Edinburgh Fringe and International Festival Reviews 2026

Emma Howlett is a gifted, extremely clever writer-director who scored a deserved Summerhall hit last year with the audacious feminist science odyssey Aether. Howett’s follow-up is The Plot and really (if you’re British, anyway) there is only one plot…

One suspects Bella Hull would have been a shoo in to the SNL UK perfomers if the ‘acerbic female Gen Z stand-up’ slot wasn’t comprehensively filled already by the more famous Ania Magliano, but the volume of press and profiles that have greeted Hull’s latest set suggest she’s waiting in the wings if a vacancy comes up…

The start of Lover Girl is in fact indistinguishable from stand-up, as the sunny, charismatic Wilkey talks us through a classic solo-show conundrum. She’s single! And she doesn’t know why! Which is particularly galling because she’s bisexual and – by her own account – pretty unfussy…

Underground Monk Show is an American clowning supergroup. Like many supergroups it’s a bit self indulgent, probably not as good as its individual members’ main projects, and one member seems to have left already…

Paddy Young is annoyingly handsome and – after years of cultier success – has one of the best gigs in British comedy, being the co-anchor of SNL UK’s Weekend Update…

Larry Dean is the great workhorse of Saturday Night Live UK: the Glaswegian comic didn’t necessarily get the kudos of the show’s breakout stars like George Fouracres or Jack Shep, or his younger fellow stand-ups Ania Magliano and Paddy Young. But in season one he performed in more sketches than anybody else, and if you didn’t notice then that’s because he’s an undoubedly chameleonic presence, his astonishing command of accents making him an invaluable supporting player…

Ben Norris has had a decent career as a poet, actor and writer: notably, he’s played Ben Archer in The Archers since 2018. But in The Distance he looks back to his childhood and deftly sidesteps his future success for a poignant, formally thrilling work that tells an almost true story exquisitely…

Hole!, by American Sing-Song – aka ASS, aka New York-based performers Jake Brasch and Nadja Leonhard-Hooper – is one of those Fringe shows that you feel faintly grubby even describing the premise of but is, in fact, quite, quite magical.

Basically it’s a two-hander musical about Conor and Luke, two young closeted gay men from Nebraska living through The Great Sucking, a phenomenon predicted by Conor’s stern preacher father (God tipped him off) wherein anyone who doesn’t have something shoved up their bum will be sucked up into the sky and never seen again. The boys’ community has survived via a creative approach to going to the toilet and the job lot of wooden buttplugs Conor’s dad ordered for them just before it all kicked off. And now, in a post-apocalyptic America, the duo have been sent off to prove that they’re men by taking out the ‘Cincinnati Daddies’, a tribe of gay men living liberated lives that offend Conor’s religious father.

It obviously sounds insane, not to mention somewhat dirty. And yes, you probably shouldn’t take a young child (the age advice is 14-plus). But if it’s not what you’d call straight, it’s enchantingly straitlaced, as the deadpan creator-performers – dressed in caps, hoops in hair, poised at banks of instruments, for what amounts to a staged concert performance  – really set about telling the story with maximum conviction. I mean this thing really has worldbuilding and you’d better believe that Brasch and Leonard-Hooper have thought through their premise: when Conor and Luke set off on their quest they bring along a lead toilet with straps; when we eventually reach the Daddies the community has developed a sex technique called ‘sky fucking’ that involves allowing yourself to start being sucked into the sky before plugging the gap in the nick of time. That sort of thing.

The earnest and inventive use of Foley adds another layer of sweetness, as does the essentially wholesome chemistry between Brasch and Leonard-Hooper. Yes, Conor and Luke are gay and yes they come to realise they have feelings for each other. Yes, there is a fair amount of innuendo and knowingness. And sky fucking. But it’s not just a musical about two dudes banging, but rather about two confused young men who have both lost their mothers, attempting to grow up and do the right thing in a confusing world. A confusing world in which you have to shove something up your bum or be sucked into space.

It’s great fun, has fun synth poppy narrative songs, and as much as anything it’s a real testament to human imagination. ASS have created an insanely detailed world. But also you could never do a literal staging of this thing. There is no sucking on stage, and nary a buttplug in sight: the world of Hole! exists in our heads, and in its own strange way it is a wonderful place.

Chipper provocateur Hannah Maxwell’s new show leans heavily on an autobiographical account of her secretive work in ‘strategic communications’ during the pandemic era.…

One of the most talked about shows at the 2026 Fringe isn’t a show at all, it’s a new venue, the Sauna Theatre. There is absolutely no euphemism at work in that name: it’s a big sauna that is also a theatre, designed by the people behind Paines Plough’s iconic Roundabout venue and occupying its space at Summerhall while it’s getting a refurb. Like the Roundabout, it can be packed up – it’s hoped there will be future stops in Manchester and London…

Elf Lyons is a clown comic who makes weird concept shows like her last one, Horses, which involved her playing the role of multiple horses, several of whom die. A singular talent, she’s certainly on the popular end of the esoteric but she also always seemed destined to be the definition of a cult artist. Might something as humdrum as a breakup change that?

This new play from Morna Young – staged by renowned touring company Paines Plough – has a flawed but perfectly agreeable first half that follows the Blackwoods, a sprawling, glamorous family who have been summoned to the country pile of 80-year former stage and screen star matriarch Vivienne (Alison Peebles) for a party…

A version of Hamlet called HAM in which Hamlet is vegan and sad about the death of a pig as opposed to his father is the sort of show concept that gives people cold sweats about seeing theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe…

Conceptual comic Joseph Morpurgo hasn’t been totally absent this last 10 years: he recently brought back his classic 2015 show Soothing Sounds for Baby. However, Highlander 70 is his first new work in nearly a decade although you’d hardly guess it if you didn’t know…

Ahir Shah is obviously a very good comedian: his last show, Ends,was famously so good that it came to the 2023 Fringe as a work-in-progress, was rapidly upgraded to finished show and then won that year’s main Comedy Award…

There are two major stand-up shows about critics at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and obviously I went to see them both almost immediately. Part of me wishes I hadn’t, though, or at least thinks I should have left more of a gap between the two…

Ania Magliano could probably tell you that you had five minutes left to live with a sense of gossipy intimacy that would make you chuckle naughtily. So it’s no wonder that in her latest show Peach Fuzz she pulls off chatting about a sense of disassociation from her own body with a casual breeziness that suggests it is absolutely no big deal – or at least, that we should just sit back and enjoy the ride…

Now this is proper hardcore Fringing: two actors and a sheet of plastic in a thin-walled box of a venue, together conjuring an epic thriller about a woman who has travelled to the ends of the earth only to become entangled with an esoteric cult on a farflung, half-forgotten Pacific island…

While aspects of new show Horrible Things remain distinctly Frankie Thompson – she still lipsyncs to a load of esoteric recordings, she still seems very irritated by the Tories – she now has a voice of her own. Quite a loud one too…

As bright, cheerful and well-meaning as one of those issues-based picturebooks designed to educate children about misunderstood minority groups, laying into The Singer feels like the critical equivalent of that bit in The Odyssey when the guy throws the puppy off the cliff. Nonetheless…

Written and performed by relatively unknown Australian comic Hannah Reilly, Roleplay had sold out its Fringe run before the festival began and there’s an obvious reason why…

I don’t think Andrew Doherty actually wishes death upon any theatre critics. He certainly didn’t kill me when I came to see his new show. Still, I do think is he was probably genuinely upset by the so-so reception given to last year’s Sad Gay Aids Play – a marked contrast to his roundly-hailed debut Gay Witch Sex Cult – and has explored his hurt feelings in quite spectacularly entertaining way with third show Reviewers Welcome… TO DIE! 

‘What does a woman have to do to be remembered?’ ask Sh!t Theatre, the duo stood naked on the yawning, pink-draped stage of the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room…

Bryony Kimmings has one heck of a fanbase: some big comedy names have played the 1,000-seater Soho Theatre Walthamstow since it opened in May, but none of them have mounted a two-and-a-half week run, as Kimmings has with new show Bog Witch…