Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews - Cat Cohen / Lachlan Werner / KC Shornima

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 emergency is grist to the mill for her self-obsessed millennial onstage persona; the hole in her heart that caused the stroke, the warning signs of the debilitating migraines she suffered from puberty? Why they just prove that she is anything but the "normal girl” a casting director once dismissed her as. 

And that the cardiologist mending her hole in the heart was called Dr Love is just the icing on the cake.

Cohen mines great comedy from the tale, but the musical finale neatly subverts what has gone before – and will bring a lump to your throat.

Broad Strokes is that rare thing – a show that I wanted to be twice its length, and then some. Let’s hope it has a life beyond the Fringe, because it thoroughly deserves it.

• Until 24 August

Lachlan Werner, Pleasance Dome ★★★

We’re in a Big Top, and Lachlan Werner is Jack Hammer; he’s a twunk – head of a twink, and the body of a hunk, he says. He’s supposedly a muscleman (although he looks anything but in his old-fashioned leotard) and appears in this circus owned by his father, the world’s weakest man. So they’re perfectly balanced – or are they?

This is the set-up for WonderTwunk in which Werner plays several characters, with the help of puppets and a member of the audience. One minute he’s the strongman, the next he's his father, then Slippy the sea lion as we go behind the scenes and uncover the story of his mother, who his father told him died in childbirth because Jack’s superhuman strength so drained her.

Werner is a one-man variety act, using puppetry, ventriloquism, physical comedy, cloning and storytelling in the hour.

The gothic comedy-horror story doesn’t go where you might expect it to, and it’s performed with great energy, although the pacing isn’t consistent. But it’s enjoyably daft, surreal fun.

• Until 24 August

KC Shornima, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★

KC Shornima has packed a lot into her 29 years. She’s an established Saturday Night Live writer, for one thing, and her early childhood was spent in Nepal while there was a civil war going on. Her parents left her and her sister behind for a few years while they made a new life in the United States, but they were eventually reunited and she grew up there. Unsurprisingly, you may think, she’s in therapy. “It’s been a year. I’m almost done,” she deadpans.

She runs through her life – and some politics – in Detachment Style, her Fringe debut, but while she talks about some deeply personal subjects, the comic maintains an impressive aloofness.

She talks about how her childhood still informs her relationship with her parents now, the horrors of dating, and of being an Asian woman in white spaces. She muses about taking a white boyfriend on a trip to Thailand and not looking like a hooker.

Some of the material – about porn, wanting to be choked by her boyfriend – feels misjudged, as if Shornima is trying on an edgy persona for size. That material was met with stony silence on the day I saw the show, but she was completely unfazed and nimbly moved on to the next section. Occasional misstep aside, this is a solid debut by a distinctive new voice in standup.

• Until 24 August
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