Pleasance Courtyard

There’s more to Edinburgh Fringe kids shows than bubble performers and bad science. Not a lot more, perhaps, but this show from Irish company Branar is certainly something a little different, being a kids’ adaptation of James Joyce’s famously impenetrable Ulysses. Presumably not that much is used for what is, after all, a 45-minute show. But the endeavour sounds admirably quixotic and the staging – based around intricate paper models and an original score – sounds compelling. Not one for the tots – the age advice is eight plus.

Priyanka Shetty’s one-woman docu-theatre play is subtitled ‘the show that Trump does not want you to see’ and on the one hand this is probably broadly accurate: the notional leader of the free world is so brittle I’m sure he’d ban anyone, anywhere, from seeing anything even mildly critical of him given half the chance. On the other hand, I suspect he’s not specifically aware that there’s a solo show about the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia playing at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.  Originally from India, Shetty came to Charlottesville to study acting at the University of Virginia, which is in the city. Her degree forms a sort of fraught subplot to #Charlottesville. Shetty apparently didn’t have a good time, in her opinion experiencing racism from not only some students but also the staff, who failed to cast her in a production – despite this being mandatory – because of her accent. Essentially left to her own devices, she put together a solo show about Unite the Right, which didn’t please the faculty either.  But here the show is - albeit refined over a number of years - and now directed by Yury Urnov. And it’s a solid introduction to both the events of the rally – which many of us will remember – and the precise context to them – which are probably hazier to the average Brit.  Unite the Right was nominally a response to the city of Charlottesville’s decision to remove Confederate statues from its streets. Various factions from the right – different...

This promising young comic makes his Fringe debut with an hour of sketch comedy based entirely around a series of ‘sad and pathetic characters’ who are absolutely not like him. To be honest we’re putting him here because a colleague saw the show and thought it was great, but we’ll soon find out if she’s right eh. 

I promise I won’t go on about this too much, but I think I may have been responsible for The Sun’s bizarre 2023 attack on Lorna Rose Treen, in which the tabloid accused the rising sketch star of killing comedy with ‘wokery’. I was on the panel for the Dave Joke of the Fringe award that year, and I nominated Treen’s harmless – and by no stretch of the imagination woke – gag that won that year’s award (it revolved around ‘cheetah’ and ‘cheater’ being homophones). So unless another panellist also nominated it then that was me - sorry Lorna! This isn’t simply a flex because Treen has a new show, but because within a few minutes of it starting she very amusingly breaks with its Americana theme to address the Sun ‘incident’ – she has the article printed out to show us – and to declare that her intent this time is to kill theatre as well. 24 Hour Diner People isn’t really a theatre show, but it’s certainly notably higher concept than its predecessor Skin Pigeon. It follows a series of oddball characters at a quintessentially American diner – possibly at some point in the ‘80s – with Treen playing most roles and audience members being dragooned in to tackle the rest.  It is a huge amount of fun, in large part for the same reason Skin Pigeon was: Treen tackles the bizarre series of characters – from our daydreaming waitress host to a trucker with really long arms to a bizarrely kinky schoolgirl – with total conviction, and a palpable fondness for the world she’s referencing. With...

In this sweet debut Fringe hour,  Lewisham-born-and-bred stand up Toussaint Douglass threatens us with 55 minutes of jokes about pigeons.  As a stickler for high-concept shows, I was a little disappointed to discover this was a colossal overstatement: there’s maybe 15 minutes on the ubiquitous winged rats. But they’re 15 good minutes, not least the show’s brilliantly chaotic cold open where Douglass makes one audience member drive a stuffed pigeon strapped to a remote control car around the room while others are made to try and feed it bread. For the most part Accessible Pigeon Material is a show about Douglass and his family, though he has a pleasingly idiosyncratic way of approaching what might otherwise be fairly humdrum material. There’s some great gags about Lewisham and some charming stuff about living with his ‘87-year-old flatmate’ (ie his nan, for whom pigeons were emblematic of the UK when she arrived with the Windrush generation). Best of all is a sequence where he roleplays his geezerish father while an audience member is forced to play the part of a younger Douglass trying to get his pathologically undemonstrative old man to say ‘I love you’. That this last gag isn’t pursued with quite the self lacerating viciousness it could be is indicative of the fact that Douglass basically seems like a really nice guy, making a show about the things that interest him (which includes pigeons). Perhaps he’d benefit from more rigour in the future: does he want to push the...

Ultra-nerdy standup Kieran Hodgson – a man who once did an entire hour about the 1975 European referendum – recently had a cameo role in notorious superhero flop The Flash. In fact he spoke the first line in the movie. This is so prodigiously improbable that it’s no wonder it’s the jumping off point for his new show, Voice of America.  In fact the very English Hodgson makes relatively little hay out of his turn as the character dubbed Sandwich Guy, the drawling American barista who opens the doomed Ezra Miller flicks. Of course he talks about it a lot, and is as bemused as anyone that it happened. But there’s no behind-the-scenes goss or analysis of the film itself. Rather, some initial feedback over the quality of his accent is used as a jumping off point to explore his relationship with America as a whole. To a certain extent the point of Hodgson’s unswervingly high concept stand-up shows is that they’re not especially relatable: he’s an intensely warm and likeable performer, but he pursues odd obsessions, in an eccentric manner. His last, Made in Scotland, followed his relocation to Glasgow and his attempt to immerse himself in Scottish culture and language to such a ludicrous degree that it seemed calculated to wind up anyone Scottish in the audience (which is quite a lot of people at the Edinburgh Fringe). Voice of America, though, is very relatable: it’s about the complicated relationship we all have with the US, a country that we tend to be drawn to in our youths...

We all loved US cabaret comic Cat Cohen’s debut Fringe show The Twist..? She’s Gorgeous, which eventually went on to Netflix special glory: but there was something particularly magical about its original Edinburgh Fringe run. Playing late at night in the 100-seat Pleasance Beneath, a massive part of its magic was how the young, unknown Cohen brought Streisand-scale diva-isms to the dinky venue. It was an act, of course, but her apparently colossal self-absorption registered as hilarious deluded in front of the small crowd. Success complicated this a bit: at last year’s Fringe her second show Come for Me mined a relatively similar vein of millennial diva humour, but the overweening ego of Cohen’s stage persona felt relatively less funny now that she was actually really quite popular. That Come for Me didn’t quite work in 2024 can partly be attributed to the fact the show was a couple of years older than that, and was supposed to run at the 2023 Fringe. It didn’t because at the age of 31 Cohen had a stroke: clearly a terrible thing to happen to her, but it has to be said it makes for her strongest material yet in Broad Strokes.  Cohen’s first two shows were more about the character, the songs and the vibe than opening up about her life. With the happy caveat that she is now in better health than she was before (see the show if you want medical spoilers), the question ‘what would happen to a ditsy young millennial narcissist if she had a stroke?’ is answered to perfection by...

The curiously terse title Relay seems calibrated to deflect from the fact that this is the second solo Fringe show from Welsh comic Leila Navabi, whose 2023 debut Composition was billed in the more traditional way of having her name next to it in the title. Not that she’s hiding her involvement, more that she seems to be determinedly pushing the ‘theatre’ side of a somewhat generically ambiguous storytelling show that’s co-produced by Sherman Theatre.  I raise this because on the performance I saw it was the more traditional stand-up style bits at the beginning where Navabi seemed to struggle – the audience was supportive but she didn’t quite seem to know how to work them; she needs a bit more confidence in her material. I think she was thrown by the fact she began proceedings by accidentally falling into a bank of chairs, which was obviously unfortunate but also fundamentally amusing and surely something she could have had fun with. But if the sense of nervousness never quite abates, it certainly diminishes, and Relay is basically lovely.  The Elan Isaac-directed show concerns Navabi and her partner – also a ‘brown’ female Welsh stand-up – and Navabi’s account of their efforts to conceive, a process that involved spending a lot of money at a fertility clinic before concluding they had no choice but to go for a rather more budget, rather more DIY option. With a melodica strapped around her neck for virtually the entire show, Navabi delivers this as a mix of wryly...

Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak is the new show from Victoria Melody, whose whole thing is like being a madder, lower budget Louis Theroux, who embeds herself in unusual hobbies and professions for years on end, eventually making shows about them. Undertakers, pigeon fanciers, competitive dog shows and on her last out – 2022’s Head Set – the amateur stand-up circuit. Although she deftly plays it up – she’s always had a terrific sense of comic timing – there’s no denying she is ‘a character’, and she’s fully aware of this. ‘I often make excruciating but relatable errors’ she observes, accurately. The headline hobby here is English Civil War reenactment. Kind of. As the show begins, Melody describes how, in the wake of her recent divorce, she turned up at an isolated reenactment via public transport, without knowing anyone there, much to the bemusement of the assembled armies (who all knew each other already and had come by car). Still, she found a warm welcome and was given a musketeer’s uniform by a kindly group happy to turn a blind eye to the fact she was rubbish at musketeering.  One problem: she’d actually joined because she’d fallen in love with the idea of the short-lived Civil War-era dissidents the Diggers, who advocated living off the common land of the country. But she’d fallen in with a group of Royalist re-enactors, who had nothing to do with the Diggers, a Parliamentarian concern. But as they’d been so nice, Melody simply stuck with them. This is all good...

I very much enjoyed this berserk late-night hour from Alice Cockayne, a selection of inscrutable but hilarious character sketches that might offer a sort of anxiety dream interrogation of contemporary femininity, or might just be a load of random shit that exists purely for the lolz. If that sounds hifalutin it’s definitely not: Cockayne has a colossal pair of fake boobs strapped to her for the entire show, starting with the lengthy opening scene in which she plays the deadpan owner of what one assumes to be a brothel, although all her working ‘girls’ – represented by wigs that are sometimes thrust at audience members – seem to be very old and have a lot of problems (‘riddled with neurodiversity’). Other characters include the posh, wildly overbearing Penelope Jane Pendlewitch, whose entire worth is tied up in motherhood and who claims to have had ‘556 children’; a cleaner, also apparently incredibly old, who fills the air with cleaning spray and dirty thoughts; and an Eastern European woman with incredibly long nails.  To be honest, describing the characters doesn’t make them make sense and Licensed. Professional. Trained. Qualified. is one of those balls-trippingly weird shows that would conceivably not work if it were staged for an afternoon crowd (it is currently running in the 10.40pm slot). But while the WTF absurdity is a lot of the point, it’s Cockayne’s eye for layering her oddball creations with details that defines them - the brothel sketch is, among many other...