Pleasance Courtyard

This looks fun: kids’ theatre stalwart Danyah Miller leads an interactive, ‘board game style theatre show’ in which the young audience (aged seven to 11) solve clues and crack a case together. It’s a reworking of London hit The Mystery of Little Angel Theatre.

It’s a good Fringe for comedians doing kids’ shows this year, and the most prominent of them is surely loveable veteran Mark Watson, whose reasoning for turning his hand to child entertainment is that it’s one of the few things he’s not done before. Despite the slightly grumpy title, Watson is a generally upbeat, joyous presence and you can see he’d go down a treat with the five plus crowd.

Iraqi-Brummie Al-Habib scored great notices with the funny, slick musings of last year’s debut Fringe hour Death to the West (Midlands), a coming of age-style set about growing up with Iraqi heritage during Iraq War-era Britain, and also about being from Birmingham. For his second show he promises to offer something ‘more relatable for white British people’ – Stuck in the Middle (East) With You is about growing up as a child of divorce, though from the title one imagines his heritage will come into miore than a smidge.

Even by the fairly vague naming conventions of stand up comedy shows, it’s hard to imagine what sardonic Anglo-Russian Olga Koch’s new show Fat Tom Cruise will be about. Apparently it revolves around a story Koch has to tell. And furthermore, it’s a genre-defying show with immersive elements. In the world of solo stand-up shows this could mean everything or nothing, but Koch is an undoubtable pro and if she’s stretching her wings a bit formally then so much the better.

Following last year’s fine character comedy-based Edinburgh debut Pathetic Little Characters, young comic Rory Marshall turns his hand to something a little more autobiographical with Thank You for the Opportunity, a show exploring the fact that the still youthful comedian has had an astonishing 26 jobs. As much as being a series of funy anecdotes, it’s also an exploration of the world of work and the people one meets in it.

Like every stand-up comedian in the SNL UK cast, Larry Dean has a had a massive profile boost from the hit show. At the same time, the Glaswegian comic had the most establish career of any of the show’s stand-ups, and if a bigger name in Scotland than the UK as a whole, he’d certainly made a name for himself with a series of acclaimed, high concept shows that ran the gamut from coming out to his strict Catholic family to dicussing his grandmother’s dementia and his own autism diagnosis. Latest Hellbent is descrived as ‘a riotous show about refusing to grow up’.

Artsy comedian extraordinaire Morpurgo follows up last year’s tenth anniversary revival of his cult show Soothing Sounds for Baby with a new one – indeed, his first new one in nine years, which much of the intervening period taken up by TV work. Highlander 70 is inspired by something Morpurgo found at a car boot sale ten years ago. What? The descriotion doesn’t stretch that far, but it’s a real treat to have his idiosyncratic, generically ambiguous humour back with us.

Produced by Edinburgh Fringe hitmeister Francesca Moody, The Scaring sees sketch trio Crybabies follow up their very silly sci-fi Bagbeard and absurdist World War 2 show Danger Brigade with what you could probably have correctly guessed to be a rummage around the horror genre. The series of sketches that comprise The Scaring follow a former priest who must team up with a ghost after peril strikes at a creepy hotel.

‘If you laugh it's comedy, if you don't it's performance art’ runs the undoubetdly laughter-worthy tag line Frankie Thompson’s new show, which not only points to how weird her work is but also to the fact that the genre is genuinely uncertain: 2022’s superbly weird Catts was classed as comedy; 2023’s follow up Body Show was in the theatre section of the Fringe brochure. For Horrible Things it’s back to comedy with an hour in which Thompson explores… horrible things, both real and conceptual. Assuming she’s not radically changed her MO, the key thing to remember here is that her performance is in no way done in a stand-up style, but rather involves her lip syncing disquietingly to a mad collage of vidoe clips, like a sort of Adam Curtis fever dream. A genuinely singular performer.

Andrew Doherty burst onto the Fringe with his superb spoof folk horror Gay Witch Sex Cult, before enjoying rather more tepid reviews from with last year’s Sad Gay Aids Play. Well when life gives you lemons, take brutal revenge: his latest show is a pointed swipe at the haters who gave Sad Gay Aids Show a three star review specifically (NB Time Out gave it a three star review). Doherty’s latest slice of amusingly macabre storytelling follows Felix Chatelier, a reviewer who accepts an invite to be guest of honour at a new fringe festival but soon finds creepy things happening ‘as he desperately seeks to answer the question: Why oh why did I only give Andrew Doherty three stars?’