Comedy
Rhod Gilbert: Work in Progress
Gilded Balloon Teviot
Edinburgh was where the Welshman first hit his straps as a standup and his 2008 show Rhod Gilbert and the Award-Winning Mince Pie is still one of the best fringe sets to miss out on the comedy award. Now, after a cancer-enforced break from performing, the 54-year-old will get a very warm welcome back.
Gillian Cosgriff: Actually, Good
Pleasance Courtyard
Ten years ago in Edinburgh, Jonny Donahoe and Duncan Macmillan made a play about a boy who itemised Every Brilliant Thing to keep life’s dark side at bay. Gillian Cosgriff’s show is up to something similar and, on its wave of positivity, swept all before it at the Melbourne comedy festival, bagging the prestigious main award.
Viggo Venn: Clown (Clown in Progress) and British Comedian
BlundaGardens and Monkey Barrel
A fringe mainstay with his double-act partner Zach Zucker and in his solo clown shows, Viggo Venn had been ploughing a perfectly successful but leftfield furrow until this spring, when he became the nation’s hi-vis, shock-haired sweetheart on Britain’s Got Talent. A quarter of a million quid better off, he returns to Edinburgh with two shows: last year’s British Comedian, updated, and a new work-in-progress.
Freya Parker: It Ain’t Easy Being Cheeky
Pleasance Courtyard
Solo-show glory is often dispensed to those who cut their teeth in sketch groups; Phil Wang and Liz Kingsman are two recent examples. Might that fate be in store for Freya Parker? The geordie is best known in comedy as one half – the silliest half – of Lazy Susan. This summer, she goes it alone, with a show about “trying to remain cheeky when it’s raining trauma”.
John Robins: Howl and Work in Progress
Just the Tonic Nucleus
The last time John Robins turned his bad times into standup, with a show about his breakup from Sara Pascoe, he waltzed off with the biggest award in world comedy. This year, the ubiquitous podcaster and BBC Radio 5 man is fashioning a new show from a recent very low mental-health ebb. Prior to an autumn tour, he presents both a polished set, Howl, and a work-in-progress, daily.
Leila Navabi: Composition
Pleasance Courtyard
If the fringe is for anything, it’s for ferreting out the most exciting new talents, the artists who’ll be small-screen and front-page fixtures in years to come. Welsh up-and-comer Leila Navabi is prominent in this year’s crop of first-timers, with “an audacious punk musical comedy hour about the monopolisation of minority identity for social gain”.
Chloe Petts: If You Can’t Say Anything Nice
Pleasance Courtyard
Her 2022 fringe debut, long delayed by Covid, was one of the best reviewed sets at last year’s festival, an artful and intelligent skip through the minefield of modern gender. After that feat of comic delicacy, Petts promises something “ruder” with her follow-up, which addresses “weddings, Christianity, men who like Millwall and calling you all a bunch of virgins”.
Drew Michael: Drew’s Adventures
Pleasance Dome
Post-Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, a corner of Edinburgh is forever reserved for “but is it comedy?” shows that shepherd the artform far from straightforward laughs. Might Drew Michael occupy it this year? The Chicago native is one of the US’s “most formally experimental and artistically polarising” acts of recent years, says the New York Times.
Kieran Hodgson: Big in Scotland
Pleasance Courtyard
A familiar TV face on Two Doors Down and Prince Andrew the Musical, Kieran Hodgson is held in high esteem by fringe-goers, after an unbeatable run of shows (one on Lance Armstrong, one on the 1975 Common Market referendum) that secured the Yorkshireman a trio of comedy award nominations. His latest looks at Scotland’s history and culture from the perspective of an adopted Glaswegian.
Jessie Cave: Work in Progress
Just the Tonic Nucleus
Much of the most breathtaking comedy in recent years has been characterised by oversharing, emotional disclosure taken to the nth degree. Its queen is Jessie Cave, whose shows open up her heart likes the pages of a teenage diary. This year’s – still at the work-in-progress stage – promises a bulletin on motherhood, birth, mess and heartbreak from the erstwhile Harry Potter star.
Ahir Shah: Ends
Monkey Barrel
At his best, Ahir Shah’s shows splice erudite geopolitics and tender self-revelation into something highly potent. After 2018’s award-nominated Duffer and 2019’s terrific Dots, the 32-year-old’s fringe record is strong, and this year’s all-new Ends is one to look out for.
Nabil Abdulrashid: The Purple Pill
Pleasance Courtyard
Amid all the fringe hype, it’s worth remembering that some comics make it to the top without ever visiting Edinburgh. Nabil Abdulrashid is now one of the UK’s most thoughtful and least-beholden-to-anyone socio-political comics, but – after career-making glory on 2020’s Britain’s Got Talent – he’s only now making his full fringe debut.
Amusements by Ikechukwu Ufomadu
Pleasance Courtyard
An entertainer: that’s how Ikechukwu Ufomadu describes himself. Comedian doesn’t quite cut it. He starred in the world premiere of Clare Barron’s award-winning play Dance Nation. He was nominated as best actor for his shortform TV series Words with Ike. Now, this so-called “gentleman scholar” of alt-comedy comes to the fringe, to dissect the alphabet, counting, and more.
Laura Ramoso: Frances
Pleasance Dome
Ah, but can they do it live? Such is the welcome that greets online comics arriving at the fringe to try their luck in-person. Happily, Laura Ramoso, a Canadian act with gazillions of TikTok followers, has already vaulted that hurdle: her multi-character solo sketch show Frances, about a woman journeying to meet up with her ex-boyfriend, arrives in Edinburgh trailing five-star reviews.
Larry Owens Live
Assembly Roxy
Triple threat barely covers Larry Owens’ offer. He acts, and won awards for the Broadway hit A Strange Loop. He sings, touring with his own solo Stephen Sondheim cabaret. And he makes you laugh: he’s part of the same NY musical comedy scene as the extraordinary Catherine Cohen (also in Edinburgh), and twins big laughs with the voice of a virtuoso.
The Retreat
Underbelly Cowgate
The best of the Edinburgh fringe is uncategorisable. Step forward “an absurd comedy narrative variety show” satirising corporate culture, starring two US TV talents and produced by an English pop star. Why not? The leads are Rebekka Johnson of Netflix’s Glow and Anne Gregory from Parks and Rec. The producer is Kate Nash. Guest acts (Nash included) will feature nightly. It sounds like a gas.
Rose Matafeo: Work in Progress
Monkey Barrel
Lots of water under the bridge since Rose Matafeo last brought a new show to Edinburgh. She left clutching the biggest award in world comedy for her 2018 show Horndog. She returns a star, after the success of her screwball comedy for the BBC, Starstruck. If only with a work-in-progress, fringe audiences will be thrilled to welcome back one of the most natural, anxiety-riddled and hilarious of live standups.
Frank Skinner: 30 Years of Dirt
Assembly George Square
The Brummie veteran featured in this “best of Edinburgh” preview last year, only for his show to be cancelled for family health reasons. Twelve more months has only heightened anticipation of this new set, 30 Years of Dirt, from an absolute master of the laconic, twinkling standup art, a man for whom the phrase “funny bones” might have been invented.
An Evening of Mayhem with Megan Stalter
Gilded Balloon
Fans of the HBO sitcom Hacks will be wise to the destabilising force Megan Stalter can bring to the screen – or stage. So too the legions who plug in to her online character-comedy. Now the so-called Little Miss Ohio brings her self-glamorising anti-comedy to the fringe, where – if it’s a patch on the show she brought to London in 2022 – it really shouldn’t be missed.
Dan Lees: The Vinyl Countdown
PBH Free Fringe @ the Banshee Labyrinth
If the elusive “spirit of the fringe” is to be found anywhere, it may be on the Free Fringe, where anything goes apart from all the cash in your wallet. Big hitters here this year include the veteran experimentalist Trevor Lock and lovable twosome Shelf – so too the repeat winner of the Malcolm Hardee award for comic originality Dan Lees, back with a new show about, er, album covers. BL
Theatre
Food
The Studio
Having riffed on the notion of “home” in his 2018 Edinburgh offering, the acclaimed absurdist Geoff Sobelle takes on the subject of food. Designed as a dinner party, with the audience around a dining table complete with culinary sounds and smells, this immersive show is part of the Edinburgh international festival’s programme.
Ben Target: Lorenzo
Summerhall
This autobiographical show by the performance artist and comedian is told through storytelling – and live carpentry. It dramatises the story of Target’s experience as a full-time, live-in carer to extended family member and “irascible octogenarian” Lorenzo Wong. Target developed the show with the late director Adam Brace.
Chriskirkpatrickmas: A Boy Band Christmas Musical
Pleasance Courtyard
A musical parody for anyone with a penchant for 90s pop nostalgia, namely *NSync, though it is not the American boyband’s most famous member, Justin Timberlake, who we follow but Chris Kirkpatrick. We meet him on Christmas Eve in 2009, as he looks back to the band’s heyday. Created by Valen Shore and Alison Zatta.
Hello Kitty Must Die
Pleasance Courtyard
This premiere is billed as a darkly comic musical mashup. Its protagonist is Chinese-American lawyer Fiona Yu and the show studies white patriarchal society and its racial stereotyping though the lens of Asian feminism. We can apparently expect sex, violence and killer stilettos. Based on the cult novel by Angela S Choi.
Pitch
Pleasance Courtyard
If James Graham’s Dear England, at the National Theatre, deals in the travails of the England football squad and modern masculinity, this blend of documentary storytelling and theatre explores the relationship between the beautiful game and the queer community in the wake of the Qatar World Cup.
Sound Clash: Death in the Arena
Pleasance Courtyard
Conceived by reggae musician and celebrity chef Levi Roots and written by award-winning novelist Alex Wheatle, this is a musical about star-crossed love and murder in the dancehall. Set in a dystopia in which MCs run the nation and two warring sound systems vie for power, it promises to come with a thumping soundtrack.
The Van Paemel Family
Zoo Southside
Valentijn Dhaenens is a Belgian performer and co-founder of theatre company SkaGeN. He recreates a 1903 Flemish theatre classic about class oppression by Cyriel Buysse and slips between 13 different characters, as well as engaging with numerous digital characters. Part of the Big in Belgium season.
Party Ghost
Assembly Checkpoint
An Australian production about mortality, as seen through a pop culture lens, Party Ghost takes audiences on a journey to death and beyond through drag and dark comedy. Apparently not for the faint-hearted, it is billed as part circus, part seance, and was named Adelaide fringe’s best circus show this year.
Yoga With Jillian
Pleasance Courtyard
Written by Lia Romeo and performed by Michole Biancosino, this is a screwball comedy about a shiny, happy yoga teacher from the team behind the fringe show Trump Lear. It arrives in Edinburgh from off-Broadway and reflects on the goodness, or otherwise, of green juice, gurus and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop culture.
KlangHaus
Summerhall
Almost a decade after KlangHaus caused a sensation in Summerhall’s Small Animal hospital, the collective are back with InHaus, which again blends sound, song and movement to create their distinctive brand of theatre. They are also performing Darkroom, a 20-minute climate change wake-up call performed in complete darkness for a single audience member at a time.
An Interrogation
Summerhall
Written and staged by Jamie Armitage, co-director of Six: The Musical, An Interrogation follows a detective who sets off on a surprising trail by questioning an apparently upstanding member of society. Produced by Ellie Keel, the show uses livestream cameras to manipulate the audience’s viewpoint and aims to cross-examine society’s preconceived ideas around crime, power and truth.
The Ballad of Truman Capote
theSpace @ Niddry Street
Andrew O’Hagan, better known as a Booker-nominated novelist, brings us this tragi-comic memory play, written as a monologue. Set in 1966 in a suite of the New York Plaza Hotel, it dramatises the highs and lows of Capote’s life, from his Alabama childhood to writing In Cold Blood, with Capote reflecting on the price paid for fame.
June Carryl is a previous winner of the best playwright award at the Hollywood fringe festival. Her story here revolves around an LAPD detective and a white man who shoots a black motorcyclist at a traffic light. The American playwright examines police corruption along with a culture of misogyny and racism.
Trojan Women
Festival theatre
Korean director Ong Keng Sen brings this revisionist retelling of the fall of Troy from the point of view of its female survivors. The production combines music and dance, with more than 25 singers, actors and musicians, and is a collaboration between K-pop producer Jung Jae-il and master pansori singer, Ahn Sook-sun.
Self-Raising
Pleasance Dome
Jenny Sealey, artistic director of disabled-led theatre company Graeae, brings us this autobiographical play, co-written with Mike Kenny, about growing up Deaf in a family that bears a long concealed secret at its centre. Sealey performs it as a one-woman show. Presented in association with Soho theatre and Theatr Iolo.
Jacob Storms’ Tennessee Rising: The Dawn of Tennessee Williams
Assembly Rooms
Written by Jacob Storms, this show looks at the US playwright’s life and sets up the audience in the role of a “kind stranger” to Williams as he goes through the rollercoaster of his early career, during which he conceived some of his most iconic characters. Originally directed for the stage by Alan Cumming in New York.
The Baron and the Junk Dealer
Assembly Roxy
An aristocrat and a junk merchant are stranded on a desolate planet, waiting to be rescued or killed. Described as “Waiting for Godot in space”, this production comes from the creators of cult underground comedy The George Lucas Talk Show and features two fugitives, played by Griffin Newman and Connor Ratliff, who are also its writers.
Jade Anouka’s poetic debut tells the story of a woman at the end of her marriage and the beginning of a new chapter in her life. Billed as a raw exploration of love, loss and self-discovery, it had a first outing as an Audible drama. Now, Paines Plough bring it to their portable pop-up theatre venue.
Glass Ceiling Beneath the Stars
Pleasance
Sexism at Nasa is the subject of this show, which dramatises the launch of Endeavour STS-47 in 1992. Its focus is on crew members Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space, and Jan Davis, travelling with her husband, whose presence leads to wild speculation on whether Davis has become the first person to have sex in space.
Oscar at the Crown
Assembly George Square Gardens
Reality television meets the complete works of Oscar Wilde. Set in a secret bunker in a fascist future, this is an immersive nightclub musical conceived by Neon Coven, and dramatising the flamboyant life and times of Wilde. The New York Times called it “a party-inducing Rocky Horror transplanted to a 1990s Madonna video”. AA
Dance
Bullyache: Tom
Zoo Southside
A new company launched during the pandemic by artists Courtney Deyn and Jacob Samuel that promises a vivid, messy mashup of dance, live music, pop culture and Auto-Tuned vocals. Their show, Tom, is billed as a “boundary-pushing queer thriller” incorporating the Orpheus myth and a waiting room at the Department for Work and Pensions.
After All
Assembly @ Dance Base
A former member of Scottish Dance Theatre, Solène Weinachter is best known for playing a disillusioned Juliet in Lost Dog’s brilliant Shakespeare rewrite Juliet & Romeo. After All is a solo show, on the subject of death, where Weinachter re-enacts the funerals of those she’s loved and contemplates our rituals of grief.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Festival theatre
One of the great US dance companies, founded in 1958 by legendary choreographer Alvin Ailey. They present two programmes, both capped with Ailey’s classic Revelations, but also showcasing new works by current choreographers Aszure Barton and Kyle Abraham – whose own company was a hit at the festival last year.
Diary VII: The Story of ...
C aurora
Hong Kong choreographer Mui Cheuk-Yin began her autobiographical Diary project in 1986. Now aged 63 and a grande dame of the Hong Kong dance scene, she’s on to her seventh instalment. Mui imagines herself as a stray cat stalking urban streets and memory lane, through light and shadows, to explore the changing nature of the city.
Junk Ensemble: Dances Like a Bomb
Zoo Southside
Finola Cronin was a member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal in the 1980s and 1990s. Here she and actor Mikel Murfi perform a dance-theatre duet on the subject of ageing bodies, time, regret, care, beauty and decline, which garnered great reviews when it premiered at Dublin Dance festival last year.
IMA
Murrayfield Ice Rink
When festival-going is often so frantic, IMA (meaning pray), from Budapest’s Recirquel Cirque Danse, purposefully makes viewers slow down and take some time for contemplation. In an immersive set-up designed to evoke a vast starry sky, the audience focuses on a single aerial performer in a show with both scale and intimacy.
I’m Muslamic – Don’t Panik
Assembly @ Dance Base
Hip-hop dancer Bobak Champion’s comic/serious show about Islam – and the western media’s depiction of it – doesn’t shy away from politics, but his warm, affable presence is a winner. Using dance, storytelling, clowning and a catalogue of characters, Champion regales the audience with tales of his travels between Bristol and Tehran.
Papillon
Summerhall
A plunge into chaos theory from Canadian choreographer Helen Simard and Montreal company We All Fall Down Interdisciplinary Creations. Playing with order and disorder, the result is mesmerising improvisation from three dancers responding to live electronic music that roams through jazz, hip-hop and drum’n’bass.
Tandava
theSpace @ Niddry St
Guitarist Simon Thacker joins forces with three dancers from Bengaluru’s Piah Dance Company in a border-crossing world premiere. Drawing on Gujurat and Rajasthan folk dance and the classical form bharatanatyam, the work finds similarities between intricate rhythms of dancers’ feet and guitar-playing fingers. Part of the Made in Scotland showcase.
The Unknown Soldier
Drill Hall
African, Caribbean, Lindy hop and contemporary dance all go into telling the stories of Black British men and women who fought in the first and second world wars. Choreographer Alison Ray sheds light on often forgotten figures in an informative, surprising piece that’s soundtracked by live music from berimbau and violin. LW
