Supposing: ★★★★★Sally fell down a hole outside the local theatre. Since then, things have changed. She just… knows things that other people don’t. But rather than being a source of joy, help or hope, her new abilities feel more like a curse.Writer-director Zinnie Harris’s taut, focused two-hander (well, for the most part) turns to ancient Greek myth – and to the chiselled definition of ancient Greek dramatic forms – to address the disintegration of personal freedoms, climate breakdown, rising intolerance, and everything else that’s falling apart around us. It’s an audacious conceit, and Read more ...

Tom Read Wilson ★★★★Gilded Balloon MuseumTom Read Wilson has been plying 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 Read more ...

Susie McCabeAssembly George Square  ★★★★Glaswegian Susie McCabe has established a loyal following at the Edinburgh Fringe over the past few years, and in Coming of Rage she updates them on the past two years of her life.It’s not been a barrel of laughs. She suffered a heart attack in 2024 (which she talked about her in previous show) and is now divorced from her second wife, but much of this hour is about the death of her father. It is never, however, downbeat as she wrings comedy from really awful life events.McCabe was tasked with organising her dad’s funeral, which meant an unwelcome Read more ...

Max Fulham’s Monkey Business ★★★★Gilded Balloon TeviotRarely do I delve into the rich world of children's entertainment at the Edinburgh Fringe, but sometimes a scheduling snafu can pay dividends. I went to Gilded Balloon Teviot expecting to see a comedy play, but it wasn’t on that day. A quick scoot through the brochure revealed this show starting at the same time, so I took a punt, and I’m very glad I did.There’s a particular joy in hearing a room full of children (and their adult minders) squealing with delight over fart gags, physical comedy, daft games, puppetry and ventriloquism, all of Read more ...

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 ...

 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...