Things to do in Edinburgh this week

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? Well maybe, although it’s all done in a very Elf Lyons-ish way. For at least the first 10 minutes there is no way you’d even begin to suspect that’s what was up, as Lyons – in an elaborate cocktail dress with enormous sleeves that keep slipping off distractingly – wanders in on barefoot tippy toes (as if she were wearing high heels) and launches into a breathy, faux femme-fatale film-noir accent as she takes a series of phone calls from ‘her husband’ (on bananas). ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asks. Dry ice pours out of her dress. Eventually she gets an audience member up to read a script, which she lip syncs to as he reads it. The script divulges that last year, she broke up with her fiancé just a couple of months before her wedding, and as the show wears on it becomes clear that she was utterly devastated by this.   Woman on the Edge is a mass of dissociations: the ’40s screen-siren character is an abstract avatar of Lyons’ grief and the marriage that never was, which is for the most part only addressed via the script read by the audience member and by recordings (also lip synced to) of friends detailing what a mess...

I really loved Frankie Thompson’s previous Fringe shows Catts and Body Show (the latter made in collaboration with Liv Ello). Both of them were out-there satirical collages of video and voice recordings in which Thompson came across like a clown-world Adam Curtis, with her performance revolving around her dramatically lip syncing to the piece while serving a series of comical, otherworldly looks.  I suppose they gave the impression that Thompson was a gifted but vulnerable Gen Z savant, who barely spoke at all using her own voice: performing, but also hiding behind the recorded audio visuals. 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: clad in a polkadot gown, her persona is as a posh, slightly eccentric despot (think Queenie from Blackadder) who commands the room with a withering imperiousness, pulling faces of pure horror any time anyone threatens to interact with her.  She also vomits a lot. Nothing health and safety need to worry about, but with every dry heave another horrible thing is cued up. Some are nauseating: that recording of a freaky nine-year-old Jacob Reese Mogg you’ve probably heard before; a 1995 interview with the Tory whips office intimating that they’ve smoothed over instances of child rape; Cliff Richard. There is much less video than the previous shows, but each...

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. Follow-up Golden is of course very funny, a mediation on getting older and settling down in which Shah mines some sharp, oft-idiosyncratic laughs from buying a flat, getting married, and the amusement that comes from being a total (probably) autistic mess of neuroses and depression and being in a relationship with a woman who is almost comically ‘normal’. But is it reasonable to say that Shah is moving slightly away from comedy with Golden, a show whose heart lies in impassioned rants about family, mortality, the state of the British state and I guess maybe you could say the meaning of life?  I mean it’s hard to unequivocally say ‘Ahir Shah is aiming to be less funny now’ when it may be that Golden will eventually take on a more amusing final form. But the version I saw was certainly unafraid not to be serious. This sounds like I’m damning what with faint praise. But for the most part I found the most impassioned moments – including a new ending he wrote shortly before the run started, for reasons you’ll discover – absolutely sublime. Some of this stuff is in terms of subject matter not a million miles away from Peter Kay. But while Kay’s musings on family etcetera are, ah, what they are, Shah’s anguished, erudite screeds are utterly hypnotic - again and...

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.  As we enter, Norris is jogging at a treadmill, surrounded by a large metal frame. Throughout the show he will alternate running on the treadmill with clambering on the bars, often hanging off them at alarming angles as he tells his tale.  Or, not quite his tale. Although based on true events, it’s a fictionalised version, with a protagonist named Chris, not Ben. As a young teenager in Nottingham, Chris did extraordinarily well in cross county at school, leading to his joining the county’s under-15s running team, a path that would lead him – little by little – to selection by Team GB. Norris’ poetic monologue doesn’t really phrase all this as a story of exuberant youthful triumph, or even obsession, exactly. It’s more that as a young man, he came to an understanding of what he was for. As his body changed shape – lean and wiry – and he became laser focussed on things like the expensive running shoes he needed to replace at regulated intervals, his life progressed methodically, in a single, clear direction. A relationship with a fellow young athlete is briefly touched upon – she asks him about whether he’s happy and even that doesn”t sound quite right – he simply belongs, doing...

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. With a capacity of 80, it’s built around three wooden tiers of seating, three massive sauna stoves, and the art of aufguss, a sauna ritual involving scented ice and elaborate towel flapping performed by ‘sauna masters’. This is Britain, so obviously you don’t go in naked: you need swimwear and a towel, both of which can be rented if you don’t have your own.  I won’t lie: I do not like saunas: I find the whole process of deliberately getting overly hot and sweaty faintly insane, and for that reason – and because I only saw two shows of its lively daily programme – I’m not going to do a traditional starred review here because one, I spent the whole time mildly bugging out, and two, I think judging some of this stuff out of five is a bit weird as to some extent I’d be rating the concept of saunas. The main thing you need to know is that while the shows have a 90-minute-plus running time, you get turfed out every 12 minutes or so to cool down in very cold showers and a plunge pool. This stops you dying of sauna, although it made for...

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. That’s not to say that Andrew Doherty’s Reviewers Welcome… TO DIE! and Adam Riches’ The Critic’s Way are similar to each other, because they’re not. But what I loved about Doherty’s show was that it was obviously personal; a man miffed by the three-star reviews dished out to his previous show now channelling his petty annoyance into a massively unreasonable but very funny Lovecraftian revenge fantasy. I’m sure veteran oddball Riches has a lifetime of gripes against comedy critics (who are explicitly his target vs Doherty’s theatre critics) but his show comes across as less enjoyably personal. As with a lot of his work, it’s loopy character study in which he loses himself in an immaculate accent. Here he is Caliban Munroe, a plummy, self-regarding Scots comedy critic who is hosting a ‘masterclass’ for wannabe critics based around his magnum opus The Critic’s Way, a ‘52 page’ pamphlet of pure, self-indulgent drivel. It’s wilfully silly: Riches has crafted a story about a deluded, down-on-his-luck oddball who has shades of a more highfalutin Alan Partridge during one of his lower ebbs. Talking us through a career that peaked with a long stint working for The Scotsman (which he recently departed under a cloud), Munroe is now attempting...

Chipper provocateur Hannah Maxwell’s new show leans heavily on an autobiographical account of her secretive work in ‘strategic communications’ during the pandemic era. Left-leaning, queer, and well-spoken, Maxwell sheepishly walks us through the time she allowed herself to be recruited to not MI5 but what amounts to a sort of clandestine advertising agency, her years of filling in Arts Council funding grants being deemed sufficient qualification by a uni mate who worked there. (To be clear she tell us what she can about it – we don’t find out loads about office life beyond the fact it had a spectacular array of breakfast cereals). Her rise and fall at the agency makes for a drolly gripping story, her fish-out-of water experience (although to be clear, she was never a spy) ending when she freaked out after her identity came close to being compromised. This of course all resonates nicely with the show’s wider themes of the way in which big tech and authoritarian regimes manipulate our lives via the data they keep on us, via many routes but most especially our phones. It’s all entertainingly punctuated by a series of jolly diversionary tasks and karaoke numbers Maxwell sets for us as she switches between a series of daft Bond-themed costumes (tux, Blofeld suit, white bikini). Her rise and fall at a secret agency makes for a drolly gripping story It’s a well-meaning and interesting show, amusingly delivered, but I felt confused by some of its tonal shifts and logical leaps:...

If the advent of Saturday Night Live UK has offered an Edinburgh Fringe boost for the stars of the show performing here then it’s also offered a calling care to SNL UK’s legion of writers – many of them terrific stand-ups who presumably came close to being included in the performing line-up but there was simply no room for them. One suspects Bella Hull would have been a shoo in 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. Who cares if she’s a mean girl when the jokes are this funny? Her schtick on Mad Cow Disease is relentlessly ironic, relentlessly acidic and extremely funny. She wields withering disdain like a samurai with a sword and clearly lies as easily as she breathes, with an opening routine that ends with as spectacularly stone-cold piece of rug-pulling as I’ve ever seen in a comedy show. I’ve no doubt she mines her real life for inspiration: it is not unbelievable that she spent 2025 single; her whole extremely amusing reminiscence about having a chaotic upbringing being raised by her mum and grandma would surely be too random to have made up. But she applies a zingy, lightly poisonous filter to everything – a sequence where she is gratuitously horrible about her flatmate is funny precisely because it’s so wildly over the top. I guess the underpinning assumption...

Adam Riches’ virtually method approach to comedy – in which he loses himself entirely in a character and accent – has taken a logical turn in the last couple of years, with him now making one-man-shows that sit in the theatre section of the Edinburgh Fringe programme. They’re still funny, but that’s not the main point of these detailed characted studies of real life figures.  Last year it was Jimmy, in which Riches took on the persona of Jimmy Connors, a complicated, pathologically competitive tennis star of the ’70s who’d fallen into obscurity before making an extraordinary comeback in 1991. There are definitely similarities to its follow-up, The Captain. Both concern quixotic-bordering-on-eccentric real-life figures, who were written off only to triumph… in a fairly qualified way. The captain in question is James Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel (in 1875), a feat that was all the more remarkable because despite this being the great Victorian age of exploration, almost nobody gave a hoot about what Webb was trying to do: swimming was only just starting to tentatively take off as lesiure activity and wouldn’t really become popular until the early 20th century. The really big difference between Riches’ two theatre shows is that we do not see The Captain from Webb’s point of view. Instead it’s that of his swimming coach Fred Beckwith, a kind of Ishmael to Webb’s Ahab. It’s a smart move, I think: despite the century separating Webb and Connors’ lives, I can see...

Paddy Young is annoyingly handsome and has one of the best gigs in British comedy, being the co-anchor of SNL UK’s Weekend Update.  So you’d think a stand-up show bemoaning that he’s a permanently single loser might not entirely convince. But no, he’s all good: Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? kicks off with a joke so kamikaze inappropriate that you have to think there’s a vague chance of it escaping isolation and screwing up his career. So probably best not share it here. Young’s surreal, somewhat poetic set paints him as an arch oddball whose singledom can be attributed to weirdness, moroseness and an inability to comprehend the rules of life in general. He obsesses over the first girl he kissed, reasoning she is the answer to his funk, tracking her down to Copenhagen and planning to fly out to see her; he dates a group of 30 men (called ‘the lads’) all at once, a logistical nightmare; he stews over his housemate’s greater romantic success and takes petty solace in the fact he has the better hair of the two. I would say most of this is very definitely made up, but Young’s stand-up has its own weird artificial gravity that kind of means that even if you don’t believe what he’s saying to, you know what he means: the man we see before us is a massive loser, or at least he is for the purposes of the show. And reality and tall tales are amusingly blurred – I don’t believe Young dated 30 men at once but I do believe he injured his hand in a freak accident with a samurai sword...