Edinburgh Fringe and International Festival Reviews 2025

One of the buzziest and frankly most bewildering hits of this year’s fringe is Club NVRLND, a work of (I guess) immersive club theatre that attracted a very large, very enthusiastic crowd on the Tuesday night I saw it.

Pantomime in August? Oh no it isn’t! It isn’t, actually. True, She’s Behind You is a self-penned celebration of the daming career of Edinburgh panto legend Johnny McKnight, that’s performed by him in full Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz-themed outfit. And he does throw sweets to the audience.But he also swears a lot and eschews a fairytale plot in favour of an autobiographical night in which he shares stories from his career in panto, something that has taken up much of his adulthood.

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…

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)…

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…

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…

Andrew Doherty’s idiosyncratic folk horror comedy Gay Witch Sex Cult was one of the most arresting stand up debuts at last year’s Fringe. And its follow up Sad Gay AIDS Play is a lot of fun. But it also sails into tropier waters than its predecessor, and though hardly a run of the mill stand up show, it does feel like it’s treading on some pretty well worn ground.

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’…

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…

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…

This enjoyable if extremely lightweight musical is based around a substantially made-up version of the complicated relationship that existed between tech titans Steve Jobs and Bill Gates…

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… 

This is a nice way to start the Traverse’s Fringe programme: performer Gary McNair’s monologue ‘ A Gambler’s Guide to Dying’ is a tribute to his grandfather that blends a nostalgic warmth and a few good chuckles with some smart stuff about the nature of storytelling…