Edinburgh Fringe
Veronica Lee
Olga Koch comes bounding on to the stage and tells us she needs a time machine to tell her story, to prevent someone being born – at which point a reference to a certain happening in Nazareth 2026 years ago flashes up on the onstage screens. It’s the first of several neat gags – many of them throwaway – in which she provides the set-up, and the payoff follows on the screens.It’s a catchy addition to what is essentially a good old-fashioned piece of storytelling that’s fast-paced and whipsmart. In Fat Tom Cruise (directed by Jet Vevers) Koch dances along a timeline that skips between present Read more ...
David Kettle
Water Colour ★★★★Milly Sweeney’s powerful two-hander comes to one of the Fringe’s highest-profile venues bearing prestigious awards for new writing, and it’s not hard to see why it’s won them. Water Colour is a taut, focused, elegantly constructed creation that rather miraculously manages to be both poetic and bracingly vernacular, bristling with the distinctive rhythms of Glaswegian speech but unafraid to mull over matters of life and death, and the apparently arbitrary nature of both, with compassion and insight.Haunted by school traumas, Esme is struggling to put paintbrush to canvas Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A right wing populist, a master manipulator of the media, he appears to be immune to the long accepted norms of professional behaviour. Foul-mouthed and a bully, but backed by an oligarch, he rides roughshod over those who play by the old rules, truth, like everything else, merely transactional. “What’s in it for me?” is the only question worth the breath.Stop me if you’ve heard this before…Not the Oval Office now, but The Sun’s editor’s office in Wapping nearly 40 years ago, where Kelvin McKenzie, high on his own supply of circulation figures and the reluctant professional admiration of even Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It wasn't exactly a stellar year for comedy but there were plenty of shows that shone brightly and have stayed with me, even if the Edinburgh Fringe – for so long the highlight of the comedy year – increasingly disappoints.Where once comics based their working year on appearing at the Fringe each August, building an audience year by year in increasingly bigger rooms, many younger comics now build their audience much more quickly on social media. Having a sellout run, crowned by winning the prestigious Perrier award (now the Edinburgh Comedy Award) is no longer the career achievement it once Read more ...
David Kettle
The Ode Islands, Pleasance at EICC ★★★★ I might be going out on a limb here, but you’re unlikely to encounter anything quite like The Ode Islands elsewhere on the Fringe – perhaps anywhere, to be honest. That’s both in terms of form and content. Let’s get the first of those out of the way: Irish-born, Hastings-based solo performer Ornagh (yes, she’s single-named) dances, acts and lip-synchs sandwiched between two screens, interacting with intricate CGI both as a backdrop of psychedelic landscapes and in the foreground as monsters, demons and more. The effect isn’t always 100% faultless, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Cat Cohen, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★★In Broad Strokes Cat Cohen paints a fascinating picture of events leading up to the stroke that could have killed her. Thankfully three years on she is now fully recovered – and from near tragedy comes this superb show.The hour is her trademark mix of standup and music (with Frazer Hadfield on piano) and Cohen delivers it in her usual deadpan, knowing style. You might forgive her should some sentimentality creep in, but no, her cuttingly ironic comedy shines through – “I had a stroke at 30: isn’t that so creative?”Describing the health Read more ...
David Kettle
Ordinary Decent Criminal, Summerhall ★★★★★ Frankie learnt a thing or two about the police and how they work from his years as an activist. Fighting for crucial political causes, however, never seemed at odds with a sideline in drug-dealing – which, when the authorities got wind that the chocolate bars he was importing from Spain weren’t exactly Cadbury’s, earned him a few years inside. Once banged up, however, Frankie finds himself immersed in prison feuds, struggles for power, conflicts and unexpected connections.Ed Edwards’s vivid, vibrant solo play fits its performer – comedy legend, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Emmanuel Sonubi, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★This show – Life After Near Death – is not about dying, it is about living, Emmanuel Sonubi tells us. Well, actually it’s about both, as in his case he nearly died of heart failure but, thankfully here he is.A physically imposing figure, the comic – an ex-nightclub bouncer – certainly looks good, but then he has always been fit. But not fit and healthy, as we learn he had a taste for big nights out that would include “party sugar”. There’s only so long you can cane it before the Grim Reaper starts taking an interest.Sonubi Read more ...
David Kettle
Kinder, Underbelly, Cowgate ★★★ Drag artist Goody Prostate (yes, I know) receives a call from a local library. Garbed in lederhosen and sporting a preposterous German accent, she was expecting a brutal, no-prisoners-taking drag roast battle. Instead, she finds that she’s actually been booked to read to a bunch of kids.Okay, the starting point for Melbourne-based actor/writer Ryan Stewart’s solo show might not be the Fringe’s most convincing, but it nonetheless offers up plenty of opportunities for a dissection of current moral panics, and of the rights and wrongs of introducing children Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Eric Rushton, Monkey Barrel ★★★★ Everything about Eric Rushton is lo-fi. His delivery, his movement about the stage, his interactions with the audience. Even the subject matter of this show – mental health, lost love – is low-key. Yet with his deadpan delivery and finely wrought gags, he commands the audience and delivers a lot of laughs.He tells a personal story, although one or two set-ups may have some comedic licence. But the core of Innkeeper – about how Rushton has come to handle his sometimes fragile mental health – has the imprimatur of lived experience.He takes us back to Read more ...
David Kettle
The Horse of Jenin, Pleasance Dome ★★★★★ Alaa Shehada bounds onto the stage, all muscular energy and swaggering self-confidence, for what’s effectively a cross between stand-up and solo theatre. Is it wrong to joke about Palestine? Definitely not, the larger-than-life, matey Shehada clearly thinks, finding plenty that’s funny, or certainly much that’s bleakly ironic, in his native city of Jenin in the West Bank, its cast of flawed, colourful characters, and its strange and awkward ways of life. With the threatening spectre of Israeli occupation constantly in the background.In many ways, Read more ...
David Kettle
The Fit Prince (who gets switched on the square in the frosty castle the night before (insert public holiday here)), Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★They’ve created an affectionate but merciless send-up of Princess Di; they’ve lampooned Gwyneth Paltrow, her lifestyle brand Goop and her (ahem) unfortunate skiing collision; and they’ve even got their claws into the horror show that was the movie version of Cats. Awkward Productions – aka real-life couple Linus Karp and Joseph Martin – have a well-rehearsed arsenal of tried-and-tested techniques for skewering those who deserve it (or, in many cases, don Read more ...