Books

Meera Sodha

If you’ve followed Meera Sodha’s food column in The Guardian, you might already be looking to try and replicate one of her veggie or vegan recipes (or begging someone else to) even before this opening sentence is done. For these two events Sodha will chat about her book Dinner (and, yes, prepare a dish from it) with Chitra Ramaswamy, and then later alongside Julie Linn will discuss the meals she prepared which helped her recover from burnout.
Edinburgh Futures Institute, 19 August, 1pm, 5pm.

Art

Eva Rothschild

The acclaimed Dublin artist takes over three spaces at Fruitmarket for The Void Presses The Wall. Highly suggestive of the urban landscape, her sculptures aim to create ‘bodily encounters in space’ and platform the spatial relationship between the viewer and the object. Rothschild represented Ireland at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and from 2012 there’s some fun footage online of some young boys ‘engaging’ with her art when they think no one is looking.
Fruitmarket, until 11 October.

Film

Borges And Me

Based on the 2020 ‘novelised memoir’ by Jay Parini of a Highlands road trip he took with Jorge Luis Borges in the early 70s, Marc Turtletaub’s film covers this meeting of two very different people who nevertheless bonded and got up to all sorts. Such as getting lost in a maze in Scone and having a close shave while rowing on Loch Ness. Fionn Whitehead and Luis Gnecco are the two leads accompanied by a fine supporting Scottish cast including Morven Christie, Peter Mullan, Alan Cumming (been very quiet recently so it’s nice to see him busy again), Stuart Bowman and Freya Mavor.
Cameo, 15 August, 6.30pm; 16 August, 6.15pm; Cineworld, 17 August, 4.30pm; Filmhouse, 18 August, 6.30pm.

Fringe

Charlene Kaye

This Hawaii-born, Arizona-bred comic and musician has collaborated with the likes of Margaret Cho and Darren Criss, but most amusingly has fronted some parody bands. See if you can guess who they might be in ‘homage’ to: No Gout, Guns N’ Hoses and Labiahead (if you need more a clue for the latter, their slogan is Hail To The Queef. Smart. Now, Charlene Kaye is doing a full Fringe run with Diversity Shredder, all about her days in the biz and the sad but depressingly predictable attitudes she’s had to confront.
Gilded Balloon Teviot, 5–30 August, 8.20pm.

International

Clown Show

Geoff Sobelle is no stranger to the International Festival having previously brought us immersive works about notions of the domestic (Home) and consumption (Food) and now he’s turning to the idea that clowning represents the chaos and collapse of society, most specifically that of the USA. As Sobelle himself puts it, ‘this is a show of/about chaos, things falling apart, the centre not holding, the slow-moving and sometimes fast-moving shitshow of disaster, failure and catastrophe… also, it’s a comedy. Sort of. It’s certainly a clown show.’
King’s Theatre, 27–29 August, 8pm; 29 August, 2pm; 30 August, 3pm.

Jazz

Soweto Kinch

Marking the grand finale of this year’s Jazz And Blues Festival is this performance from the MC and composer who’s scooped some shiny awards in his time: Mobos and Urban Music gongs adorn his mantlepiece while he also received a Mercury nomination in 2003 for his debut collection Conversations With The Unseen. Here, he teams up with Joshua Vadiveloo on bass and Louis Hamilton-Foad on drums for a spellbinding night of bebop and hip hop.
George Square Spiegeltent, 26 July, 8.30pm.

TV

TV Festival

After several decades of hosting the International TV Festival, Edinburgh is (reluctantly) passing the baton over to Manchester from 2027. This industry event is going out with quite the bang though as Gary Oldman will be in town to receive the Global Icon Award. The Slow Horses star was quoted as saying that being bestowed with such a prize was ‘enormously flattering and faintly alarming’. Davina McCall will also be smiling for the cameras when she gets the Outstanding Achievement gong while YouTube executive Pedro Pina is set to deliver the James McTaggart Memorial Lecture.
EICC, 25–28 August; main picture: David Loftus.

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