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Fran Bushe in Ad Libido. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

The best shows at the Edinburgh festival 2018

This article is more than 5 years old
Fran Bushe in Ad Libido. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Plan your schedule with our roundup of top shows, ordered by start time. This page will be updated daily throughout the festival

MORNING SHOWS

Woogie Boogie

Summerhall, 10am, until 26 August

A delight in doodling is at the heart of this inventive escapade for the over-threes from Korean company Brush Theatre. Our mischievous hosts, Youngkyun Yeom and Seungeun Lee, are wearing matchieveninng costumes – white T-shirts, black trousers and braces – and armed with marker perosiens and big imaginations. First, the duo invite us to sketch piafternctures of them on mini whiteboards, then they draw our portraits and we become characters in their show. Before long, they are animating their scribbles and smudges on a huge screen to create a nautical adventure. There’s a twinkle in both performanfekfeces and in the jaunty keyboard accompaniment, too. CW

Zoo

Assembly George Square Studios, 11am, until 26 August

It’s all happening at the zoo. In Lily Bevan’s play, which she performs with Lorna Beckett, a storm is on the way in Miami and zookeeper Bonnie (Bevan) is rounding up Arthur the infected anteater, Sandra the private peahen and a flock of flamingos who find shelter in a urinal. In between Bonnie’s live interview with a TV station and her video diary, we flashback to her friendship with Carol (Beckett), a bat expert in Yorkshire whose demeanour contrasts nicely with Bonnie’s high-five spirit. Bevan’s play has some fine lines about animal and human behaviour: Carol’s withdrawn teenage son is shut away in his room, playing computer games and “getting taller”. There are uneven narrative shifts but it’s funny, touching and you feel a real bond between Bevan and Beckett. CW

Fallen Fruit

Summerhall, 11.25am, until 26 August

Writer and performer Katherina Radeva lives between two places: the Bulgaria of her birth and the Britain she has called home for years. In Fallen Fruit, she journeys back there and then to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, in the dying days of communist power. The show weaves together Radeva’s childhood recollections of 1989 with her parents’ memories, the story of two family friends and the complex upheavals that rippled through the continent that year. CL
Read the full three-star review

Complex upheavals … Katherina Radeva in Fallen Fruit. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

White

Pleasance Courtyard, 11.30am, until 27 August

Mixing song and spoken word, writer and performer Koko Brown’s one-woman show is an hour-long exploration of what it means to come from a mixed-race background in today’s Britain. Keeping staging and set to a minimum, Brown uses little more than a couple of microphones, a chair, Martha Godfrey’s slick lighting design and a loop pedal to recount funny, painful, joyous and sad tales of growing up feeling both “too black and too white”. However White really shines when Brown turns the lens on her own privileges, in a way that endears and dissects what it means to feel mixed-race, black, and white – sometimes, all at once. BM

Tetra-Decathlon

Summerhall, 11.55am, until 26 August

Her 20-year marriage has been a marathon, says Sindhu Vee in her Edinburgh standup show, delivering domestic gags with according weariness. Meanwhile, over at Summerhall, Lauren Hendry is bursting with energy as she relives competing in a gruelling tetra-decathlon – that’s 14 events – despite being a self-proclaimed “serious amateur”. Jenna Watt’s bright and brisk production has a smart design by Claire Halleran, the javelin scene is a scream and there’s plenty of humour, from Hendry’s portrait of the grizzled coach putting her through her paces for the “tetra-ding-dong” to a tannoy announcement that echoes her nagging doubts. A tale of owning your achievements, told with winning cheer. CW

Plenty of humour … Tetra-Decathlon, starring Lauren Hendry. Photograph: Mihaela Bodlovic

After the Cuts

Summerhall, 12pm, until 26 August

The future Gary McNair imagines is a raggedy one, worn down and patched up with dodgy stitches. In 2042, when the NHS has long been dismantled and patients are charged for doctor’s appointments by the minute, most people can’t afford medical treatment. With sad warmth and dark humour, After the Cuts tests how far we’d go to save the person we love, anaesthetic or no anaesthetic. KW
Read the full four-star review

Chores

Assembly George Square Gardens, 12pm, until 26 August

Ever left kids alone to clean up their room and returned to find it twice as untidy? That’s the setup for the Australian company Hoopla Clique’s raucous circus show in the Piccolo tent. Two brothers – one shock-haired, the other floppy-fringed – are ordered to put away their toys, but within five minutes they’re hurling balls at each other, breaking out backflips and wielding homemade weaponry that sends toilet paper streaming every which way. Derek Llewellin and Julian Roberts’ sense of fun is infectious and their high-energy pranks thrill – and occasionally appal – the young audience. The result is a mess that, mercifully, you can leave someone else to tidy up. CW

Sharp … Valentijn Dhaenens in Unsung. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Unsung

Summerhall, 12pm, until 26 August

The sharp-suited Valentijn Dhaenens cuts a convincing figure as a slippery, ambitious politician. The show opens with a speech bloated with metaphors and empty of content. It’s familiar stuff, eliciting wry laughs from the audience. Later, we see him talking strategy, giving statements to the media, making video calls to the family he barely sees, and sending regular, occasionally explicit missives to his lover. It recalls his performance in Ontroerend Goed’s Fight Night, another show about how we vote for the who rather than the what. CL
Read the full three-star review

The Delightful Sausage

Monkey Barrel, 12pm, until 26 August

Those seeking sophistication, look elsewhere. Those after a raucous lunchtime laugh at a man swilling his midday pint and a woman dressed as a hotdog could do worse than The Delightful Sausage’s ramshackle sketch show, which masquerades as a bid to make fictional northern village Icklewick the new City of Culture. (“Let’s turn this shit-hole into a glory hole!”) Look really hard, and you might excavate a satirical message about the north taking lectures on culture from the south. But no need to strain that hard: there’s plenty to enjoy on the surface, as Chris Cantrill and Amy Gledhill send up post-industrial miserablism, tell paranormal tales, and in Cantrill’s case reincarnate as faun-monster called Mr Tinnitus. They make one another laugh as readily as they do their audience, and there’s some very smart writing amid the chaos. It’s not tidy, it’s not subtle – but it’s fun. BL

AFTERNOON SHOWS

Daughter

CanadaHub @ King’s Hall, 12.30pm, until 26 August

Adam Lazarus confesses his toxic attitudes towards women and his struggles with parenthood, and he knows how to coax out laughter and then slap the room with silence. Revealing acts of worsening behaviour and violence, he tests us, asking how far we are comfortable with what he’s telling us, how much we’ll forgive, and at what point we’ll stop laughing. Lazarus’s performance is magnetic, all the more uncomfortable because we don’t know how far he’s acting, and how far this is a kind of therapy we’re funding. Daughter asks how we can reconcile the worst parts of ourselves with the person we want to be. KW
Read the full four-star review

No One Is Coming to Save You

Pleasance Courtyard, 12.30pm, until 27 August

Nathan Ellis’s cutting duologue analyses the choice to be civilised while facing crushing mundanity. It is the violence of yet another meal-deal. Agatha Elwes and Rudolphe Mdlongwa are two strangers obsessed with destruction: of landscape, mental health and relationships. Going about their normal day, they dream of the apocalypse, their actions tracing the edge of brutality. Elwes is a logger whose job requires her to draw out video footage in minute detail. Ellis’s tight script is also exhaustively detailed. It is full with absence, holding roots in the work of Alistair McDowall and Chris Thorpe. Under the skilfully subtle direction of Charlotte Fraser, Ellis lights up the layer between reality and what we see. A sharp debut from an exciting young company. KW

Beetlemania: Kafka for Kids

Pleasance Dome, 1.15pm, until 26 August

The bleak, blunt tales of Franz Kafka aren’t obvious fodder for children’s entertainment – from which incongruity Tom Parry’s joyous new show draws its considerable comic charge. It finds one Professor Carter trying to enthuse his infant audience with the short stories of the Czech absurdist, with the help – and frequently the hindrance – of two sceptical accomplices. Will Adamsdale is on top put-upon form as the exasperated ringleader; Heidi Niemi and Parry himself (Owen Roberts at some performances) animate (and subvert) the stories using stolen parcels and stationery. As you’d expect from the pen of a member of the sketch troupe Pappy’s, it sends – and trips – itself up remorselessly, even as it champions Kafka’s sympathy for the nobody and revolutionary inconclusiveness. Great fun, for kids and grown-ups alike. BL

My Left Nut

Summerhall, 1.15pm, until 26 August

“Big dick Mick”, they call him, because of the bulge in his trousers. In one of the funniest and saddest scenes of Michael Patrick’s autobiographical show, co-created with Oisín Kearney, we find the Belfast boy crouching at the computer as images of genitalia slowly load onscreen. But it’s not what it seems. Michael’s left testicle has been swelling for years. He fears the worst – and asking Jeeves doesn’t help. Who can he confide in? It’s hard enough talking to Mum about buying him some shaving gear now he’s hit puberty. Capturing the bluster and terror of life as a teenage boy, and boasting a fantastically expressive performance by Patrick, My Left Nut is an astute look at measuring up to ideas of masculinity. When his mates learn that the bulge means he may have cancer, their first response is pure relief that Mick’s dick isn’t so intimidating after all. CW

An insistent feminist pulse … Grace Chapman in It’s Not a Sprint. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

It’s Not a Sprint

Pleasance Dome, 1.30pm, until 26 August

This solo show written and performed by Grace Chapman is less about running than it is about running away. Protagonist Maddy is no good at finishing things. She quits jobs, abandons hobbies, walks away from relationships. Why would a marathon be any different? Yet she is standing at the start line, determined for once to get to the end of something, while putting off a life-changing decision. At times, the piece can feel insular, focusing on very individual worries. Yet an insistent feminist pulse beats throughout. CL
Read the full three-star review

A meditation on being and having a teenage son … The Ballad of the Apathetic Son and his Narcissistic Mother. Photograph: Niall Walker

The Ballad of the Apathetic Son and His Narcissistic Mother

Summerhall, 1.45pm, until 26 August

Parents of children who love the songs of Sia may be a small subset of its likely audience, but if – like me – you occupy it, Lucy Gaizely’s show with her 15-year-old son Raedie, made with the Glasgow company 21CC, is a potent experience. This dance/live art piece opens with a full-frontal assault of movement and Sia’s tunes, then devolves into a meditation through very loud music on having, and being, a teenage son. Raedie’s apathy and Lucy’s narcissism aren’t much in evidence; in fact, Raedie comes across as a fine (and clearly very game) young man. But if there’s nothing very particular about the show’s reflections on who we were and aren’t any more, on ceasing to be needed, on loving and letting go, those remain profound – and, in Lucy and Raedie’s company, often moving – subjects with which to spend an hour. BL

The Half

Pleasance Courtyard, 2pm, until 26 August

If you thought the feud between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis was toxic, former comedy double-act Anderson and West make them look like Thelma and Louise. Played superbly by Anna Crilly and Margaret Cabourn-Smith, The Half opens with the pair in a dressing room about to perform a sketch for a charity benefit based on Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? West (Anna Crilly), just back from Los Angeles where she has a successful TV career, taunts Anderson (Margaret Cabourn-Smith), who is washed up, living in a bedsit and poignantly claims that “the best work these days is audio. Podcasting. I’m … casting pods.” Yet this knockabout savagery conceals something more complex, relayed over a series of flashbacks. Written by comedian Danielle Ward, The Half is brutally funny but its portrait of female friendships, and the way a male-dominated world conspires against them, means that it’s also makes it intelligent and moving. AN

Circa: Wolfgang

Underbelly’s Circus Hub on the Meadows, 2pm, until 25 August

No one doubts Mozart was a genius, but it’s only now – having seen Aussie circus group Circa’s latest – that I fully appreciate his acrobatic skills. Their lovely three-hander imagines the composer spirited back to life as sole guest at a lonely girl’s birthday party. In frock-coat and wig, which can’t make it any easier, Paul O’Keeffe balances atop a tower of chairs, does surprising things on a bicycle, and has a slapstick fight with a music stand. It falls to his host (real-life wife Kathryn O’Keeffe) to flip Wolfgang round like a rag-doll, and conduct the imaginary orchestra when her guest proves too butterfingered with a baton. It’s manic and magical in well-judged proportions, and (courtesy of accordionist Gareth Chin) the music – obviously – is a delight. BL

Trying something different … Ahir Shah at Cabaret Voltaire. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Ahir Shah: Duffer

Laughing Horse @ Cabaret Voltaire, 2.15pm, until 26 August

Ahir Shah made his name with polemical standup about the disintegrating state of the world. Now he tries something different. This year’s set is about his grandmother, who was deported from the UK when he was five, and whom he met for the first time in 22 years on a recent trip to Gujarat. Shah uses his gran’s enforced exile from Britain to make strident points about immigration policy. But mainly this is a personal show, about his ethnicity, his struggles with depression and the tug on this atheist millennial of his ancestral religion. BL
Read the full three-star review

Harry and Chris Save the World

Mash House, 2.25pm, until 25 August

Joke that you’re “the nation’s favourite comedy rap-jazz duo” and you’re bound to recall “New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk parody act” – as if it weren’t hard enough already for musical comedy duos to escape Flight of the Conchords’ shadow. But Harry Baker and Chris Read have made waves over the last year (Radio 2 appearances; guest slots on Russell Howard’s show on Sky) with their brand of peppy comic song. Provided you put Conchords comparisons to the back of your mind, their latest fringe offering makes for a pleasantly diverting hour. BL
Read the full three-star review

Potent and emotionally intelligent … Jessie Cave. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Jessie Cave: Sunrise

The Stand, 2.25pm, until 26 August

There’s intimate standup comedy, and then there’s Jessie Cave’s shows: tracing the ebb and worrisome flow of her sex life, her self-esteem – and her feelings for her randy ex-lover and the father of her kids, fellow comic Alfie Brown. Three years after the remarkable I Loved Her, which chronicled the couple’s Catastrophe-style hook-up, Cave is back to prove it was no one-off. Sunrise is just as potent, a grownup and emotionally intelligent hour of heart-on-sleeve comedy. BL
Read the full four-star review

Drip Feed

Assembly George Square theatre, 2.30pm, until 26 August

Performing her own script under Oonagh Murphy’s steady direction, Karen Cogan is a compelling storyteller, her voice mellifluous and even, her manner warm and witty. Told with a different slant, this could have been the tale of a malevolent stalker; instead, she makes it an empathetic story of a directionless woman whose denial about a breakup leads to behaviour that seems less psychopathic than sad and fruitless. MF
Read the full three-star review

The Providence of Neighbouring Bodies

Underbelly Cowgate, 2.30pm, until 26 August

Dora and Ronnie live side by side in Rhode Island, but they aren’t friends. Today, Dora intends to change that. Ronnie thinks the glass is half empty; Dora is likely to delude herself it’s overflowing with wine. The two actors make the most of Jean Ann Douglass’s sharp writing, which pulls absurdity from the mundane. Their interlocking monologues are hilarious, and their opposite approaches to life have us immediately invested. Douglass’s writing revels in its oddities, and some of her lines are pure poetry. This is a strange reflection on female friendships, loneliness, rejection and the need to find yourself. BM
Read the full four-star review

Love Songs

Underbelly Cowgate, 2.40pm, until 26 August

Alissa Anne Jeun Yi’s flyers call her Edinburgh fringe debut a “one-woman spoken-word and rap show” but Love Songs, tucked into the corner of Underbelly at Cowgate, comes across more like standup comedy. For most of the show, Jeun Yi bounces with endearing energy from anecdote to anecdote, all loosely connected to the theme of love. BM
Read the full three-star review

It’s True, It’s True, It’s True

Underbelly, 2.50pm, until 26 August

By rights, a verbatim report of a 17th-century court case should be no more compelling than one that happened last week. Yet the reverse is true in Breach Theatre’s tremendous three-hander evoking the 1612 trial of Agostino Tassi, who was accused of rape by Artemisia Gentileschi, a gifted baroque painter, who was 15 at the time of the alleged attack. MF
Read the full four-star review

Tremendous … It’s True, It’s True, It’s True. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Sitting

Gilded Balloon Teviot, 3.15pm, until 26 August

The trick to writing a monologue is finding a reason for a character to speak. If they are alone, what motivates them to address us? Katherine Parkinson has a novel solution. Making her playwriting debut, the IT Crowd and Humans actor takes us into an artist’s studio where three models of different generations are posing. Sharing the stage, they speak out of embarrassment. Their words spill forth to fill the void. MF
Read the full three-star review

Songlines

Pleasance Courtyard, 3pm, until 26 August

Songlines can be lifelines and one scene of Tallulah Brown’s gig-theatre show reflects on how music mirrors our mood. Teenager Stevie – whose mum was a Fleetwood Mac fan – explains how when she was growing up they’d play music together, but as the family splintered each listened to tracks alone in their rooms before Stevie’s soundtrack became silence. Brown’s play is ostensibly a two-hander, charting the relationship between Stevie (Fanta Barrie) and Stan (Joe Hurst), the gawky and bullied boy she meets when she moves to the country. But another duo are ever-present, watching them on stage: Brown herself and Seraphina D’Arby who perform as folk group Trills, with gold leaves wrapped around their mic stands. Their sweetly melancholic songs fill the room with feeling and enrich a familiar yet still affecting story of adolescence and the search for privacy in the wide open countryside. CW

Trojan Horse

Summerhouse, 3.15pm, until 26 August

This straight-talking, clear-headed and elegantly presented piece of documentary theatre revisits the much reported – and much inflated – news story from the spring of 2014. Drawing on 200 hours of interviews, Helen Monks and Matt Woodhead make the case that a government fearful that terrorism was being nurtured on its watch, egged on by a rightwing press too ready to believe it, encouraged the over-hasty acceptance of an anonymous document alleging an Islamist conspiracy to game the system. Their anger is all the more affecting because of its restraint. MF
Read the full four-star review

F**k You Pay Me

Assembly Rooms, 3.25pm, until 26 August

“I’d found my tribe – sluts who love money.” Bea is recounting her first experience working in a strip club in a show that vividly evokes that world. Written and performed by Joana Nastari, herself a stripper (and a routine to Cardi B’s I Like It surely leave her skills in that department in no doubt), Fuck You Pay Me plunges its audience into the life of a sex worker, from hangover to pole to early morning moment of transcendence. Whether or not you buy its message that strippers are empowered witch-goddesses of the night, the camaraderie between sex workers is tenderly drawn, and Nastari’s voice is compelling – even when vying for attention with her light-up stilettos. AN

Ken Cheng: Best Dad Ever

Bedlam theatre, 3.30pm, until 26 August

Best Dad Ever is no battery of one-liners, it’s another of those almost-formulaic autobiographical shows in which real-world pain is wrung for on-stage catharsis. But if the conclusion errs towards neatness and sentimentality, what goes before is never less than compelling, as the ex-maths student wheels out nerdy Excel gags, wrestles with the show’s levels of “Chinese-ish-ness” and reads from his childhood fantasy saga Lambs v Teddies. Cheng is very measured, but beneath the well-turned gags about “avant-garde racism” and chlamydia, a remarkable story unfolds of family secrets and lies. BL

Taking matters into her own hands … Fran Bushe, performing Ad Libido at Pleasance Courtyard. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Ad Libido

Pleasance Courtyard, 3.30pm, until 27 August

Armed with glitter, songs and a diagram of her vulva, Fran Bushe is on a mission to kickstart her own libido and change how we think and talk about female pleasure. After trying to enjoy sex for 15 years and facing unhelpful advice from GPs, she is taking matters into her own hands. Though, of course, it’s not that simple. She wants a quick fix, a happy ending. Much of her solo show is about how life and sex don’t work that way – and all of this is surprisingly funny. We might finally be having more sophisticated conversations about consent, but Ad Libido makes it clear that we need to go further. CL
Read the full four-star review

Misha Glenny: McMafia

Assembly Checkpoint, 3.30pm, until 26 August

Arriving in Edinburgh for the final week of the fringe, and dressed down in grey T-shirt as he circles the stage, Misha Glenny is like a left-leaning travel agent giving us a Cook’s tour of international hotspots. Sun-seekers will be disappointed to find only drug barons, trafficked women and computer hackers in his choice of destinations. MF
Read the full four-star review

Off-Kilter

Dance Base, 3.30pm, until 26 August

You know the feeling. The alarm clock goes off and for a few seconds it’s all a blur before you slip into the familiarity of the weekday routine. This solo piece written and performed by Ramesh Meyyappan stretches that fleeting feeling of discombobulation across 45 minutes to ask what happens when you lose the sense of order we impose on our daily lives. Meyyappan’s wordless show, directed by Andy Arnold, is wise and darkly witty about mental health. Nothing is played just for laughs: a sense of anxiety underlines each gag and sleight-of-hand trick. CW
Read the full four-star review

Heteronormative? … George Mann and Nir Paldi in No Kids. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

No Kids

Pleasance Courtyard, 3.40pm, until 27 August

To procreate or not to procreate? That’s the question around which Theatre Ad Infinitum’s new show anxiously circles. For George Mann and Nir Paldi’s decision as a gay couple has an added layer of worry and uncertainty. Can they cope with the prejudice two dads still face? Are they just buying into heteronormative aspirations? The show peels back its makers’ desires and motivations, while dissecting its own process. This two-hander has all the messiness of people negotiating their relationship. Paldi interjects. Mann demands more emotional intensity. They both keep pausing, asking whether this is working. CL
Read the full three-star review

Sara Barron: For Worse

Just the Tonic at the Tron, 3.40pm, until 26 August

“The reigning queen of New York’s live storytelling scene,” trumpets Jon Ronson from Sara Barron’s publicity. Odd then that For Worse isn’t a storytelling show, but no-frills standup addressing sex, marriage and new motherhood. It’s good too, although given the raucous subject matter and bar-room environment, it might fly higher in an evening slot. Barron misses few opportunities to flout propriety, waxing ambivalent about parenting, heaping scorn on other couples’ sweet nothings, and going dewy-eyed at the memory of her “two dicks in a day!” sexual peak. The brand of brazenness on show feels quite familiar, but this UK-based American carries it off with verve. BL

Lost Voice Guy: Inspiration Porn

Gilded Balloon Teviot, 4pm, until 26 August

The Britain’s Got Talent star Lee Ridley’s new show, Inspiration Porn, is more political and vulnerable than anything you’d expect to see on the same TV programme as Simon Cowell. It is a distinctive mix of barbed disability comedy and self-mocking humour, in which Ridley caustically mocks the inspirational rhetoric that surrounds high-achieving disabled people, contrasting “yes we can” Paralympic mottos with the realities of his own life: lazy, lonely, he tells us, and “shit at everything”. The entwining of private and political is adroitly done, and Ridley’s call-to-arms to fight, not for heroic individual success a la Britain’s Got Talent, but for social justice is – irony of ironies – inspiring. BL
Read the full three-star review

Self-mocking … Lee Ridley AKA Lost Voice Guy at the Gilded Balloon. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Enter the Dragons

Pleasance Dome, 4.10pm, until 27 August

An award-winner at the Brighton fringe, this amusingly ramshackle two-hander recasts female ageing as a mythological quest. Armed with an invisibility cloak (a beige M&S cardie) and tongue sharpener, off set Emma Edwards and Abigail Dooley across the sea of apology and the bridge of tears, on a mission to slay ageing itself. Directed by Spymonkey’s Toby Park, Edwards and Dooley have gleefully improper fun mocking the expectations of fiftysomething femaledom, as clownish prop-comedy splices with confessional moments about growing old. It’s so DIY as to teeter, like the middle-aged body, forever on the edge of collapse, and the pace sometimes lags. But its up-yours spirit is as infectious as the don’t-take-yourself- too-seriously message it so cheerfully exemplifies. BL

Catherine Bohart: Immaculate

Pleasance Courtyard, 4.15pm, until 26 August

“I’m the bisexual daughter of a Catholic deacon. And I’ve got OCD.” So Catherine Bohart introduces – and sums up – her textbook fringe debut, Immaculate. The brand of OCD from which Bohart suffers is called perfectionism, which you might have guessed from the scrupulously accomplished nature of her show. Never less than meticulously, she wins our trust, sets up her character and themes, spins the plates awhile before closing in on a heart-warming finale (with obligatory comic sting). It’s a mite schematic. But Bohart is great company, milking her obsessive compulsions for featherlight laughs, and the tale she tells – of her parents’ courtship in repressive 20th-century Ireland; of daughter and dad learning to love one another’s queerness and Catholicism – is elegantly told. BL

Stardust

Pleasance Dome, 4.20pm, until 27 August

One-person shows that have both a human and a political edge are a tricky tightrope to walk, and few stories are as steeped in the politics of humanity as that of cocaine and its effect on the lives of Colombian people. Performer Miguel Hernando Torres Umba tells us about its popularity over the last two centuries, the coca leaf’s original healing properties, personal stories of lives affected by cartels, and the process by which cocaine has become the west’s most widely used illegal drug. This sounds like a lot, and it is, but he does it with aplomb. BM
Read the full four-star review

William Andrews: Willy

Pleasance Courtyard, 4.45pm, until 26 August

It’s nine years since Andrews brought his comedy to the fringe, and in the opening stages of his new show, you wonder whether returning was such a good idea. It’s all strenuous wackiness as Andrews paces the small stage with a bread bag on his head, looking a bit desperate, explaining his phobia of poo. “Is it worth sharing?”, runs his catchphrase: “Probably not.” But it gets more so, as Andrews settles into stories of alienating conversations with other parents, and a set piece about the cultural reach of Robbie Williams’ Angels. The deal is sealed by a post-script seeking to express the barely expressible reasons for Andrews’ return to comedy via the medium of the ITV show Police Camera Action! BL

Bon 4 Bon

Dance Base, 5pm, until 26 August

One childhood memory recurs in this vivid, bracingly personal show performed by the four brothers who run Taiwan’s Chang Dance Theatre. When their father took mangos from the fridge to prepare them, they would race to the kitchen in excitement. Bon 4 Bon manages to create its own heady rush as the quartet explore their family’s dynamics in a work that is as sweet as their favourite fruit. It’s a short piece, but it captures how siblings tumble through hot, humid days of summer. CW
Read the full four-star review

A revelation … Freeman. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/Guardian

Freeman

Pleasance Courtyard, 5pm, until 27 August

Freeman is a revelation, a piece of stunning physical theatre that deftly looks at deaths in police custody, institutional racism and mental health. Focusing on six real-life people, the cast leap and tumble their way through each of their often painful stories. Projected images and music are subtle but strong, complemented by sounds made by the performers’ bodies. Claps, punches and slaps all begin to sound sickening, and the horror of being tasered or treated with electroshock therapy is not shied away from. Freeman is not a play with easy answers, or interested in blame. BM
Read the full five-star review

Garrett Millerick

Just the Tonic at the Tron, 5pm, until 26 August

Millerick booked his fringe slot promising audiences “just some jokes” and no learning. Then he experienced an ordeal in his private life, which now dominates the second half of his show. And so Sunflower becomes another trauma-as-comedy set for Edinburgh, which Millerick is unnecessarily self-conscious about. He does a decent job tethering the new material to the old, though, as hospital trips and dashed dreams jostle for stage space with a crack routine about Chesney Hawkes and reflections on recent Twitter-storms swirling round his old school. In its later stages, Sunflower errs close to piety as Millerick hymns his relationship with his wife. But in the main, this is a big-hitting standup set in which the comedy of “nitpicking misery” (Millerick’s words) is interrupted by misery – then a sort of redemption – of a more substantial variety. BL

Hunch

Assembly Roxy, 5.05pm, until 27 August

At first sight it’s just your average bright-red halterneck jumpsuit, but the shiny H on the waist gives her away. Writer-performer Kate Kennedy plays superhero Hunch, whose gift for gut intuition gets her recruited to join the ranks of those protecting the metropolis of Hum (she takes the office next to the loo in the super-HQ). Directed by Sara Joyce, DugOut Theatre’s dynamic solo show has plenty of kapow, thanks to some stylised movement and scene transitions that mirror the action-packed panels of a comic book. Kennedy raises a range of questions about how we make decisions and who we trust. The storyline doesn’t have enough emotional punch, but Kennedy proves she could become a super-powered performer nonetheless. CW

Timpson: The Musical

C Venues, 5.10pm, until 27 August

A musical comedy imagining the founding of the shoe repair chain, with a nod to Romeo and Juliet, Timpson: the Musical is unashamedly wacky, but is delivered with verve – and some of the songs aren’t bad at all. Dressed in black leotards, co-creators Sam Cochrane and Chris Baker preside over a talented cast and three-piece band, in an hour taking in the invention of the lock and key, sexually repressed fishermen and fraught relations between the Montashoes and the Keypulets. It’s performed to the palpable delight of an all-ages audience. If you want a break from the deep-level analyses of toxic masculinity, along with some old-school fringe laughs, this is where to get it. AN

The Political History of Smack and Crack

Roundabout @ Summerhall, 5.30pm, until 26 August

An empathetic portrait of two long-term addicts locked in an almost unbreakable cycle of dependency and recovery. With humour and honesty, Eve Steele and Neil Bell give an unsentimental account of a pattern of behaviour from which death is often the only release. Juxtaposed with this impossible love story is an analysis of how the situation came to be and the political insight is shrewd, blaming the rise in heroin use on a toxic combination of British appeasement of the regimes in Nicaragua and Afghanistan and a Brave New World-style attempt to quieten an angry working class. MF
Read the full four-star review

Mind tricks … Malaprop Theatre’s Everything Not Saved. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Everything Not Saved

Summerhall, 5.50pm, until 26 August

Dublin-based Malaprop Theatre play mind tricks on us. In three discrete scenes, John Doran, Breffni Holahan and Maeve O’Mahony interrogate ideas about faking history, questioning absolute certainty and curating cultural memory. In each, they pick at a nugget of a conversation – their own or one remembered – smoothing the bumps of memory and creating a thin new film of fiction over fact. A stage manager bustles around the set, manipulating the story, and Malaprop’s deeply layered meta-theatricality dances a step ahead of the audience, teasing and probing. KW
Read the full four-star review

EVENING SHOWS

dressed.

Underbelly, 6pm, until 26 August

Several years after being stripped at gunpoint, Lydia and her three best friends have made a show about it. Lydia won’t let us pity her, exploring the complex mechanism of how trauma breeds selfishness – just as an autobiographical show does, she points out – and how an assault hurts those around you, too. They take turns performing set-pieces, their moves and words becoming more vicious, challenging what a woman is allowed to be. Josie Dale-Jones’ standup slices at the audience: “Men, we couldn’t have made this show without you.” They clamber over each other, carrying each other. The execution is messy at times, but so is trauma. A visceral, painful performance. KW

Glenn Moore

Just the Tonic @ the Tron, Edinburgh, 6.20pm, until 26 August

Moore’s set – nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award – is the best showcase of joke-writing on the fringe. The jokes keep coming at you, and back at you, which purports to relate why Moore has applied to go on the first civilian mission to Mars. It’s richer than a battery of one-liners would be because Moore has threaded them into a story; and because he pretends the story is true. That’s a way of celebrating the ludicrousness of Moore’s shtick, as he introduces his flatmate, a surgeon who operates after all-night drinking sprees, and his inamorata, with whom he has sex so wild that “afterwards, we exchanged insurance details”. It’s blissfully silly – and you could assemble a killer top 10 jokes of the fringe from these 60 minutes alone. BL
Read the full four-star review

Rose Matafeo: Horndog

Pleasance Courtyard, 6.20pm, until 26 August

Last year, Rose Matafeo cast herself as the perfect Sassy Best Friend. Now she explains why she’s never been quite right for romantic lead. Horndog is a history of the Kiwi comic’s brushes with love and sex – and, having kissed nine people in her life (she’s 26), that easily fits into a fringe hour. And what an hour it is: another storming set from a woman whose neuroses, intelligence and flamboyant sense of her own ridiculousness make her a near-perfect comedian. BL
Read the full four-star review

Storming set … Rose Matafeo at the Pleasance Courtyard. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Drip

Roundabout @ Summerhall, 6.55pm, until 26 August

Goggles on and guitar in hand, Liam (Andrew Finnigan) tells us not to expect too much. His best friend, Caz, has planned a synchronised swimming routine for their school project, but Liam doesn’t know how to swim. In this heartwarming one-man musical comedy, he recounts his spluttering journey towards being able to doggy paddle in the year 11 assembly. With the audience crinkling in waterproof ponchos, Drip illuminates the value in trying, even when the result is underwhelming. Developed with young people in Hull, the play (by Tom Wells) speaks to the kids who don’t get invited to the cool parties, the ones for whom seeing gay characters without a bully in tow is a rarity. In its understated awkwardness, Drip finds moments to glow. KW
Read the full three-star review

Sheeps: Live and Loud Selfie Sex Harry Potter

Pleasance Dome, 7pm, until 27 August

This gloriously silly show about growing up and growing apart, finely stitched into a series of unpredictable, beautifully performed sketches, leaves you light-headed with enjoyment. If you have seen Sheeps’ earlier work, or are familiar with Liam Williams’ dour persona elsewhere, the razzle-dazzle song-and-dance opener is intensely funny. Their sketches pull in all sorts of directions, from surrealist to clever-clever to a brand of political (one sketch is about Syria) that’s seething, sarcastic and ridiculous at the same time. BL
Read the full five-star review

Mistero Buffo

Underbelly Cowgate, 7.20pm, until 26 August

In the damp, dim space of Underbelly’s Big Belly, the stage seems to teem with people. Julian Spooner, alone in the gloom, embodies a restless crowd, moving fluidly from one person to the next. He is a shapeshifter – a ruthless soldier one moment, a cowering mother the next. In this updated take on Dario Fo’s famous performance piece, Spooner tackles a huge cast of characters, from rowdy drunks to Christ on the cross. Each is distinct with an astonishing sharpness and clarity. CL
Read the full four-star review

Dylan Moran: Dr Cosmos

Gilded Balloon Rose theatre, 7.30pm, 22-26 August

Dr Cosmos is top-drawer standup from this past master of the art form. There’s no theme, save Moran’s bold promise to offer “all the answers” to the problem of life. He ranges across politics, religion, dinner parties and – he’s not always au courant – Findus crispy pancakes. It’s “not even jazz”, he says of the show’s modus operandi. “Jazz is too organised. It’s just -zz.” Certainly, the show derives some of its charge from its free-form nature. The impression, rightly or wrongly, is of a man plucking jokes and extemporised riffs from a head teeming with comedy. Few fringe shows come as well stuffed with sparkling material. BL
Read the full four-star review

Pleasingly theatrical … Nick Mohammed in Mr Swallow and the Vanishing Elephant. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Mr Swallow and the Vanishing Elephant

Pleasance Courtyard, 7.30pm, until 26 August

Nick Mohammed’s comedy, magic and musical mashups have been among the highlights of recent Edinburgh fringes. His new show, The Vanishing Elephant, where he is again in character as excitable northern busybody Mr Swallow, doesn’t quite measure up. It’s more of a conventional magic show, without the preposterous narrative of its predecessors. But if the show is not quite one thing or another, nor up to the dazzling standards Mohammed has set, it’s still entertaining and pleasingly theatrical. BL
Read the full three-star review

Status

Summerhall, 7.55pm, until 26 August

Chris Thorpe says his one-man show is not about Brexit. That’s a moot point. He’s right in the sense that it’s not about leavers and remainers, adverts on buses or dodgy data harvesting. But he’s wrong – and, of course, he knows he’s wrong – in the sense that Status is a play about the questions of nationhood that the divisive referendum and the impending split from Europe throw up. With characteristic punchy delivery, Thorpe describes an impulsive journey of escape from the UK on a quest to find the sense of identity that has been stripped from him. MF
Read the full four-star review

Steen Raskopoulos: Stay

Underbelly Cowgate, 8pm, until 26 August

No one who’s seen the Aussie act Steen Raskopoulos would associate him with trauma-as-comedy. While Richard Gadd and Hannah Gadsby won awards for their soul-bearing shows about sexual violence, Raskopoulos just kept on supplying blithe character-comedy about mournful horses, bank robberies and interpretive dance. But his latest show, Stay, pulls back the curtain on what we thought we were getting from Raskopoulos: not multi-role solo comedy but ceaseless voices in an unhappy man’s head; not (as per his signature sketch) faux-sentimental scenes about abandoned kids, but cries for help. BL
Read the full three-star review

The Pin: Backstage

Pleasance Courtyard, 8pm, until 27 August

As much comic play as sketch show, even while duo Alex Owen and Ben Ashenden slot in some terrific free-standing skits. They are operating at such a high level of inventiveness, they can afford to toy with the audience’s expectations of a punchline. We are forever tantalised at the prospect of the next volte-face – it’s like watching a magic show. One of the most dazzling comedy shows in Edinburgh and a complete hoot. BL
Read the full four-star review

Midsummer

The Hub, 8pm, until 26 August

When Midsummer debuted at the Edinburgh fringe a decade ago, it was a quiet affair. Two actors on a stage with guitars, slowly falling in love. Today, David Greig’s explosive revival pairs young Bob and Helena (Sarah Higgins and Henry Pettigrew) with older versions of themselves (Benny Young and Eileen Nicholas) to create a joyful story of love, uncertainty and stupid decisions. A glorious tale of making the most of it. KW
Read the full five-star review

A song of love and letting go … User Not Found. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/Guardian

User Not Found

Traverse at Jeelie Piece cafe, 8pm, until 26 August

Tucked in a cafe off the edge of the Meadows in Edinburgh, a roomful of strangers stare down at their phones. Perched at a corner table, Terry (Terry O’Donovan) gets a text, and our phones vibrate. Terry’s ex-boyfriend Luka has passed away. His screen is shared with ours, and we see the flood of condolence texts, calls and emails pile up from people he hasn’t spoken to in years. Having been named Luka’s online legacy executor with the new app Fidelis, Terry has to choose whether to keep or delete. Exploring intimacy and loneliness, User Not Found is a beautiful song of love and letting go. With a smart actor and live technology, User Not Found makes use of a newly intimate form of storytelling. KW
Read the full four-star review

Garry Starr Performs Everything

Underbelly Cowgate, 8.10pm, until 26 August

“Theatre is dying. Garry is our only hope,” we’re told. Damien Warren-Smith plays Garry Starr: gangly of limb, quivering with sincerity, and frequently stripped down to nothing but a ruff. He’s here to rescue forsaken theatre by demonstrating every one of its genres in 60 minutes. You can almost hear theatre’s heart come pounding back to life – but defibrillation has seldom been this uproarious. BL
Read the full four-star review

The playground is a battlefield … Square Go. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/Guardian

Square Go

Roundabout @ Summerhall, 8.20pm, until 26 August

The playground is a battlefield. Max and his best mate, Stevie, know that more than most. They’re the boys ducking punches and running from bullies, the boys who try to talk tough but feel scared. And for the hour we spend with them in Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair’s new play, they’re the boys hiding out in the school loos, waiting for Max’s imminent fight – his square go – with resident tough guy Danny. CL
Read the full four-star review

Rosie Jones

Pleasance Courtyard, 8.30pm, until 26 August

Her show is called Fifteen Minutes, jokes Rosie Jones, because that’s all she has written – “but with this voice, it’ll take an hour.” Jones has cerebral palsy, which affects her speech. Her show is in some ways a double act, with the recorded voiceovers of able-bodied Rosie, the alter ego she spends her life imagining. But there’s no doubt who comes off best here: the real-world Jones delivers a barnstorming debut set that subverts expectations and propriety. From the twisty-logic joke about the word spastic (proving “you’re more spastic than I am!”) to the show-stopping Ryan Gosling lesbian fantasy, she fashions her disability and sexuality (“I can’t tick two boxes! It takes me that long to tick one …”) into endearing comedy. BL

Emma Sidi: Faces of Grace

Pleasance Courtyard, 8.30pm, until 26 August

As a demo of comic and performing talent, you can’t fault Emma Sidi’s Faces of Grace. Whether it stacks up to more than the sum of its parts – these portfolio character-comedy shows often don’t – is moot. We meet five characters, from “kinetic-somatic movement practitioner” Cathy via a vacuous young American easily enthused by the banal (“Oh my God, how good is Pizza Express?!”) to a Love Island wannabe snogging Billie Piper at a bus stop. The show crunches realism and absurdism, and its significance remains largely elusive; the ostensible theme (all the characters are seeking a state of grace) feels tenuous. But Sidi’s transformations are pretty extraordinary – an ageing Hollywood grande dame comes to life with little more than a Blanche Dubois accent and two downturned corners of the mouth – and the writing and performing are pleasingly spry. BL

The riskiest comic in the biz … Jordan Brookes. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Jordan Brookes: Bleed

Pleasance Courtyard, 8.30pm, until 26 August

“I’m the riskiest comic in the biz,” Jordan Brookes boasts in his new show, Bleed. Then he tells us again, and again, until the phrase collapses into gibberish, and his self-esteem collapses, too. Last year’s gripping show Body of Work, nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award, had many hailing Brookes in just those terms. But on the evidence of this follow-up, which is even better, success won’t go to his head. There can’t be much room in there, after all, what with self-loathing, images of violence, playful impulses and limitless ideas for how to subvert a comedy show all jostling for attention. BL
Read the full four-star review

Famous Puppet Death Scenes

CanadaHub @ King’s Hall, 8.30pm, until 26 August

Time to bow our heads and contemplate the passing of inanimate objects. Let us remember the one-eyed space creatures consumed by monsters on German TV, the plastic farm animals strewn to the ground by careless children and the hot-headed balloon man who breathed in too deeply. These and many other death scenes are taken from the “greatest puppet shows in history” by Canada’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop with a style that goes from Looney Toons to Edward Gorey and all points in between. It’s as funny as it is inventive – perfect festival fodder – and all the richer for the darkness and poignancy that grows out of the laughter. MF

Mat Ewins

Just the Tonic at the Mash House, 8.50pm, until 26 August

Last year, Mat Ewins unleashed his fiendish programming and editing skills – and all-conquering sense of fun – on a spoof Indiana Jones epic. Now he ventures deeper into hi-tech tricksiness – but also reveals more of himself. It’s ceaselessly inventive and daft. How else to describe his videos of football matches with the ball removed, or his all-new Martian sport that involves catching cats with a magnetic moustache. The videos have a sumptuous retro-futurist aesthetic, splicing Blade Runner and the swinging 60s then straining them through a Super 8 filter. These techie skits and pranks may take many a lonely, nerdy hour to manufacture, but – for Ewins’ audience at least – it’s well worth it. BL
Read the full four-star review

Felicity Ward: Busting a Nut

Pleasance Courtyard, 9pm, until 26 August

Aussie comedian Felicity Ward has addressed everything from her mental health to irritable bowel syndrome in smart, swaggering standup. Her show this year is a 60-minute club set. To begin, our host is newly married and living with her husband’s parents. Mother-in-law is a “feeder”, she says, and a hoarder of toilet rolls. The wedding is recalled, with a pedicure set piece (big-hitting if cut from familiar comic cloth) and a routine about Ward’s quest for a “vintage” frock. Then there’s a “performance art” moment about a fart noise. It’s a sign of confidence that Ward – a high-energy, endearing standup – tries it, and her confidence is justified. BL
Read the full three-star review

High-energy … Felicity Ward. Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

Luisa Omielan: Politics for Bitches

Gilded Balloon Teviot, 9.15pm, until 26 August

There’s lots to admire about Luisa Omielan’s self-made comedy career, which is unlike anyone else’s. The same can be said for Politics for Bitches, a politics-for-dummies seminar that morphs into a cri de coeur about her mum’s recent death from cancer. That event, which she blames on poor service from the NHS, politicised the hitherto ignorant Omielan. Now she’s here to spread the gospel of political agency, via audience Q&A and whiteboard workshops on parliamentary representation and public spending. Some of her facts are dubious (“In recent history, we’ve had 440 world leaders…”) and the second half of the show, while gripping, is barely comedy. But it can only be valuable that Omielan is raising these subjects with an audience who may well be as disengaged as she was. And the rallying call that pulls the show together (“She mattered. You matter”) is undeniably powerful. BL

Kate Berlant: Communikate

Assembly George Square Studios, 9.15pm, until 26 August

A pin-sharp satire on self-love and self-care, millennial-style. We meet a woman whose self-regard needs its own exclusion zone, who assumes we must be fascinated by her every utterance. She isn’t here to perform comedy – perish the vulgar thought! – but to commentate, moment by moment, on the connection she’s making with her crowd. “I’m interested in the different tonalities of your laughter,” she blathers – and she nails the precious little vainglory of this brittle, self-delighted persona. BL
Read the full four-star review

Myq Kaplan

Underbelly, Bristo Square, 9.15pm, until 26 August

New Jersey comic Myq Kaplan comes to Edinburgh with a show that’s packed with material – maybe too packed. There are excellent jokes here, as cerebral wise-guy Kaplan tells of encounters with alpha Alabama males, tripping on ayahuasca and the likelihood of him (very much a beta male) murdering or being murdered. There’s a great line about Kanye West being able to rap but not talk, and a loopy gag about how to immunise yourself against the band Nickelback. After a while, the twittering delivery can make Kaplan’s material feel undifferentiated. Even when the jokes are deep (existentialism, religion – it’s all here), they can feel shallow, more surface pyrotechnics than profundity. But they keep coming, and they’re always worth listening to. BL

Jayde Adams: The Divine Ms Jayde

Pleasance Courtyard, 9.30pm, until 27 August

The audience are on their feet by the end, which feels less like spontaneous reaction than part of the show’s choreography. That’s not to detract from the potency of Adams’ third fringe outing, a musical comedy created and performed with the Jerry Springer: The Opera maestro Richard Thomas. It’s one of those shows – and Adams has one of those personae – designed with bums-from-seats vertical takeoff in mind. In comedic terms, it’s so-so. But Thomas’s music, Adams’ powerful voice and her spotlight-compelling personality still add up to emphatic entertainment. BL
Read the full three-star review

Confessions of a creep … Alfie Brown. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/Observer

Alfie Brown: Lunatic

Monkey Barrel, 9.30pm, until 26 August

Firebrand. Depressive. Sex addict. Philosopher. You never know which Alfie Brown you’re going to get, but they all crop up in his new show, which relates an incident he was involved in at a bus stop. It’s not much of a story; Brown is only ever an outsider, looking in. The show is stronger when it digresses, particularly towards the subject of his tyrannical libido, and his belief that modern audiences’ hunger for intimacy doesn’t extend to the intimacies Brown has to offer. This “amusing confessional stuff about what a creep I am” feels rawer, and funnier, than the bystander-to-a-tragedy material that precedes it. There’s some enjoyably bloodless being-a-dad material too, and a memorable gag too about veganism and fake meat. An easy target, but Brown punches a hole clean through its bullseye. BL

Rob Oldham: Worm’s Lament

Pleasance Courtyard, 9.30pm, until 27 August

Memories of Liam Williams’ debut five years ago are stirred by this rookie set from Rob Oldham. The younger comic occupies similar territory, somewhere between depression, wry humour and millennial existential angst. He contrasts his relatively privileged, meaningless life with that of his grandad. One fought a war, the other sits at home talking to his dog and failing to write a novel. In lieu of that magnum opus, we get “tonal prose poems” about being young in 2001, sardonic alternatives to Brexit, and potshots at listicle culture. Sometimes it’s a bit underpowered. One or two routines (a strong one about, er, guns and butt-plugs; a more generic bit on the bronze age) seem to belong in a different show. But Worm’s Lament remains a vivid snapshot of being young and half-alive in the 21st century, and whets the appetite to see what Oldham will do next. BL

Fearless plain-speaking … Fin Taylor. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Fin Taylor: When Harassy Met Sally

Pleasance Courtyard, 9.45pm, until 26 August

Those who shoot from the hip can easily shoot themselves in the foot, but Fin Taylor seems happy to take that risk. He is one of those provocateur comics whose fearless plain speaking can shade into shock-jockery. But he’s a lively watch and often worth listening to: in recent years on the subjects of race and leftwing tribalism, and now – hold on to your hats! – on post-#MeToo gender politics. He strikes a decent balance between having fun, teasing at bien pensant limits and trying to progress the conversation on gender. Amid the garish sex comedy and loud disdain for fashionable opinion, he is making a striking effort to embrace the complexity of modern sexual behaviour. BL
Read the full four-star review

Alice Snedden: Self-Titled

Pleasance Courtyard, 9.45pm, until 26 August

New Zealand standup Alice Snedden makes her fringe debut with Self-Titled, and its keynote is confidenc, the show’s subject and its defining characteristic. Nothing about Snedden’s cool and capable delivery says debutante, as she talks us through her home-birth photo album, her sexually overactive parents and her unprecedentedly low Uber rating. There’s a great gag about PMS, too. Through it all, she sends up her self-satisfaction with a lovely light touch, but never backs away from it, as her short set comes up to date with some sacrilegious reflections on #MeToo. There are a couple of weak routines, but one of them is redeemed, as Snedden hits us with a crowd-pleasing party-piece finale. BL

Steely wit … Ciarán Dowd. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Ciáran Dowd: Don Rodolfo

Pleasance Courtyard, 10.45pm, until 26 August

Imagine Zorro struggling with the Spanish accent and with a weakness for fondue, and you’ve a flavour – it should be a cheesy one – of Ciarán Dowd’s buzzy character-comedy show. Don Rodolfo Martini Toyota is a 17th-century swordsman on a mission to avenge his father’s death. His rival is near, but before he confronts him, he’s here to tell us his life story, offer seduction tips – watch out, though, or you’ll drown in his eyes – and send up as many narrative cliches as you can shake a rapier at. BL
Read the full four-star review

The Cabinet of Madame Fanny du Thé

Laughing Horse @ The Mockingbird, 11.30pm, until 26 August

Riddlestick’s raucous comedy folk musical is a gem of the free fringe. The audience choose the order of the night from Madame Fanny’s (Kate Stokes) cabinet of curiosities, each of the five fables riotously funny and artfully told. Through tales of pirates, milkmen and mad scientists, the ensemble create a vibrant world of adventure. Their energy is boundless, the script fiercely intelligent and the original live music bound to stay dancing through your head. Stuffed in a cramped attic on the edge of the festival, Madame Fanny is worth the trek. Riddlestick’s second show is a late-night riot. KW

Sam Campbell: The Trough

Monkey Barrel, 00:15, until 26 August

With The Trough, we’re in the realm of Harry Hill or Sam Simmons, where non sequitur follows prop gag follows wildly arbitrary behaviour, all in defiance of good sense. For me, this falls short of the best absurdism: there’s no subtext, nor implication that his “complete case of the wackadoos” is a displacement activity. That said, The Trough is a reliably amusing way to spend midnight hour on the fringe. From its opening video, using Kevin Spacey’s face to express Campbell’s dismay at observational comedy, it cocks a manic snook at convention. And the best punchlines are very good indeed. BL
Read the full three-star review

TIMES VARY

Angry Alan

Underbelly Cowgate, until 26 August

Donald Sage Mackay as Roger could be your next-door neighbour, charming, even-tempered and tolerant. After stumbling across the Angry Alan website, he goes through a process of radicalisation and falls for the myth of a gynocentric conspiracy that blames feminism for his reduced status in the world. But there’s something about Roger’s cool-headed reasoning that quickly pushes the play beyond easy satire. His rationale, however misguided, is honestly felt. The play shows how the force of a compelling narrative might throw any of us into a spiral of self-deception. MF
Read the full four-star review

A humanist … Mark Thomas. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Mark Thomas – Check Up: Our NHS at 70

Traverse, until 26 August

Thomas made his name as a leftwing agitator, needling pomposity, fighting injustice, righting wrongs. There’s no edge missing here, but his boyish enthusiasm is a reminder that he is foremost a humanist. He makes a smooth transition, in Nicholas Kent’s carefully paced production, from a celebration of the NHS in its 70th-birthday year to a critique of the complacency, underinvestment and creeping privatisation that is poised to bring it down. MF
Read the full four-star review

Meek

Traverse, until 26 August

Shvorne Marks plays Irene, a devout young woman detained after performing a song in a coffee bar. Getting to grips with what offence she has caused makes up the play’s narrative intrigue. In a bleak concrete prison, she is visited by Scarlett Brookes as her best friend Anna and Amanda Wright as secular lawyer Gudrun. In a sequence of short scenes and very short sentences, Skinner shows how a small act of resistance can turn an independent thinker into a political revolutionary. MF
Read the full three-star review

Potent … Natalie Palamides. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Natalie Palamides: Nate

Pleasance Courtyard, until 26 August

It is a potent cocktail: a goofy interactive comedy about a macho “douchebag”, with a confrontational sting in its tale. Nate starts superbly, as Palamides – disguised under a lumberjack coat, biker boots, shaggy moustache and marker-pen chest hair – motorbikes on stage to a cock-rock soundtrack. She is chugging cans, toting fake phalluses and flaunting her 2D masculinity. BL
Read the full four-star review

On the Exhale

Traverse, until 26 August

In the Alice-in-Wonderland logic of the National Rifle Association, “guns don’t kill people, people do”. Martín Zimmerman’s On the Exhale is an attempt to get under the skin of a debate that tells you more about America’s fraught relationship with its history and constitution than it does about reasoned argument. In this story about a bereaved mother, there is a mesmerising performance by Polly Frame. Still, matter-of-fact and measured, her delivery is gripping in its economy and hits home like a bullet. MF
Read the full four-star review

A dark tale leavened with humour … Kiri Pritchard-McLean: Victim, Complex. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/Guardian

Kiri Pritchard-McLean: Victim, Complex

Pleasance Courtyard, until 27 August

“I hate doing this show,” says Kiri Pritchard-McLean: an unconventional introduction to an hour of comedy. But Victim, Complex is an unconventional show, about “gaslighting” and psychologically abusive relationships. It relates Pritchard-McLean’s experiences in a relationship where loyalty and betrayal, paranoia and clarity became blurred – a dark tale she leavens with humour, as she takes counselling from a no-nonsense Scouse voice in her head. For much of the hour, she’s as concerned to empower her audience as make them laugh. But it remains an important show: as comical as (given the content) we have any right to expect, and surely valuable to anyone who’s been embroiled in this murky brand of relationship warfare. BL

The Greatest Play in the History of the World …

Traverse, until 26 August

Ian Kershaw’s science-fiction fantasy follows an apparently accidental romance that turns out to have been written in the stars. What makes it special, in Raz Shaw’s good-looking production, is the superb performance of Julie Hesmondhalgh as the unnamed narrator, meticulously colouring in the stories of neighbours, friends and love rivals whom she identifies by the footwear she finds in the shoeboxes of Naomi Kuyck Cohen’s set – and also by the shoes she borrows from a willing audience. MF
Read the full three-star review

Enlightening and heartfelt … Kieran Hodgson. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Kieran Hodgson: ’75

Pleasance Courtyard, until 26 August

Arguments about Europe, sovereignty, Britain’s place in the world – they’ve all happened before, says Kieran Hodgson. The 2016 referendum was just a cover version. In his new show, ’75, the two-time Edinburgh comedy award nominee traces the roots of our current Brexit malaise back to the 60s and 70s. Few comedy shows since Mike Yarwood’s heyday have leaned so heavily on impersonations of Barbara Castle, Roy Jenkins and Ted Heath. But if Hodgson’s latest is research-heavy – a quality he cheerfully sends up – it’s never fusty. He has created a set that’s enlightening, heartfelt and jam-packed with funny. BL
Read the full four-star review

Class

Traverse, until 26 August

“I thought I’d be called,” says Sarah Morris as Donna, as she stumbles apologetically into Mr McCafferty’s classroom. Despite being 29, when she wants to ask a question she instinctively raises her hand. Stephen Jones as her estranged husband, Brian, is scarcely more confident, though he has a bullish swagger to cover his insecurity. In Iseult Golden and David Horan’s fraught and quarrelsome three-hander, this primary school represents a schism. It is not just about the educated and the unread, but the haves and the have-nots. In a society organised to benefit the better off, the school is the site of class warfare. MF
Read the full four-star review

Heady black comedy … Lucianne McEvoy in Ulster American. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Ulster American

Traverse, until 26 August

David Ireland’s heady black comedy is a satire as timely as it is riotous. If Jacobean revenge tragedies were played as uproarious comedy, they’d look like this. It’s rare to hear an audience repeatedly gasp out loud at the wince-inducing action on stage. Like Jerry Sadowitz, Ireland can make you laugh and doubt the wisdom of your laughter at the same time. MF
Read the full five-star review

Sticks and Stones

Roundabout @ Summerhall, until 25 August

In this dystopian satire, to deviate from the politically correct rules is to initiate social and professional suicide. B (Katherine Pearce) makes a misjudged joke and trips into a world of cultural landmines and magnified consequences. B’s caricaturish colleagues live in a perpetual state of forced, grim wokeness, wearing anonymous suits and tight corporate grins. Under Stef O’Driscoll’s direction, virtue signalling becomes a tangible action: every time an actor says a particular word, their arms wave or knees dip like exaggerated air quotations. The absence of banned words makes the audience fill in the gaps, and allows for the debate to work for any social issue. Let’s start talking to each other, the play begs, before our words start slapping us across the face. KW
Read the full three-star review

Island Town

Roundabout @ Summerhall, until 26 August

Stuck … Jack Wilkinson, Katherine Pearce and Charlotte O’Leary in Island Town. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/ Guardian

The unnamed setting of Simon Longman’s play is a dead-end place, robbed of jobs and hope, where getting drunk is the only way to pass the time. Sam’s focused on survival, while Pete just wants to get laid. Only Kate plans to escape – if the town will let her. In the encircling space of Paines Plough’s Roundabout theatre, Stef O’Driscoll’s staging creates a clammy sense of imprisonment, making us feel the constraints of geography and circumstance. Kate, Sam and Pete are vivid personas from the moment we meet them, slugging cider and taking the piss out of each other. The laughs keep coming until suddenly, with a shock, they start to feel like kicks to the gut. CL
Read the full three-star review

Underground Railroad Game

Traverse, until 26 August

Ars Nova’s wayward, unsettling and troublingly funny two-hander is set in American high school. As soon as we see Jennifer Kidwell’s teacher Caroline, sharp, wise and quick-witted, we recognise her as a black American whose view of slavery can only be personally felt. Likewise, we know Scott R Sheppard’s teacher Stuart, gauche and ingratiating, is likely to have the liberal white man’s combination of guilt and embarrassment, laced, as it turns out, with unreconstructed racism. Pretty soon, the history project they set up looking at the American civil way has stirred up genuinely ugly racist sentiments. Someone uses the N-word. The teachers’ attempt to leave a painful history safely in the past falls by the wayside as the legacy of discrimination comes crashing into the present. MF
Read the full four-star review

Tantalising … Lizzie Muncey, Marie Lawrence, Jake Ferretti and Sam Newton in Nigel Slater’s Toast. Photograph: Sid Scott

Nigel Slater’s Toast

Traverse theatre, until 26 August

Henry Filloux-Bennett’s adaptation of the much-loved memoir tells the story of an often unhappy childhood, and the miseries are not skipped over. But it’s the joy – however fragile and quickly gobbled up – that stands out. Smoothly choreographed sequences that infuse fun and tenderness into Slater’s anecdotes. A gentle moment between mother and son becomes a countertop waltz. The delicious rivalry of a culinary battle plays out to the iconic bassline of Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer. And at the heart of it all, food. Smells of cooking waft tantalisingly from the stage and sweet treats are distributed to the audience, all bringing with them the unmistakable and bittersweet taste of childhood. CL
Read the full four-star review

Sit With Us for a Moment and Remember

Zoo Aviary, until 27 August

In her fringe show Eraserhead, standup Louise Reay finds comedy in the time she’s spent reflecting on park benches during a difficult year. This interactive encounter enables fringe-goers to find their own fleeting moment of stillness amid the relentless hum of the festival. Created by Michael Pinchbeck and performed by members of the Lincoln Company for an audience of one, it’s a brief encounter that’s both sweet and sorrowful in its reflection on how life is lived both alone and together. You’re left taking in the immediate moment – grass blowing in the wind, butterflies dancing, Arthur’s Seat in the distance – and considering the times that have gone and those to come. It costs a pound, lasts 10 minutes and may well stay with you for years. CW

Taking stock … Cora Bissett in What Girls Are Made Of. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

What Girls Are Made Of

Traverse, until 26 August

Cora Bissett was a teenager when her Glenrothes-based band Darlingheart secured one of the biggest record deals in Scottish music history. Potentially life-changing gigs clashed with school concerts, and free drinks on flights made them giddy, but innocence soon waned as she came up against the industry and had to deal with broken friendships and being sexualised by the media too young. Taking stock in this autobiographical story infused with humour and song, the former indie star uses gig-theatre in a way that could suit few performers better. KW
Read the full four-star review

Flight

Summerhall, every half hour from 1pm-9pm, until 26 August

Binaural headphones, which offer extremely realistic 3D sound, have opened up a new avenue in theatre-making. Complicite took us into the Amazon jungle with The Encounter. Now Darkfield are leading intrepid audiences somewhere even further out of their comfort zones. So what happens? You enter the venue (a shipping container) and suddenly you’re in the cabin of a plane. You load your bags in the overhead lockers, fasten your seatbelt and put on the headphones. Then everything goes dark – really dark. And there’s something untoward going on between the captain and the crew. Suffice it to say, this show puts the uneasy into EasyJet and is most definitely not recommended if you have a fear of flying. AN

John-Luke Roberts

Assembly George Square, until 27 August

This run-through of 24 hitherto unknown Spice Girls delivers big, out-of-nowhere gags. It is framed as a defence of nonsense. Our host – sporting shorts, a headband and a moustache died blue, in case we didn’t know where he was coming from – thinks stories are “a fantastic way of being lied to” and that absurdism better reflects the chaos of being alive. The Spice Girls, with their neat categories (Scary, Posh and so on), were just another failed system to make the world explicable. Better to let the madness in, as Roberts does by introducing us to Facts About the Romans Spice, Twenty-Seven Babies Spice and Lady Bracknell Crossed With a Theramin Spice – a funny premise, funnily realised. BL
Read the full four-star review

Lazy Susan: Forgive Me, Mother!

Assembly George Square, until 27 August

Rather than interrogate the climate of anxiety about male misbehaviour – or respond with disclosures of their own – in Forgive Me, Mother!, Celeste Dring and Freya Parker send the whole thing up. It is the most irreverent approach possible, and – as it collapses under Parker’s terror of the threat posed by male audience members – the show soars above anything the duo have previously done. This excellent show asks, tongue firmly in cheek: “Can’t two women do a sketch show on the fringe without a man trying to murder them?” It delivers a constantly funny 60-minute answer. BL
Read the full four-star review

The End of Eddy

The Studio, until 26 August

When Édouard Louis was growing up, there were four televisions in the house. As a gesture of kindness his mother would encourage her son to watch cartoons to calm his nerves before school. It’s a detail director Stewart Laing alights on for this groundbreaking adaptation of Louis’s book. Dominating the front of the stage are four monitors. Alex Austin and Kwaku Mills are with us in person, sharing the role of Eddy as if to universalise the experience of small-town homophobia, and they are also present in video form, taking on the roles of family members and classmates. In a school corridor, two bullies spit in the face of an on-screen Eddy. When he’s punched to the floor, the monitor drops and his head lies horizontal. This is grim stuff, but the actors win our trust with their vigour, empathy and theatrical inventiveness. MF
Read the full four-star review

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