, look at the size of the bag: PE gear, books like paving slabs, a five-litre water bottle. They’re not children: they’re mini sherpas, hauling supplies to base camp.’ (Lucy Ribchester) n Assembly George Square Studios, 5–16 August, 1pm.

THE MYSTERY OF PLEASANCE TWO

Board game host and super sleuth Danyah Miller unravels this venue-based mystery with her audience’s keen detective skills required to help crack the case. Keep an eye out for some hidden clues as the truth looms into view.

n Pleasance Courtyard, 5–16 August, noon.

VASTHY AND FRIENDS

Broadway veteran (Mary Poppins, SpongeBob SquarePants), choreographer and voiceover artist Vasthy Mompoint aims to get the wee ones and their keepers moving, imagining and celebrating in this early morning interactive affair.

n Gilded Balloon Patter House, 5–31 August, 10.20am.

CIRCUS THE SHOW

Magnus Danger Magnus is your ringmaster for a high-energy circus affair which keeps it modern while still retaining the vibe of a traditional big top. Jugglers, fire-breathers, rednosed clowns: it’s got the lot.

n Assembly George Square Gardens, 5–31 August, 1.25pm.

MAMA G

Britain’s Got Talent semi-finalist

Mama G wields her Magic Bookmark for a panto-style adventure in which the baddie (Book Worm) steals all the books from the library because knowledge is a bad thing. Boo, hiss etc.

n Gilded Balloon Teviot, 5–31 August, 12.20pm.

KIDS HIGHLIGHTS

CINDERGORILLA: THE MUSICAL

Blue Peter Book Award winner and creator of the Ninja Meerkats series, Gareth P Jones delivers a one-man musical featuring piano, trumpet, uke, loop pedal and, as if that wasn’t enough, two puppets.

n Space Surgeons’ Hall, 7–15 August, 11.40am.

FORT

Who hasn’t wanted to turn a living room upside down? This award-winning show does it with craft and guile as everyday objects are transformed via clowning, acrobatics and imagery.

n Assembly George Square Gardens, 5–16 August, 11.25am.

TELLING THE BEES

From the people who brought you The Tale Of The Loneliest Whale comes this piece which blends Celtic folklore, original music and puppetry to show that big life changes can be difficult, and how sharing our feelings will help us grow.

n Scottish Storytelling Centre, 7–11 August, 11.45am.

Edinburgh’s best kept secret

Unwind at Victorian Baths across the city

Take a break from the festival crowds and discover one of the city’s best-kept secrets. Loved by locals, Edinburgh’s Victorian pools, Warrender, Leith Victoria, Glenogle and Portobello Swim Centre offer a calm, spacious setting throughout the city centre - perfect for a casual swim, a sauna, or simply switching off for a while.

Check timetables and plan your visit today

No pre-booking is necessary. Simply find your favourite Victorian bath, step inside for a striking historic architecture, and have a moment to reset before heading back out into the Fringe chaos and fun. Fringe chaos and fun.

LAWRENCE BROWNLEE

At 2019’s International Festival, the Ohio-born tenor teamed up with Glaswegian pianist Iain Burnside to perform, among other pieces, Schumann’s intimate song cycle. Well, here they are again, collaborating this time for a largely Italy-focused programme, featuring works from Gaetano Donizetti, Ottorino Respighi and Luigi Denza. (Brian Donaldson) n Queen’s Hall, 12 August, 11am.

MUSIC

Drama queen

Main man Odysseus rather steals focus in The Odyssey. Now, a bit of Broadway star power and an award-winning score is giving his very patient wife Penelope a voice.

Leading lady Grace McLean chats to Afreka Thomson about getting under the heroine’s skin and going up against a certain Hollywood take on the classic Greek myth

While Odysseus, the wandering hero of Homer’s Odyssey, faces monsters, battles and glory, his long-suffering wife Penelope has to sit around and wait for a couple of decades. If you’ve been to the cinema lately, you’re probably well aware of this. But Broadway star Grace McLean is bringing a concert-theatre musical to the Fringe where Homer’s overlooked heroine finally gets her say. McLean stars in Penelope and admits she was instantly drawn to the project.

‘I’d seen their work and I loved it,’ she says of composer Alex Bechtel and director Eva Steinmetz. ‘I thought, “how do I get to work with these people?”’. Bechtel began writing the songs while quarantining from his partner during the pandemic, only to realise the voice emerging wasn’t his own but Penelope’s. The lockdown concept album gradually

evolved into a full musical, and when McLean was invited to join, she didn’t hesitate. ‘It wasn’t even a musical yet,’ she laughs. ‘Eva heard the songs and said, “I think this is a show”.’

McLean expected to come in as a performer. Instead, she found herself helping answer a central question: what does Penelope have to say? ‘To be trusted by these people I respected so much, to really get in the sandbox and figure out what this woman has to say, was just really fun,’ she reflects. ‘That’s why you want to get in on the ground floor.’ Five years in Penelope’s shoes has left McLean convinced she’s far more than the faithful wife history remembers. One of her favourite moments comes in ‘Pilgrim Song’ where Penelope imagines what life might look like if she simply walked away. ‘It’s Penelope imagining herself as a traveller. Like, “what if I left here?

And what if I became a wandering soul?” She gets to leave her identity as Penelope and Queen Of Ithaca behind. What might that look like for her?’ Penelope isn’t simply waiting: she’s imagining another life. ‘Her whole act of choosing to wait is a creative act.’

Spending so long with the character has shaped McLean, too. ‘It’s so interesting to have gotten to sit with her for so long,’ she says. ‘I’ve been through some hard life things and to have this archetype of this woman floating around . . . I’ve really come to understand what it means to endure.’ After years of workshops and development, she’s finally bringing Penelope to the Fringe, a festival she’s wanted to return to since first visiting 16 years ago. ‘The spirit of the Festival is so seductive,’ she says. ‘There’s a scrappiness and an excitement and a “we’ve got to just try this” energy.’

That intimacy is exactly why McLean is bringing the production to Edinburgh. ‘It’s not a fourth-wall kind of show. It’s different with every audience.’ One person has made seeing Penelope something of a mission: a devoted stan has attended virtually every production in the US, sitting in the front row, mouthing every lyric and enthusiastically headbanging along. Recounting the story over Zoom, McLean can’t resist acting it out. ‘Their enthusiasm is amazing,’ she laughs. ‘We need people like them at every show!’

Edinburgh audiences may well oblige. McLean’s Fringe run also happens to coincide with Christopher Nolan’s hotly anticipated adaptation of The Odyssey. She jokes that the Oscarwinning director is ‘really riding our wave. The difference,’ she grins, ‘is one is big, epic: fight, fight, fight, man, man, man. Ours is just the audience and me, singing about my feelings.’

Penelope, Underbelly Cowgate, 5–30 August, 3.45pm.

Others To See Greek myths

Straight out of Brazil are theatre group Technis whose Argonauts (Zoo Playground, 7–30 August, 6.05pm) features myths from Greek tragedy as well as figures from Shakespeare who all appear to blur reality in the contemporary world of sparring couple Liz and Sam. Fringe stalwarts Wright&Grainger (Shedinburgh, 7 August, 5pm, 6.35pm) give us two bouts of myth with the reimagined tale of Orpheus followed by their take on Eurydice, emboldened by spoken word and live music. The story of Persephone (the unwilling queen of the underworld) is at the heart of My Screaming Pomegranates (Greenside Riddles Court, 24–29 August, 11.40am), a story of rebellion and survival. New Zealand’s Barden Party lay on a folk musical with Heracles: Of Men And Beasts (Space Niddry Street, 17–29 August, 12.30pm) and Theatre Movement Bazaar deliver Delphi: The Musical (Bedlam Theatre, 7–30 August, 3.30pm) injecting ancient myth into a modern musical comedy.

Over at the International Festival, various female icons from mythology are the inspiration behind a concert by Beth Taylor & Hamish Brown (Queen’s Hall, 11 August, 11am) with the mezzo soprano singing her heart out in honour of tragic figures such as Cassandra and Medusa. And Greek tragedy meets modern psychology in Elektra (Usher Hall, 23 August, 6.30pm), Richard Strauss’ audacious opera.

Argonauts

RA R MES

Afternoon delight

Tipped to be one of the breakout musicals of this year’s Fringe, Bliss is ripping up the fairtytale rulebook. Dominic Corr meets some of the cast to discover how this pop-rock romp is turning traditional once-upon-a-time adventures on their head

For critics, our happily ever after occurs at the end of August, but for performers, those wishes and hopes burn brightest from the start of the month. Falling squarely into the latter category is Bliss, from the Olivier Award-winning producers behind Cabaret and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.

It is, by all accounts, one of the Festival’s most anticipated musicals, designed to shake the foundations of the city with a 17-strong cast of West End performers and pop-rock belts where the traditional fairytale model collides with the unstoppable concert power of a show like Six. But beneath the blinding sheen of high-budget spectacle and towering set pieces, Emma Lively and Tyler Beattie’s Bliss is aiming for something far more rebellious than your standard Disneyadjacent cash cow.

Turning the classic, pristine fairytale inside out, the narrative follows four princess sisters escaping their tower to confront a world where happy endings come with a rather extortionate price tag. Rather than inheriting a collection of sanitised, hollow archetypes, the performers are finding messy nuance inside the spectacle.

‘We don’t really have many references to look back to in terms of developing our characters,’ explains Akshara Gunda (The Lunchbox Musical), who steps into the royal shoes of Princess Piper. ‘We are given a lot of liberty to find where the character lives within ourselves, rather than taking us to meet

the character.’ It is a refreshing approach, allowing performers to bypass the usual constraints of a creative production line.

Matilda Shapland (Les Misérables), portraying youngest sister Princess Holly, echoes this liberating sense of ownership, noting that ‘everything added is flavoured by us’. Gunda reinforces that this lack of superficial perfection is precisely what makes the piece tick: ‘A big part of the girls, these sisters and their story, is that they’re not perfect.’

To convey this existential royal angst, Bliss relies on an eclectic score that Shapland describes as pop-rock at its core, featuring ‘moments that feel a little bit Sondheim-y in the sense that the music dramaturgically reflects what’s going on’. It is a musical landscape that refuses to stay in one lane, moving from radio-friendly choruses to complex, characterdriven storytelling. And for those who fear a jukebox musical, Shapland emphasises how the production’s original songs are woven to interrogate traditional roles, offering diverse character opportunities while still capturing the genre’s roots in nostalgia and escapism.

Intended as a joyous smashing of the bones of westernised storytelling, Bliss isn’t waiting for permission to rip up the fairytale rulebook, acknowledging that all happy endings come with a cost, and seeking to include everyone within that fairytale world rather than just the privileged few.

Bliss, Pleasance Courtyard, 5–31 August, 1pm.

PRIMARY SCHOOL BANGERS

Stumbling across an old songbook from his school days ignited the spark for James B Partridge’s feelgood show, Primary School Bangers. ‘I looked through the contents page and suddenly a door into my childhood swung open and all these melodies and memories came flooding back,’ says the music teacher who has turned those reflections into a hit hour of singalong nostalgia.

Things really took off when covid hit and he began to post those assembly hall classics on TikTok. ‘It made a huge connection with people in a time when we’d lost a lot of human connection and sparked my journey down the rabbit hole of rediscovering these tunes,’ says Partridge. Viral fame and a Glastonbury set later, he’s looking forward to Fringe crowds throwing themselves into the unbridled joy of communal singing. ‘Everyone has their own memories from school, whether positive or negative, and a lot of us sang the same tunes. I do find it incredible that I’ve performed all across the UK now and there is this universality of experience that I would never have imagined from growing up in a suburb of Poole in Dorset.’

As well as the songs that bind us together, Partridge usually gives a little nod to local favourites too. ‘I have sung “Calon Lân” in Wales and “Loch Lomond” in Scotland. When I performed in Birmingham recently, it was about a year since Ozzy Osbourne passed, so I did an Ozzy song as tribute.’ Black Sabbath bangers aside, Partridge reckons what really gets people going off is anything involving actions.

‘“He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands” usually brings a huge amount of energy. I also have a “PE” lesson during the show where we have to stand up or sit down during “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” every time there is a word beginning with B!’ (Paul McLean)

n Gilded Balloon Teviot, 5–16 August, 1pm.

PLASTIC

Multidisciplinary show Plastic is the brainchild of Seoul composer and soloist Minyoung Kim. It has already achieved notable success at both the Keroxen and Kosmopolis festivals in Spain, and an updated version gets its UK premiere in Edinburgh. ‘I always change my performance programme to fit the vibe of each venue,’ says Kim on expanding the original for the Fringe. ‘For Summerhall, I wanted to show the true beauty of Korean tradition to audiences coming from all over the world. So, besides my own original music, I added parts of Korean traditional songs and royal court music to the programme.’

Conceived in 2024 when Kim was working on another piece (Six Impossibles), Plastic tests the boundaries of tradition while digging into the personal. ‘If my previous work looked at human nature in general, Plastic goes a step further and looks directly into my own deepest, most private inner world,’ she explains.

Combining geomungo, a traditional Korean string instrument, and jeongga traditional Korean singing (which requires a level of vocal control most can only dream of), this 2026 update will also be accompanied by psychedelic projections. ‘We are using stage visuals with traditional Korean patterns. I really want to show the authentic elegance of Korean tradition to everyone in Edinburgh,’ says Kim. Plastic is a show about the human mind, about how our minds can scar and pollute, but also how they can help us grow and become freer within ourselves. (Louise Holland) n Summerhall, 6–31 August, 8.45pm.

CLEO

Here comes an overdue feminist reimagining of a woman who has long been reduced to a myth. This new musical reclaims the story of Cleopatra VII, following her rise from a teenage monarch to one of history’s most formidable political leaders.

n C Aquila, 5–11 August, 5.25pm.

TOM MCGUIRE & THE BRASSHOLES

Energy is in abundance as this funk soul collective hit up their audience with arrangements, songcraft and boundless vitality. They’ve come a long way since busking on the mean streets of Glasgow.

n La Belle Angele, 9 August, 7pm.

BOOM BOOM BATTLE OF THE BIG BOSSES

Hong Kong’s Yat Po Singers present another a cappella narrative show as rumours reverberate about a fierce musical showdown with some big scary bosses putting down their weapons and picking up the beats n SpaceTriplex, 7–15 August, 4.30pm.

GERSHWIN & BARTÓK

Dubbed by The New York Times as featuring ’some of the best young orchestral players in America’, that country’s National Youth Orchestra are in town alongside conductor Karina Canellakis and pianist Kirill Gerstein. n Usher Hall, 10 August, 7.30pm.

MUSIC HIGHLIGHTS

I AM A PILGRIM

Across three 90-minute shows, the arts department of the Wallace State Community College in Alabama deliver ‘The Story Of American Gospel’, tracing its deep roots and following its progress to the modern day.

n Ps & Gs Church, 10–12 August, 7pm.

JLCO WITH YUJA WANG

This world exclusive collaboration between classical superstar pianist Wang and the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra will be a clear highlight of the month as she takes on towering figures from jazz history such as Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk. n Usher Hall, 12 August, 6pm, 9pm.

THE

REAL

KYLE MCCARREN

A strong pedigree is attached to this musical with Emmy and Tony award winners involved in the tale of master McCarren who is being fondly remembered by his friend and bandmate given that Kyle is now, sadly, deceased.

n Pleasance Courtyard, 5–30 August, 1.50pm.

JERK OFF!

In her international solo hit Burq Off!, Nadia P Manzoor embodied no fewer than 21 characters. For this new Fringe show, she is predominantly just one: herself. This darkly funny autobiographical play shows how she fell for the wrong man but considers herself complicit in not escaping the abuse for so long. Across its 75 minutes, Jerk Off! covers hip hop, power relations and losing your mother far too soon. (Brian Donaldson) n Underbelly Bristo Square, 5–30 August, 11.35am.

PICTURE: MURRAY HALL

Fascinating

KScottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall has been busy crafting tunes for a new gigtheatre piece about the odd-couple pairing of a has-been busker and a deaf artist. She reveals to Danny Munro why The Singer resonates so personally with her and talks about the need to feel as well as hear music

T Tunstall won’t be in Edinburgh this August but she’s had a big hand in a piece of work that will be. A Fringe performer herself in the early stages of an impressive career, Tunstall has come full circle and composed the music for The Singer, a Traverse-bound musical theatre work that’s close to her heart.

‘I kind of blindly jumped in because there were just so many things that were relevant to my life in this one show,’ says Tunstall of her motivation. Zooming in mid-tour from the outskirts of Austin, Texas, Tunstall sets out the storyline in which Andy, a ‘washed out’ Glaswegian singer, has his perspective altered by a punter he encounters while busking. ‘A guy stops to listen to him and it’s clear that the guy is deaf. At the end of the song he says, “you’re really good.” So Andy’s like, “how would you know if you can’t hear?” And he says, “no, I really like your rhythm, but your lyrics are crap”.’

An unlikely musical partnership forms as a result of this curt interaction, as Andy learns through his new friend Joe about the ways deaf people interact with music. It’s a message that resonates strongly with Tunstall whose brother has been deaf since birth.

‘I’ve got that first-hand experience of growing up next to a deaf person and being really aware of how they get ignored and how they get ostracised,’ she says. ‘And I like to think of this play as the singer-songwriter experience of being

rhythm

ignored, and getting a deal, but then getting dropped and feeling no one will listen to you. It’s like the kind of pop culture version of the deaf character’s life.’

Taking on the role of Joe and breathing life into Tunstall’s score is Jamie Rea, an award-winning deaf artist who blew the ‘Suddenly I See’ singer away with his creative process. ‘He loves the feel of music, Jamie as a person, and also Joe, his character,’ she explains. ‘He’s actually using a Roland SPD-SX and has this really cool thing that looks like a jet pack that’s buzzing him; it buzzes his body in time. So he’s playing the beats and then Andy, who’s played by Dylan Wood, is bringing the voice and the chords.’ The result of their partnership is music far superior to Andy’s solo busking work.

Tunstall believes the inclusion of deaf actors is essential to helping others to understand more about their lives. ‘I’ve had an amazing experience myself, travelling the world, playing gigs, and it’s incredible to me when I go to South America, or to Japan, and I play my songs and I can tell that people don’t speak English, they’re not necessarily understanding what I’m saying but they feel the song,’ she muses. ‘And I think to really show audiences that music transcends language barriers, you don’t get that in a more intense way than with this show.’

The Singer, Traverse Theatre, 4–30 August, times vary.

Beat it: (from top left) KT Tunstall, Jamie Rea and Dylan Wood, day one rehearsals for The Singer

PICTURE:

TOMMY GA-KEN

IN A MODERN VERSE TRANSLATION BY TONY AWARD WINNER

DIRECTED BY DRAMA DESK NOMINEE

Shedloads: Nick Helm and (clockwise)

Bourgeois & Maurice, Tim Crouch, Josie Dale-Jones

Garden party

SSetting the standard for what the Fringe should be about, Shedinburgh is back looking after artists and audiences alike, while still providing quality work across various genres. Neil Cooper recalls the concept’s roots andconsiders its continuing growth in challenging times

hedinburgh was one of the most striking artistic initiatives of the pandemic. With live events closed down, along with the Edinburgh Fringe in its entirety in 2020, its online pop-up programme throughout August of that year provided a lifeline for a world that had been forced to shut up shop. Initiated by Fleabag and Baby Reindeer producer Francesca Moody alongside Harriet Bolwell and writer/performer Gary McNair, Shedinburgh live-streamed 25 performances from two sheds set up in the Traverse Theatre and London’s Soho Theatre, reaching over 5000 people worldwide.

As the world slowly reopened in 2021, Shedinburgh offered up a mixed Edinburgh programme of live and digital presentations. It was 2025, however, when the venue came into its own as a full-on live programme showcasing 36 shows by more than 100 artists. With Francesca Moody Productions at the helm, this year’s Shedinburgh is bursting at the seams with 150 performances of work, both old and new, by a who’s who of off-kilter mavericks. In the worlds of theatre and spoken word, this list includes Lucy McCormick, Inua Ellams, Bryony Kimmings, Josie Dale-Jones and Tim Crouch, while a series of works-in-progress from the likes of Bourgeois & Maurice, Sabrina Mahfouz and Nick Helm will also be in town.

While such regular Fringe names are a treat, Shedinburgh is also laying some groundwork for the future. Part of this is represented by Shed Originals, a series of new works that have emerged through Shedinburgh’s script development programme, run this year in partnership with Theatre Clwyd in Mold, Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and the Traverse. Also planting seeds is the Shedload-Of-Future Fund, which has awarded bursaries to five Edinburgh productions.

A major draw this year is the return of Forest Fringe, the team who arguably set a template for the sort of short-run, ad hoc, genre-fluid happenings that Shedinburgh now champions. Forest Fringe’s prodigal return to Edinburgh after a decade away will see the ultimate DIY outfit host work by Tim Etchells of longstanding performance auteurs Forced Entertainment, Forest Fringe co-founder Deborah Pearson and Action Hero.

Key to Shedinburgh’s raison d’être is what Moody calls an ‘artist first’ model. This means that travel and accommodation for all performers is paid for, while each show comes with a box-office guarantee; for audiences, there is a pay what you can option available. If all of the above sounds like a crazy ideal of what the Fringe is supposed to be about in the face of ongoing outpricing, that’s because it probably is. Seeking sanctuary in a shed has rarely sounded so in season.

Shedinburgh, Assembly Checkpoint, 7–30 August.

She’s had a long and storied career, with Tony and Emmy awards to her name (not to forget an Oscar nomination), but Stockard Channing finds herself in new territory this August. She talks to Kelly Apter about choosing Krapp’s Last Tape as her directorial debut and its journey from kitchen table to Fringe stage

Owner of a lonely heart F

rom a feisty teen making the most of her last year at high school to a razor sharp First Lady in the White House, and many more besides, Stockard Channing has 50-plus years of characters under her belt. But whether she was acting in Grease, The West Wing, Six Degrees Of Separation or any of the myriad other stage and screen ventures she’s undertaken, Channing was always at the behest of a director. Until now, when at the grand age of 82, she’s ploughing all that skill and experience into her directorial debut.

The person on the receiving end of her sage theatrical wisdom is actor and long-time friend David Westhead. He’ll be taking on Samuel Beckett’s seminal one-person play Krapp’s Last Tape, a powerful reflection on loss and loneliness. Focused on a 69-year-old listening back to the diary tapes he recorded as a younger, more hopeful man, the piece hits softer or harder depending on the age and stage of the watcher, and bears repeat viewing. ‘It’s a piece you can keep returning to and can also see many different interpretations of,’ says Channing. ‘However, anyone staging it has to keep within the very narrow parameters of the Beckett estate, right down to the white shoes. They really don’t give you any leeway.’

Channing and Westhead met on a film set 26 years ago and have remained fast friends ever since, even bubbling together during covid after she relocated to the UK. ‘We were having dinner one night and David said he wanted to return to the stage after 12 years away, and that he wanted to do Krapp’s Last Tape, and for me to direct it. So we started small, sitting at my kitchen table and just reading through the text. And at first we really didn’t know if it would go anywhere, we just wanted to do the work. But we know each other extremely well, and trust each other’s taste, so our communication was very open, which is unbelievably important between a director and an actor.’

The duo worked on the play during their spare time, alongside other commitments, eventually performing it in a few small venues. Channing says they’re both ‘beyond thrilled’ to be taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe, where all profits will go to the Wembley To Soweto Foundation (a charity founded by Westhead to provide training and life skills to disadvantaged young people). Channing will take part in several post-show Q&As, but when it comes to talking about her experience of directing, she insists her input was relatively light touch.

‘It wasn’t like directing a Broadway musical,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have to make a lot of decisions about set and costumes and things like that, because all of that is set by the Beckett estate. So my job was just to deal with my friend and his performance. I like to say that I conducted it more than directed it because a lot of it had to do with the timing, the decision to take a pause or not take a pause. Krapp is someone who’s looking inward, he’s not performing for the room. You’re literally watching a bunch of private moments.’

Krapp’s Last Tape, Assembly Roxy, 5–31 August, 1.25pm.

Others To See Beckettian shows

Similar to Kafkaesque and Shakespearean, Beckettian can be thrust at a piece of work which features shades of the original writer. Dubbed ‘Waiting For Godot meets Kath & Kim’, Birds (Assembly George Square, 5–30 August, 7pm) has Alex Hines and Sarah Staffford playing a pair of beach lovers who stay on their deckchairs a little longer than perhaps intended. For years in fact, as strange things start happening to their bodies. Mind Full (Space Surgeons’ Hall, 17–22 August, 3.55pm) is not only Beckettian but is deemed to also be Brechtian in its tale of a sharp-thinking person living within a body that needs constant help. But for those purists out there, some Fringe shows are simply performances of the guy’s actual work such as Flabbergast’s production of the absurdist tragi-comedy Endgame (Pleasance EICC, 5–30 August, 6pm) featuring a post-apocalyptic ‘chess’ battle between its characters, named Hamm, Clov, Nagg and Nell. If one slice of Sam just isn’t enough for you, then Three By Samuel Beckett (Greenside George Street, 7–15 August, 7.50pm) might be your thing as Not I, Eh Joe and Rockaby are analysed through a combination of live performance and film, all in just 50 minutes.

Change the channel

Looking back on his success as a vlogger in the 2010s, Euan Munro discovered the reality was darker than he recalled, an experience he’s bringing to life in Playback. He chats to Danny Munro about craving fame and the lessons he hopes others will take from his show

Euan Munro was a YouTube child prodigy. A product of the internet generation, Munro didn’t dream of being a footballer or pop star. To him, achieving viral stardom and following in the footsteps of the emerging wave of vlogging superstars was the ultimate goal. In Playback, Munro reflects on a childhood spent online and the grim realities of navigating the internet at a young age.

‘The dream was for it to be my career. When I was about 11, it was just monkey see, monkey do,’ explains Munro, now an emerging actor and graduate of the Royal Conservatoire Of Scotland. ‘I was seeing all these creators that I loved, all these vloggers, and I just wanted what they had.’

It wasn’t uncommon for those born in the early 2000s to dream of making it big on YouTube. Most people now in their mid-20s will begrudgingly admit to a short-lived period of posting embarrassing videos online, though Munro actually succeeded in making his channel a success. At the height of his fame, Munro’s vlogs and comedy sketches helped him rack up 10,000 subscribers and two million views on his channel, an impressive feat for a pre-teen and one that understandably stoked his ego. ‘I had people that would regularly come back to my videos and they would say they were “fans”. It felt like just the ultimate indulgence of that little boy dream of wanting to be famous, wanting to be cool.’

Like most teenagers, Munro eventually packed in the vlogging, ditching his channel at the age of 15 out of fear of judgement from his high school peers. It wasn’t until years later, when delving into his abandoned channel, the retired vlogger realised that not all of the relationships he had forged in his YouTube days had been as innocuous as he had realised. ‘It wasn’t until looking back that the rose-coloured glasses came off . . . looking back as an adult and seeing what other adults were doing and what they were saying, and realising that you’ve been taken advantage of in the past tense. It’s such a weird feeling.’

With the help of archived footage, Playback has Munro reliving his foray into internet stardom live on stage. The resulting play is delivered with humour, though it’s a body of work that arrives at a pertinent time, with the UK government set to ban social media for under 16s next year.

Looking ahead to his run, Munro hopes that people of all ages can glean something valuable from the performance: ‘I think the most amazing thing is if people would come out of the show and it would trigger an interesting conversation . . . and they’d think about it when they’re thinking about posting their kids online. That would be the most amazing thing.’

Playback, Summerhall, 6–31 August, 1.20pm.

PICTURES: RUARI

BARBER-FLEMING

“There’s

BY CRAIG MANSON

“Sophia Wolbrom is going

DUNGEONS & SHAKESPEARE

Shelby Bond, the man behind Dungeons & Shakespeare, reckons Scotland’s atmospheric capital is an ideal place to stage his immersive show. ‘What I love about Edinburgh is the streets are oozing with theatre,’ says Bond. ‘It’s a place where people know Shakespeare. Maybe they will have been down the road seeing Coriolanus or Titus Andronicus, and they’ll come in and grab one of those characters.’

Dungeons & Shakespeare invites audience members to take on one of Shakespeare’s famed creations, rolling the dice to decide their fate amid the monsters and mayhem of Dungeons & Dragons gameplay, with Bond’s own background the inspiration. ‘I played RPGs as a teen, as a way to escape my small town in Texas,’ he explains. ‘During the pandemic, I started gaming online and remembered that it was such a social way to tell stories. I figured out how we’d give people a chance to shine as characters and found it a fantastic way to co-create with an audience.’

And despite seemingly disparate markets for the two genres, there is a unifying thread. ‘Shakespeare is revered, and D&D is seen as a hobby. But they both come from myth and legend, and have sorcerers, swords, fantasy and fairies, so they’re not so opposite. This belongs to everyone, and we have epic adventures. I think about me as a kid, how much I would have loved to see the doors of fantasy swung open into the streets of Verona and castles of Elsinore. I love that I don’t know what’s going to happen. I can’t wait to see kids get tuned in to Shakespeare and see older folks get together with their senior group to play RPGs.’ With infectious energy and over 700 performances under his magic-laden belt, Bond’s love of the game seems truly boundless. (Rachel Morrell) n Gilded Balloon Patter House, 5–27 August, 1.35pm.

GLASS CHILD

The Fringe is a loud machine but, at Summerhall, a quiet revolution is taking place. Gold Coast-based physical theatre company The Farm presents Glass Child, a profound confrontation of what it means to be truly seen. The title refers to siblings of children with disabilities, whose needs are often overlooked. Maitreyah and Kayah Guenther reject this clinical gaze. After attending an education conference prioritising theory over experience, Maitreyah recalls: ‘We came away with a fire under our souls.’

Rather than offering a tragedy or a lecture, the performance is a poetic, fierce dialogue. Kayah, an accomplished dancer and powerlifter who has Down syndrome, navigates a world quick to label him, grounding his artistic presence in his own truth. While Maitreyah speaks first, the narrative shifts entirely into Kayah’s movement-driven world, where words can manifest as initial barriers. Their bond becomes a mutual mirror. ‘Kayah helps me to be seen in ways that I am not,’ Maitreyah says.

For them, blending physical movement and drama is vital because ‘they’re both necessary to tell our story’, allowing the audience to step into a deeper space that ‘doesn’t require words’. Thrilled to be a part of the House Of Oz showcase, Glass Child is a demand for genuine connection. The siblings are opening their journey to a global platform because, as Maitreyah notes, ‘it’s for everyone . . . if you want to feel something, then come along.’ Glass Child invites us to stop intellectually spectating and, as Kayah urges, ‘join the heart’.

(Dominic Corr)

n Summerhall, 6–16 August, 1.30pm.

BLACKBOX

Some stories resist straightforward retelling. For writer and director Rickerby Hinds, Henry ‘Box’ Brown’s remarkable escape from slavery demanded a theatrical language that could match both its historical weight and its sense of impossibility. His answer is Blackbox, a production that uses illusion, spoken word and music to explore not only Brown’s tale but the questions it continues to raise.

Brown’s 27-hour journey to freedom inside a wooden crate has long fascinated Hinds, but it was what came afterwards that shaped the production. Brown reinvented himself as a magician and performer, prompting Hinds to ask how illusion might illuminate history rather than distract from it. ‘Magic asks an audience to question what they believe they’re seeing,’ he says. ‘Henry Brown’s life asks us to question what we believe about freedom, identity and transformation.’ For Hinds, the box is more than a historical object: it becomes a metaphor for the social, cultural and psychological boundaries that continue to shape lives today.

Rather than offering audiences easy conclusions, he hopes Blackbox invites reflection. ‘I don’t believe theatre should tell audiences what to think,’ he says. ‘I hope it gives them better questions.’ Bringing the production to Edinburgh carries its own resonance. Brown toured Britain after escaping slavery and later performed in the city itself. For Hinds, Blackbox feels ‘less like introducing Henry to Edinburgh than bringing him back’. (Ananya Patankar) n Underbelly Cowgate, 5–30 August, 12.40 pm.

FOR DOLORES

‘I've always been fascinated by the all-consuming friendships that define your early twenties,’ says Fringe First award-winning writer and performer Eva O’Connor on the conception of her new play, For Dolores. Produced by Olivier Award-winning Irish theatre company Fishamble and directed by Jim Culleton, For Dolores is a gripping two-hander that investigates the very nature of friendship and how far we are willing to go for the ones we love.

After a chance meeting in a university lift, Réaltín and Mo (one Irish, the other Scottish) bond and party their way through the Edinburgh student dream. ‘The way the nights and days and hangovers bleed into one long, often very messy love affair of sorts,’ is how O’Connor describes these particular and often formative friendships. But it can’t last forever; people change, the world changes, and with that we begin to reflect on lives led and roads taken. For Dolores takes place across Ireland, Edinburgh and Glasgow where each woman recalls and faces head-on how other relationships, addiction and the past have all affected their friendship. ‘There’s no road map for what happens when these relationships shift or end. I wanted to try and capture this,’ explains O’Connor.

Taking on the role of Réaltín is Lara McDonnell with Mo played by Catriona Faint. Together they tackle motherhood, friendship and coming to terms with mistakes made in the past for what O’Connor calls an exploration of ‘the intensity of that bond you have with your friends before people have serious relationships or any real responsibility.’ (Louise Holland)

n Traverse Theatre, 6–30 August, times vary.

ohn B Keane is one of the topgreatIrishwriters,hisplays include The Field, Big Maggie andSive

11½ ANGRY MEN

The courtroom drama which spawned a Fringe sub-genre of serious plays populated by a comedy cast is reinvented with some of the originals: Phil Nichol (pictured), Owen O’Neill and David Calvitto among them, directed again by Guy Masterson.

 Pleasance EICC, 5–22 August, 2.30pm.

KIRSTY MANN: CORPSE

‘The Woman In Black meets Catherine Tate’ is quite the sell for this piece about how Mann was a long-time non-believer in ghosts. Then she bought a house. And now she does believe in ghosts. Big time.

 Summerhall, 6–30 August, 3.15pm.

ADDING UP AMERICA

Inspired by her own experiences as a mixed-race woman in the US, this work has award-winning singer-songwriter Monique DeBose exploring what happens when identity is reduced to a simple equation.

 Assembly Roxy, 5–31 August, 1.40pm.

CAMPITALISM

Subtitled ‘Three Gays Try To Fix The Economy’, this considers how the current generation of artists are meant to grow in an industry which is constantly being squeezed. Excellent tagline: ‘We’re here, we’re queer and we’re financially illiterate’.

 Pleasance Courtyard, 5–31 August, 2.05pm.

THEATRE HIGHLIGHTS

A TRIAL: AFTER ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee for The Secret Agent , Wagner Moura stars in Christiane Jatahy’s take on what happened after the end of Ibsen’s classic with 11 audience members chosen to act as the jury considering Thomas Stockmann’s fate.

 Lyceum Theatre, 7–10 August, 7.30pm; 8 August, 3pm.

ALREADY HERE

Love, loss and AI intimacy are the areas of concern in this play written and performed by SJ Hodges. A recently widowed woman seeks solace in ‘Teo’ but what happens when such companionship gets serious?

 Gilded Balloon Patter House, 5–30 August, 1pm.

A raw but funny autobiographical story of grief, mums and lasagne. Melissa Pullinger lost her mother when she was just 20 and began writing about her mourning and loss, leading to this work which charmed audiences in Adelaide.

 Summerhall, 6–31 August, 9pm.

Lindsey Barlag Thornton

FLIGHTS FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS

ACKBOX

A play disguised as a magic show

From the team behind 2025's Dreamscape One of The Scotsman’s Top 5 Shows

The Guardian

EdFest Magazine

hot shots

For those who read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s seminal book at university (or any time in life), perhaps the last thing they need is a ‘six-person dance thriller’ take on The Yellow Wallpaper (Greenside George Street, 7–29 August). Still, the commitment to that titular hue is quite admirable in the suitably haunting publicity pic.

2 3

Every August, there are publicity pictures galore with, predominantly, authors and comedians accompanied by their dog(s). We’ve run features on this weird phenomenon. Spencer Jones takes it one pad further by calling his grown-up (that word does a lot of heavy lifting here) show Dogs (Pleasance Dome, 5–30 August).

For those otherwise unaware, Chrissie Hynde hasn’t just been making records for decades, she’s been painting too, launching exhibitions in London and New York while her work also appeared on Vivienne Westwood garments. On Canvas (Harvey & Woodd, until 28 August) is a collection of still life, abstraction and portraiture.