Things to do in Edinburgh today

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...

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:...

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...

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: the failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, aka the Gunpowder Plot. A two-hander performed by Sophie Kean and Abby McCann, we initially meet brother plotters Thomas and Robert Wintour (aka Guy Fawkes’ less famous mates) as they’re playing a word association game in which they pass a lit match back and forth, with the loser the one holding it when it burns down. It becomes apparent from their conversation that they’re dead, and awaiting entry to ‘upstairs’ or ‘downstairs’ although I think Howlett means this as much reputationally as theologically. The fact they’re playing with matches, which didn’t really exist until at least two centuries after their deaths, suggests they’ve been here a long time and that perhaps they’re only going to go up or down when public opinion on the Plot settles.  The plot of The Plot is very heavy going indeed To that end they don a series of costumes and take on a succession of characters ranging from themselves and their fellow plotters to James I and even William Shakespeare to offer a guide to the tangled threads of the Plot, from its nuts and bolts origins, class and religious dimensions, to the full gruesomeness of Fawkes’ execution, to the way Macbeth was inspired by the...

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. But performance art duo Hotter Project is really onto something here with a show that casually sends up cringey activist theatre, while also being brilliantly accomplished, both in terms of the deft, funny way Mary Higgins and Ell Potter make use of Shakespeare’s own words (there is a big laugh for ‘oh that this too too solid flesh would melt’) but also in the way I haven’t wanted to eat any meat since I saw it. The loose idea is that Higgins and Potter have been driven to write a preposterous show because they think they can get funding for it. They do not seem convinced by the project and spend their whole time bickering away: Higgins is the precious, uptight vegan; Potter, by her own admission, was given the nickname ‘sausage queen’ after she ate 18 in a go once.  The duo’s fractious odd-couple absurdity and the fact that they treat the entire project as if they know it’s a stupid idea – they are also naked quite a lot, FYI – is nicely offset by how accomplished it actually all is: as well as some dazzling linguistic bits, there’s great stuff like the play within the play being reimagined as an S&M session between Higgins and a hapless member of the audience. Does it preach? Well maybe kind of, a bit, but certainly having confirmed meat eater Potter on...

As this new one-woman-show reminds us in more ways than one, success can be a double-edged sword.  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: its producer, Francesca Moody, has been responsible for a series of solo shows that have in recent years almost single handedly resurrected the festival’s reputation as the place to spot the stage and screen stars of tomorrow. Fleabag and Baby Reindeer are the biggies and 2024’s Weather Girl may well join the list when its A24-produced adaptation debuts on Netflix. So you can see why a new Moody-produced solo show staged in perpetually hip Summerhall is an easy sell, and has featured in just about every preview theatre list for the festival. Does it pile on too much pressure, though?  Roleplay does not hide its light under a bushel, beginning as it does with Reilly strutting into the room in a bra and panties, before whipping off the former and grinding away topless to thunderous strippercore beats. She’s Danni, the host of a little-listened to podcast that seems to exist to both celebrate and satirise sex positivity: ‘hey slut’, is how she greets her callers. That might have been the sum of her career, but a series of shady behind-the-scenes events leads to her being offered serious money by a big American corporation to make the show a mainstay of their empire. The catch is, she needs to show she can...

Paul Ready is possibly a more familiar face than name, insofar as the actor has a low public profile that includes a couple of very high profile TV roles, notably hitman Lee in the shocking drama Utopia, and loveable sadsack dad Kevin in beloved sitcom Motherland. He’s also a stage regular, often at the Globe, which is run by his wife Michelle Terry, but Little Animals does feel like a real step into the spotlight for him, being a one-man-show that he’s written and performs. It follows two lifelong friends – or at least, lifelong until Richard dies – and charts how the climate crisis drives a wedge between them. Directed by Caroline Steinbeis, the intimate lo-fi performance is staged at the Lyceum under the auspices of the Traverse.

This review is from the Southbank Centre in London. Evita Too transfers to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2026. ‘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. It’s a good question. Rollerskate in said state of undress while a video of Andrew Lloyd Webber DJing Phantom of the Opera plays? Travel to Argentina, then Spain, in an attempt to track down a living historical figure they’ve become obsessed with? Write a musical about this woman that leads to a lightly threatening (and extremely passive aggressive) email from Lloyd Webber’s legal team? It’s something theatremakers Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole have been thinking a lot about since they became interested in Isabel Perón, the second wife of Argentinian president Juan Perón. Of course, as their earlier project DollyWould proved, a play about a prominent woman is more than a simple biopic when done by Sh!t Theatre. That show explored the inevitability of death by way of Dolly Parton; here, under Ursula Martinez’s direction, they wrestle with legacy, memory, grief, having (and not having) children, and even democracy. The result is a predictably anarchic production, one rife with levity and remarkable profundity. While most audience members won’t have heard of Isabel – I certainly hadn’t – we know of Juan’s first wife, Eva, remembered in life, history, and Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical as Evita. Evita...

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 directed by Cora Bissett with songs by KT Tunstall, it follows Andy (Dylan Wood), a feckless one-hit wonder singer-songwriter now reduced to gigging in Glasgow pubs. But then, after a particularly shitty gig, he meets Joe (Jamie Rea, who co-wrote the short Bissett film the play is based upon). A saintly deaf guy, he lets Andy crash at his flat, whereupon the guest discovers that his host has a notebook full of killer lyrics and a laptop full of sick beats. The two tentatively start a collaboration – but as soon as Andy gets his commercial mojo back, perfidious record industry types start trying to rip them apart. The Singer preaches a strongly inclusive message about the deaf community, both in terms of their being marginalised and undervalued generally, but also specifically regarding the fact that they absolutely appreciate and indeed write music – something Andy is initially bemused by. It is a deeply good-hearted play. My issue with it is that – accepting some swears – it feels like it was written for an audience of five-year-olds. Bissett has made some good stuff in the past, but it usually comes saddled with an improving message and here the message has simply overridden...