Edinburgh Fringe
Veronica Lee
Eric Rushton, Monkey Barrel @ The Hive ★★★★ Eric Rushton tells us he has enough cash on him to return the price of one person’s ticket if they don’t like what’s about to follow. No one takes up the offer, although I suspect a few in the audience may have taken a few minutes to tune into his individual style of comedy.Essentially Real One is a shaggy dog story that uses a surreal hook – a vivid dream the comic had about the actress Margot Robbie – to examine regrets, embarrassment and a life that’s yet to take off.Rushton intersperses his account of that dream – in which he managed to Read more ...
David Kettle
The Mosinee Project, Underbelly Cowgate ★★★★In May 1950, a small US town awoke to hammer-and-sickle flags hanging from lamp-posts, its local newspaper transformed into a Soviet propaganda journal, its citizens’ firearms confiscated and handed to loyal communist troops, and – most alarmingly – its mayor detained under armed guard.It’s a fascinating and little-known byway of US history, and how the Wisconsin community of Mosinee arrived at that elaborate and eyebrow-raising simulation is the subject of the debut Fringe show from new theatre company Counterfactual. And what begins with a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Anna Akana, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ If you like morbid humour, you’ve come to the right place. Asian American comic Anna Akana, a YouTube star making her Fringe debut, dives in at the deep end with It Gets Darker, which deals with, inter alia, her sister’s suicide.But before we get there, Akana sets the scene. She has returned to comedy after several years away, having left the scene because she was threatened by a long-term stalker who the LAPD told her they couldn’t arrest until he did something. As awful as it was, she acknowledges that having a stalker is great material for a comic. “My Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jin Hao Li Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Jin Hao Li was born in China, raised in Singapore and studied English at a Scottish university. So it’s perhaps not surprising that, in drawing on so many cultural sources, his brand of comedy should be so singular.Swimming in a Submarine, his debut Fringe show, is a deftly constructed hour in which Li mixes surreal invention, zinging one-liners, callbacks, hokey rap and some rather disconcerting audience interaction.He certainly knows how to make an impression. He comes on stage to loud metal music but then speaks softly – which forms a great Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour is many things, some seemingly contradictory: a) a clever, poetic playwright who uses high-tech elements in his work to inventive effect; b) a mischievous presence who likes to appear in his own highly unusual plays; c) a man in pain who is traumatised by his self-imposed exile from Iran. This blend helps make his latest, ECHO (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen), a uniquely enriching experience. This production, which is part of LIFT 2024, is like the pieces he has taken to the Edinburgh Fringe: White Rabbit, Red Rabbit in 2014, Nassim in 2017. Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Richard Gadd won an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 with material about being sexually abused by a man, in a set called Monkey See, Monkey Do that he performed on a treadmill with a gorilla at his back. He followed that with another piece of writing about abuse, this time meted out by a female stalker, Baby Reindeer, which he performed at the Fringe and then at the Bush Theatre in 2019. Spliced together, these two traumatic experiences now form his bleak Netflix seven-parter of that same name. "Baby Reindeer" is the nickname given to the object of her obsession by a middle-aged woman Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Many an Edinburgh Fringe transfer has struggled when it moves to the big city, but the Dirty Hare company’s Gunter, sensibly embedded in the Royal Court’s intimate Upstairs space, has settled in nicely, thanks.Originally staged at the best Fringe venue for new theatre-making, Summerhall, where it won a Fringe First award last year, Gunter was devised by Lydia Higman (who also plays drums and Fender lead guitar and serves as narrator), Rachel Lemon (who directs) and Julia Grogan (who performs, main picture). Along with the other two women in the cast, Grogan plays the usual multiple roles Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ahir Shah, Monkey BarrelAhir Shah is a fast talker, but then in Ends – which deservedly won best show in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards – he has a lot to say. It's a show about multiculturalism, family, identity, fitting in, and encompasses modern history on two continents, so he has a lot to pack in.He starts, more prosaically, by talking about how he got into this comedy lark because, as three generations of his family sat down together to watch Goodness Gracious Me in 1998, it was the first time he had heard his grandparents properly laugh out loud.Shah's family – specifically his late Read more ...
David Kettle
CHOO CHOO! (Or... Have You Ever Thought About ****** **** *****? (Cos I Have)), Pleasance Dome ★★★★Nye and Duncan seem to live a charmed life. Clad in primary-coloured dungarees, they begin their days with a song, and see what adventures the radio has in store for them. Maybe today they’ll be play-acting a game show, or recreating a famous movie scene. Anything to fill the time. Most importantly, they’re counting the days until their holiday. Well, Duncan is.There are a lot of laughs to be had at new company StammerMouth’s slightly sinister send-up of children’s entertainers, but Read more ...
David Kettle
Distant Memories of the Near Future, Summerhall ★★★★About three decades into the future, love has been "solved" – with (what else?) an algorithm, and a healthy splash of AI. It’s so successful, in fact, that states worldwide officially mandate computer-generated coupledom because of its benefits for productivity and consumption. Heaven help you if you’re one of the rare undesirables, unmatchable with another by the ubiquitous Q-PID app. Meanwhile, all the flowers have disappeared, asteroids are being mined for their rare minerals (now exhausted on Earth), and a compulsary daily 10- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Janine Harouni, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Names and identity feature heavily in Janine Harouni’s new show, Man’oushe, itself titled about where her family nickname comes from. Heavily pregnant (the reason why she is ending the show’s Edinburgh run tonight), Harouni tells us her baby’s origin story, and it’s by turns moving and hilarious, as she brings us up to speed with her life since we last saw her at the Fringe in 2019, when she was nominated for best newcomer.Harouni talks about her mixed feelings about becoming a mother, in part formed by her relationship with her parents. And, as an Read more ...
David Kettle
Dark Noon, Pleasance at EICC ★★★★★If there’s a more ambitious theatre production than Dark Noon at the Fringe this year, I’ve yet to see it. That’s ambitious in terms of its staging: during the course of the show’s 100 minutes (yes, it’s a proper, full-length production), virtually an entire town is constructed on a bare red-earth stage right before our eyes. But it’s also ambitious in terms of its themes and subject matter. This is the history of the Wild West, the great American push to the Pacific, frontier pioneers, gold rushes and the law of the gun. It’s a world of corruption Read more ...