If we get lost or confused in the story he’s about to tell us, writer/performer Sam Ward explains, we shouldn’t worry: it all comes together in the end. There’s an implicit warning there, and it proves entirely justified: what Ward goes on to deliver is a breathless, high-velocity dash through an ever more complicated and convoluted narrative that dares us to drop our attention and lose the flow. His tale, however, is a strangely gripping one: a woman finds oddly humming holes in her garden, and her attempts to discover what they mean lead her to a sub-department in her local council Read more ...

Populist theatre really is a terrible flirt. You know the type of thing I mean: cheeky pursed lips, making eyes at the audience, strutting with a provocative wiggle. No need for subtle signals. No need for hidden depths. Okay, so here we are: Nadia Fall’s revival of Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, the classic 1970s suburban wince-machine, finally arrives at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End, trailing the cheap perfume of crowd-pleasing populism, after first being seen at the Theatre Royal Stratford East two years ago, and touring since. One thing is certain: it’s enormously, and I mean Read more ...

Up: Violin vs Football, French Institute in Scotland ★★★★★Is it theatre? Is it music, or maybe dance? Or even some kind of circus, or simply sport? In truth, the impossible-to-categorise Up: Violin vs Football at the French Institute in Scotland (originally put together with Le Phare Centre chorégraphique National du Havre Normandie) is all of those things, and very much its own thing too. Even if its genre is hard to define, two things are certain: first, it’s about as Fringey an experience as you can hope for; and second, it’s extremely good indeed.That’s good in terms of the exceptional Read more ...

The gag – and it’s about as pitch-black a gag as you could imagine – is there in the title. Three African American guys hang out, shoot the breeze, chew the fat, discussing everything from pretty girls to who the best blues musician is. They bicker, disagree, pass on nuggets of wisdom and even sing an out-of-tune song or two, seemingly just to pass the time. But constantly interrupting their impromptu discussions are tortured, awkward movements, as the three lynched bodies hang together by their necks in deathly silence.Writer and director Zora Howard’s brief but potent show comes to Read more ...

Hi. I’m Steve, creator of the solo show bearing my name on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and I’d like to make something perfectly clear: I’m alive. I’m not dead.I’m nearly certain of that now, though there was a stretch when it became something of an open question. It was confusing. In some ways, it still is.Which is partly why I’m here in Edinburgh performing a one man show with the not especially subtle title Steve Burns: Alive. Over the years I’ve become considerably more confident about the nature of my continued existence. I eat. I sleep. I pay taxes. My knees hurt now for reasons I don Read more ...

Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella, Underbelly, Bristo Square ★★★★From hectic Princess Di parody Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story (back at the Fringe next week) to wicked Paltrow take-down Gwyneth Goes Skiing, Awkward Productions – real-life partners Linus Karp and Joseph Martin – are Fringe regulars, and they’ve carved a distinctive niche with their high-camp, extremely silly, barbed and splenetic comedy shows.Their offering this year, however, is something rather different. In the summer of 2024, Karp was struck with an umbrella in a homophobic attack in Soho. Martin apprehended the Read more ...

Max Olesker: Making the Cut ★★★★Pleasance DomeMost Fringe fans will know Max Olesker as one half of sketch duo Max and Ivan, but this is his Fringe debut as a solo performer. In it he tells how he, a man who had grown up in a liberal Jewish household, had to convert to Judaism in order to be with the woman he loved.It’s a terrific tale, well told. Olesker uses just a few stage props – a table and chairs, and a simple white cloth – to tell the story, as they become a dinner table or a courtroom, or a prayer shawl or a Jewish wedding canopy (a chuppah). Like all good stories, Olesker tells Read more ...

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 ...

It’s been 35 years since Tony Kushner’s two-play, multi-hour epic gay soap opera-cum-spiritual meditation was first unleashed on the world in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And it’s been 18 years since director Ivo van Hove unveiled his own raw, stripped-back production with what was then Toneelgroep Amsterdam, now Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. It’s tempting, therefore, to see the Edinburgh International Festival’s revival of van Hove’s production as a classic traversal of a classic text, with all the nicely safe distancing and detached appraisal that that double status might invite.That’ Read more ...

Andrew O’Hagan’s 2020 novel Mayflies had a memorable television treatment in 2022, and a brand new stage adaptation – to which the writer has given his blessing – is one of the Fringe’s 2026 hot tickets. It’s immediately clear why.Leith-based site-specific specialists Grid Iron theatre have requisitioned a grimy but wonderfully characterful warehouse as the cavernous setting for O’Hagan’s heartbreaking story of youthful, identity-forming joy and later-life tragedy. With its towering brick walls (put to excellent use with Lewis den Hertog’s colourful, clever video projections and Simon Read more ...

An Ulster playwright who insists she's British, a childish American star hung up on Irish Catholic tropes - played by a very grown up actor, Matthew Broderick - and a theatre director who's not as woke as he claims meet in the director's London apartment on the eve of rehearsals. With hilarious results? At times, yes. and Belfast-born David Ireland knows how to structure his three-hander even if you see the ground being laid for the ultimate crisis. In her programme note, Abbey Theatre Artistic Director Caitríona McLaughlin claims that the play, directed by Ciarán O'Reilly of New York's Irish Read more ...

Cathy ★★★Iconic Scottish actor Elaine C Smith towers over writer/director Eilidh Loan’s snarling, acid-sour comedy at the Traverse Theatre. Judging by chat in the hectic pre-show queue, getting the chance to see her in the flesh was a big attraction for many punters. And Smith was central, too, to Loan’s creative process: the character of Cathy is inspired by the writer’s own grandmother, who insisted that Smith should play her.You clearly don’t mess with Loan’s granny. And once you experience her on-stage alter ego, you might tremble at the thought of what that real-life older woman is Read more ...