Tom Read Wilson ★★★★
Gilded Balloon Museum
Tom Read Wilson has been playing his trade as an actor and singer for while but reality TV is where he has made his biggest impact – including as runner-up in the 2025 series of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!
A-Z of Me is, remarkably, his Edinburgh debut – or deflowerment, as he puts it – which he performed in a limited run in the Scottish capital.
He runs through the alphabet, starting with A for, well, alphabet, giving us its etymology. Read Wilson is clearly a man who loves words, and you will go home with one or extra to bank in your vocabulary – including a few rude ones (B and G will take your particular attention).
Read Wilson can be knowingly fey but saucy too, yet there’s nothing here to upset proverbial maiden aunts as he sings, dances, recites sonnets, tells stories (complete with accents) and talks about his life and career, each segment sparked by a different letter.
The overall tone is larky, but Read Wilson knows how to deliver light and shade; there are several moments that tug at the heartstrings, and others that produce a guffaw. It’s a light confection, but a delightful one.
Katie Norris ★★★★
Pleasance Courtyard
Katie Norris comes on stage to a creepy sound-effects introduction and a crow perched on her shoulder. Its purpose is to explain the show’s title, Mother Succubus, as a reviewer once used the word succubus to describe her, she tells us.
Then she rids herself of the crow and gets down to delivering another of her tight hours, a solid mix of gags, surreal punchlines and original songs. There’s also some very good crowd work, where she bounces off audience responses and genuinely seems to enjoy them.
Norris talks about the time she was cast as a Victorian prostitute in a school production – and one teacher in particular she remembers from that time, who was “a member of the not showering community”.
Along the way she mentions the travails of modern dating, military wives’ choirs, wild swimming, weekend dads – the last of which leads into a funny, but insightful song.
It’s slick and clever, and very entertaining.
Hannah Byczkowski ★★★
Gilded Balloon Teviot
This is Hannah Byczkowski’s Edinburgh debut, although Traitors fans will already know her as one of the winners of the first series in 2022.
Byczkowski is high energy and pronounces herself as "Fat, knackered, haggard and shattered." She talks a mile a minute and endlessly goads the front row into revealing way too much about themselves in response to her earthy comedy – and she utterly dominates the room.
Killer starts out by being a list of things the comic hates: she mocks the fashion for turning a loved one’s ashes into jewellery, those who wear T-shirts emblazoned with destinations they have never been to, and tattoos acquired when people were too young to know the consequences years down the road. After splitting up with someone, for instance…
Then she talks about the mad things her friends and family get up to – some of this didn’t totally chime with authenticity for me – while bits of the more bawdy material feel like a hangover from her club sets.
The former palliative care worker from Stoke also talks about death, but there’s nothing gloomy in this relentlessly positive show. If the pace dips towards the end, no matter, as Byczkowski has already given us a blast of comic energy.
