Reviews 

A single figure stands on a lonely bare stage, surrounded by nothing but a simple wire frame bed, a scattering of scratchy sheets and a backdrop of the countryside. But is that backdrop the rolling hills of home, childhood days spent playing in the woods and water, or a daunting danger laden sparsity of no mans land? For young soldier Private Tommo Peaceful, it is both. He’s counting down the hours, spending the night awake and alone as he thinks about his life, looks back on

It takes great skill to construct a story from just one single suggestion, making that story last an hour between just two performers and a pianist takes that skill to even higher levels. But this is Graham and Steen, named by Broadway World as the cool guys of improv, and here they are to construct a story so silly, so hilarious and so bonkers that your sides will ache from laughing. Performing at the Edinburgh Fringe for three nights only, I feel extremely lucky that I was

With the Edinburgh fringe, you find yourself desperately trying to see as much as possible and in doing so you have to be quite picky. And when you need your schedule to work out just right, there can be those shows that slip through the cracks simply because the timing just doesn’t work out right. That was the case for me and 5 Mistakes That Changed History, a show I wanted to see but could never make work. But this year, the stars aligned and it finally fit into my schedule

PowerPoints. You hear that one word and suddenly you’re flooded with flashbacks of your school days, work meetings and even that dreaded ‘next slide please’ from the Covid days. But this is PowerPoints like you’ve never seen them before, used not to feed us data and information but instead used in the most creative of fashions to make us laugh. This is PowerPoinDexter, the new show from PowerPoint comedian Ted Hill fresh from his golden buzzer on Britain’s Got Talent. He reac

With thousands of shows covering numerous genres available to choose from at the world famous Edinburgh Fringe, there are countless styles of shows to enjoy and you never know there might be something different and altogether unique that might catch your eye all because you are a fan of the genre. That is exactly what happened to me with the brilliant Solve Along Murder She Wrote as a lover of a good old murder mystery. Murder She Wrote ran for 12 seasons between 1984 and 199

Remember, remember, the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. That’s the rhyme that everyone knows, about the story that everyone knows. But why would you want to know the truth when you can instead enjoy the chaos that comes with WIT Theatre Company’s hilarious retelling that plays wildly with what we know and flips it entirely in its head? Remember, Remember has been talk of the town this fringe season, selling out the Queen Dome and delighting with its absurd, over

With a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, through several variations, improv could quite possibly be one of the most said and most heard words in the entire Edinburgh Fringe, especially in the flyering zones, but it remains one of the most popular genres out of everything that is on offer. Improv done well can see tickets flying out the door, and if you are lucky enough to have a ticket to see Murder She Didn't write by Degrees of Error burning a hole in your pocke

One of the many things about attending the Edinburgh Fringe year after year is the opportunity both to discover shows and/or performers that you become a fan of and to revisit them year after year. It was a couple of years ago that I first attended a Christopher Hall stand up show, then in Gilded Balloon at the Museum, and it was one of the funniest things I saw that year. So when I found that Hall was returning this year with his new show Pizazz, I knew I simply had to be th

What do you get when you combine two actors with several moments in history, high levels of audience participation and even higher levels of silliness? You get The Past, an hilarious whistle stop tour through history from Cleopatra and the Christmas Football match in no man’s land, to Henry VIII and cavemen. Sean Wareing and Freddie Walker of the Fishing4Chips theatre company don victorian style striped bathing suits and rattle through sketch after sketch, flying with moment

Comedy is perhaps what the Edinburgh Fringe is best known for, and with that comes the flurry of stand up comedians that flock to the city each summer, so many that it can be near on impossible to choose. You have your big names, established and most likely seen on our television screens, and the new talent just starting to make a name for themselves looking up to those big names with admiration. Then somewhere in the middle you have the names that some know and some don’t ne

The story of Noah, his ark and the animals marched in two by two is pretty well known and you wouldn’t think that, with the exception of the 2007 film Evan Almighty, it would be a story that could be converted into a comedy never mind one that is so silly, so ridiculous, so stupid in the best way that it will have you laughing out load and turning around in your seat just so you can try and take it all in. But here we are with our host Nathaniel Jones, playing Noah with a shi

A stalwart of the Edinburgh Fringe for many, many years, News Revue takes the hot topics of current affairs and turns them into comedy skits often including parody songs played out by a small cast who swap and change between characters. It’s a popular choice for fringe goers who, perhaps bogged down by the news (and let’s be honest, who isn’t at the moment), wish to see it turned on its head and to be given a chance to laugh at it. News stories being covered and joked about i

After becoming one of the hottest tickets in town during the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, the sea-faring, all singing, all dancing musical Shantify returns to Assembly’s Palais du Variete with new songs, a slightly reworked story and more energy than ever. With the story set in a fishing village, we are introduced to six young men who outside of their daily lives most look forward to their evenings in the local pub where they perform as the Barnacle Bouys, turning hit songs into se

The Edinburgh Fringe gives those wanting to use theatre and art to tell a personal story a stage (literally) and there are lots of moving, important and exciting stories out there to be told. These type of stories can be windows into the lives of the performers, glimpses into moments of their lives that touched them, meant a lot to them and perhaps even changed the way in which their lives were heading. And all of this is brought to life in My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Ins

What happens when you activate a super spy making machine, in the depths of the Second World War, without realising that there is a moth trapped inside the mechanism? Well, what doesn’t happen is the creation of a super spy. Instead, out steps a beast, part human part moth, 100% mystery and a creature that becomes a myth, lurking in the woods of West Virgina, hunted for years but never found. Flash forward and three friends following in the footsteps of the explorer they love

The beauty of the Edinburgh Fringe lies not only in the sheer amount of shows on offer but also in the recommendations of others. Someone may suggest seeing a show that hasn’t even come across your radar, but let me tell you, sometimes a recommendation can lead you to something great. Afronauts was a show that I hadn’t come across in the vast lists of available productions, but upon a recommendation I decided to give it a go, and it was one of the greatest surprises of the fr

With the Edinburgh Fringe, there is always so much to see, so much to choose from and I’m here to tell you that sometimes it’s just worth giving something a go, because you might just stumble across a gem that stays with you. That is exactly what happened to me during my first ever trip to the fringe in 2022 when I found a show called The Importance of Being…Earnest? By a company called Say It Again, Sorry? Since that day this show, now called simply …Earnest? Has become a hu

The local pub can often be seen as the community hub, a home away from home and a second family, and for Alan it’s where he grew up. Surrounded by his father’s nicknamed friends, as a young teenager he becomes the guard of their favourite chairs, the runner to the bar and back and their companion in the Jolly Fisherman pub. But times are changing for young Alan (Alex Hill) who delights in having the same forehead as his same named father and adores Lil the barmaid who looks o

When it comes to shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, it would be stranger and harder to find a show that doesn’t feature audience interaction then one that does, but no other features quite as much as the work of Highly Suspect who construct and perform murder mysteries where the audience are the detective and have 70 minutes to catch the killer. In Abbasolute Murder, it’s filming day for the Continental Song Contest and you are in the viewing room. The Host Hugh Eurovision, along

Wonder, Jadoo, Hex, The Remarkable Ben Hart and now The Labyrinth; five years of attending the Edinburgh Fringe and five years of having my mind well and truly boggled by the one and only Ben Hart. A magician like no other, who takes you on a journey like no other, seamlessly blending storytelling, legends, comedy and incredible magic into something extraordinary, completely such mind blowing magical achievements that there really is no point trying to work out how he does it

The Trojan Horse is legendary, a mythological tale of trickery, soldiers hidden into a vast wooden horse wheeled into the city of Troy under the guise of being a gift. Referenced on several occasions in tales such as The Odyssey, you would be forgiven for thinking it’s a topic that wouldn’t suit a comedy makeover but theatre company Fishing 4 Chips have taken up residence at the Edinburgh Fringe to prove that soldiers hiding in a wooden horse (that may or may not have had a b

What makes being a musical theatre fan so wonderful is that everyone has different opinions and that everyone likes different things, but even so there are some things that we can all agree on and that is that sometimes there are musicals that are just bad. They can be badly received by the critics, be a complete lose at the bank and run for only a handful of performances, but hidden in a pile of terrible can be a little glittering gem; one song that redeems a bad musical. An

When a local memorial bench is discovered destroyed after a heinous act of arson one morning, a sleepy sector of Exeter comes alive with suspicion, accusation and curtain twitching. The neighbourhood watch are up in arms, the hearsay is flying and whilst the police have been notified, there is another prepared to piece together the evidence, comedian Mike Wozniak, who has strong ties to the area. With Mike Wozniak: The Bench, a busy house at the beautiful Assembly Hall are t

The Edinburgh is big, bold and beautiful, and somewhere that provides a stage to big names and new starters. Fresh new talent can find their space there, a launch pad for little shows grown in schools, universities and drama groups that fit in and fly between the big players. Small fish, big pond, you might say, but these fish are swimming upstream. Most definitely in the case of the Newcastle University Theatre Society who present their comical farce Love Labour's Found writ

Often celebrated as one of the greatest composers in the history of musical theatre, Fringe shows often choose to sing Andrew Lloyd Webber's praises in thank yous and love letters, but musical comedy duo Flo and Joan take things down a different route returning to the fringe with their 2024 hit One Man Musical, which offers a hilarious satirical glance at the life and work of the theatre impresario. As the name suggests, we see just one cast member (albeit flanked by Flo and