Things to do in Edinburgh this week

Joe Kent-Waters’s second show is exactly what I wanted it to be, which is to say that it’s basically a bigger budget remake of his first show.  In case you missed it, Kent-Waters made a huge impression at last year’s Fringe – winning the Best Newcomer award – with his creation Frankie Monroe, a hulking, gravelly-voiced, white-faced men’s club owner and self-declared ‘biggest bastard in Yorkshire’. The improbable longevity of his anachronistic Rotherham working men’s club was the result of a pact Frankie had signed with the Devil 25 years previously – and in debut show Joe-Kent Waters is Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!! the Devil came to collect, the show culminating in him being dragged to Hell, ‘by the balls’. Joe Kent-Waters is Frankie Monroe: DEAD!!! (Good Fun Time) is the direct sequel: it begins in Hell, where Frankie is essentially practising almost exactly the same schtick to the souls of the damned as he was to the men of Rotherham (who I’m sure are two very different groups of people). The jokes are different, but it’s the same character doing the same shtick in a similar way – an audience member is picked on to a remarkable extent; a puppet dog is deployed. And it’s brilliant, the best show I’ve seen at the Fringe this year. Sometimes it’s death to return to what you did last time out, but it was exactly the right decision for Kent-Waters. Most crucially, the joke is still funny. Frankie – a sort of monstrous amalgam of Brian Potter and Papa Lazaru – remains a wonderful...

The story of the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland must be like catnip to James Graham, who has become the pre-eminent playwright in the country by writing niche dramas about unfathomably British subjects and unerringly striking box office gold. The 2008 financial crash (does anyone still call it the credit crunch?) has long been documented in drama: Lucy Prebble’s surreal breakthrough play ENRON emerged as early as 2009, while Stefanno Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy offered a more oblique take in 2013. The British end of things has largely been ignored by dramatists: you’re clearly not going to get an American playwright writing about the Royal Bank of Scotland, and for British writers the fact our nation saw RBS’s collapse first hand perhaps left it less in need of an urgent response. Now, though, it’s 17 years on: high time the tale was told properly. And what a tale Graham has cooked up: if you were worried there wouldn’t be enough material for one play, then the problem with Make It Happen is that there’s actually material for at least three.  One is a sweeping historical drama about the close knit, hidebound world of Edinburgh banking over the last three centuries.  One is about Adam Smith, the Scottish godfather of capitalism itself, here played by the great Brian Cox in what amounts to a juicy supporting role. And then there’s the ‘main’ plot, which follows the now infamous Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, a dour Paisley accountant with no formal banking qualifications...

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...

The omens were always good for Ohio, which is produced by Fleabag and Baby Reindeer hitmaker Francesca Moody and had a transfer to the Young Vic nailed on months before the Fringe started.  It’s the work of Abigail and Shaun Bengson, aka indie folk duo the Bengsons, aka a band you probably haven’t heard of if you live over here because their oeuvre seems to largely consist of theatrical performance pieces that haven’t toured outside of the US… until now. I’m not going to pretend I know much more about them than the above paragraph but if I had to guess I’d venture that Ohio was intentionally devised with the object of introducing the duo to an overseas audience. It’s a potted history of the pair’s lives, albeit a dreamy, impressionistic one, starting with Shaun explaining how he lied to his son about the existence of an afterlife in order to cheer him up. It then moves through such subjects as the worm Abigail had as a childhood pet, Shaun’s loss of the Christian faith of his childhood, and the degeneration of his hearing that led to him developing severe and incrementally increasing tinnitus. It’s hard to describe the show formally. The pair would make good kids’ TV presenters - she’s bouncy and ebullient, he’s dry and courteous. There is definitely a presentational aspect to the whole thing: I learned an awful lot about the mechanics of tinnitus! There’s also an intoxicating wildness to it all: despite literally beginning with a denial of the existence of God, the whole...

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...

At the beginning of their new show Philosophy of the World, the three members of In Bed with My Brother – that’s Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory – shuffle on sheepishly to announce that they’re now so skint that they’ve been forced to write a commercial show with a linear narrative that will feature absolutely no nudity. This is all a lie (apart from probably the being skint part) and what follows continues the trio’s tradition of coming up with shows that actually sound like middlebrow-awards bait, but are in fact splenetic leftfield punk-rock conflagrations in which they take their tops off. So there was Tricky Second Album, their show ‘about’ the KLF burning a million, that was really a caustic takedown of the exploitative nature of the theatre industry. Most recently, PRIME_TIME at the Barbican was an assault on Jeff Bezos so frenzied that it didn’t concern itself with any sort of contextualisation or scene setting but just consisted of an escalating series of insults and murder fantasies – hating elevated to raw art.  Now they’ve (sort of) set their sights on The Shaggs, one of the all-time great musical oddities. Hailing from smalltown New Hampshire, the sibling trio’s domineering father was told by a fortune teller that his daughters would be in a successful rock band, something he chose to wholeheartedly believe. And so throughout the late ’60s and first half of the ’70s, Dorothy, Betty and Helen Wiggin were dragooned into becoming The Shaggs, who recorded a...

I think we can all agree at that this stage in human history, no genre – or subgenre, whatever – has been more comprehensively done to death than the dinner party reunion play. I say this not to criticise Northern Irish playwright Karis Kelly for having the temerity to write a drama in which four female generations of the Gillespie familiy gather for the occasion of Eileen’s ninetieth birthday and drinks are taken, secrets are revealed etcetera etcetera. But I do wonder if some of the wackier decisions at the end come from a well-meaning but ill-advised desire to break the mould. In fact for much of its length Katie Posner’s production for Paines Plough makes for a perfectly decent play, even if it does have a familiar rhythm. Julia Dearden is great fun as the sweary, outspokenly Unionist Eileen; Andrea Irvine, Caoimhe Farren and Muireann Ni Fhaogáin are all solid as, respectively, Eileen’s mumsy but on edge daughter Gilly, strident granddaughter Jenny and sensitive English great granddaughter Muireann. Everything putters on nicely, with Dearden’s caustic comic performance keeping things lively as we edge towards revelations about the whereabouts of Gilly and Jenny’s absent husbands. And then Consumed goes totally nuts, with a trio of mountingly bombastic twists fired off in bewilderingly rapid succession. The whereabouts of Jenny’s husband turns out to be fairly pedestrian. Gilly’s is wild. And a further revelation from Eileen is just totally out there, pitching the whole...

With three Netflix specials under her belt following the global headlines she made with her merciless set of Trump-baiting at the 2018 White House correspondents’ dinner, US comic Michelle Wolf is firmly in the big leagues and a great get for the 2025 Fringe, albeit for one week only. Wolf’s wide-eyed delivery contrasts nicely with her sharp one-liners and silly meanderings on topics such as sports, dating, gender and politics. She's ace.

I’m basically a theatre critic who occasionally inflicts himself on comedy shows, and I have to say what really impressed me about Nish Kumar’s new show was his diction. Probably the country’s most mainstream overtly leftwing comic, Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe is a bit like being run over by a freight train. He doesn’t ease us into a concept or anything, he just mentions that he’s toured this show to the US and that friends asked him what it was like out there and then he ‘discusses’ the current state of America in a tone that strongly suggests he’s having a rage induced panic attack. The funniest thing about the title is that it’s never explained because it doesn’t need to be explained. The show is very loud, very fast, and there was nary a moment in which I didn’t feel concerned about his wellbeing. And yet the man truly does have terrific diction: shouting at full volume and breakneck pace, not a syllable is lost.  Even though one of the many anxieties Kumar expresses throughout is that he doesn’t really have ‘an act’ and this is just what he’s like all the time, this is clearly not entirely true. You can view him as a sort of anti-Stewart Lee, eschewing all structural trickery in favour of blurting out his panicked inner monologue at deafening volume. But of course his rants are tightly structured, and frankly the sheer stamina needed to deliver them is impressive. Plus you can’t be the anti-Stewart Lee when you both have routines about how awful you think Ricky Gervais...

Seiriol Davies’s giddily preposterous musical is a true Edinburgh Fringe classic, having originated at the festival back in 2016. A larky collision of Gilbert & Sullivan and Monty Python, it tells the story of Henry Paget, the fifth Marquess of Anglesea, a flamboyant Victorian nobleman who frittered away a fortune converting the family chapel into a theatre and staging his own terrible plays there at enormous expense. Alex Swift’s original production did really quite well for itself, but in the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Paget’s birth How To Win Against History is back in a new upgraded production from incoming Stratford East boss Lisa Spirling. Exactly how different it is to the original is TBC – frankly it would be fine if it was unchanged – but the original cast of Davies, Matthew Blake and Dylan Townley are all returning for the Francesca Moody and Bristol Old Vic-produced revival.