We’re about six days into festival season at time of writing, and our reviewers have been busy slinging stars at shows like they were drunken gods of the cosmos. To help you discover the best shows happening in Edinburgh this August, here’s every five- and four-star review we’ve scribbled so far. 

Five stars

Spy Movie: The Play!
(Theatre) 
‘What a piece of absolute… nonsense. Turn off the pun-counter (it’ll overheat) and leave your cynicism at the door. Spy Movie is so stuffed full of wordplay, clowning, farce, props (so many props) and proper jokes that you might need a little lie-down afterwards.’ 
Read the full review.

Cinderella Ice Cream Seller
(Kids)
‘Little Seeds Music is a relatively new company, founded in 2020 with a digital piece that made waves during lockdown. The polish, expertise and range of talents on display from the cast of two, however (one of whom, David Gibb, also wrote the script and composed the music), would have you believing both were West End veterans.’ 
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IKEA: Magical Patterns
(Art)
‘One of the lead marketing images for this show of IKEA textiles is Inez Svensson’s Randig Banan, featuring rows of Warhol-style bananas set against black vertical stripes. It gets across something of what the Swedish store’s aesthetic is all about, incorporating the style and swagger of modern art into affordable home furnishings. In its Velvet Underground-adjacent loucheness, it’s also a reminder of how subtly radical IKEA seemed on its introduction to the UK a few decades back.’ 
Read the full review. 

John Bellany: A Life In Self-Portraiture
(Art)
‘John Bellany is revealed as a seeker in search of himself in this first major overview of the Port Seton-born artist’s work since his death in 2013. You can see it in the early 1960s drawing of the wild-haired roaring boy of the new Edinburgh art scene as he stares through the frame, flint-eyed and goatee-bearded. You can see it too in the more resigned figure of ‘Bellany At 70’ (2012), all dressed up for the occasion, eyes softer now.’ 
Read the full review.

Four stars 

Chloe Petts: Big Naturals
(Comedy)
‘The unlikely rehabilitation of lad culture, led by a self-confessed unlikely queer role model, starts here. Chloe Petts is bewildered to be approached by worried parents, concerned about the burgeoning sexuality of their daughters. After all, she’s a football obsessive who loves witnessing a rammy in a pub; a product of 1990s lad mags, the braindead swagger of Kasabian, appreciation for a pithily cruel tabloid headline and ‘big naturals’, those female ‘funbags’ that used to appear unadorned on Page 3.’
Read the full review. 

Christopher Macarthur-Boyd: Howling At The Moon
(Comedy)
‘A self-described ‘sad, speccy guy with a tote bag’, but give this wee man a mic and he’s an absolute short king. He makes it look easy; sailing absurdly between Ozempic weight loss, the Oasis reunion and boiling dirty pants in hotel kettles and finding effortless, big laughs in pretty much of all the strange ports he stops in.’ 
Read the full review. 

Foxdog Studios: Robo Bingo
(Kids)
‘Describing themselves as ‘The UK’s #1 IT consultants’, Pete Sutton and Lloyd Henning are Foxdog Studios, offering a new high-tech version of traditional bingo which the audience play along with on their phones. This futuristic, highly interactive version of the traditional game is called Robo Bingo, and while Sutton and Henning do shows for grown-ups as well, this particular version is specifically aimed at those eight and upwards.’ 

Read the full review. 

1984
(Theatre) 
‘The continued relevance of George Orwell’s great political novel doesn’t go unnoticed by theatre group Box Tale Soup, who warn audiences to switch off their ‘surveillance devices’ before it all begins, prompting nervous laughter from the crowd. Their faithful adaptation of 1984 (the tale of Winston, a middle-class grunt quietly rebelling in an authoritarian state) doesn’t feel the need to alter its plot beats for the simple reason that its themes are evergreen’ 
Read the full review. 

Midnight At The Palace
(Musical) 
‘In November 1971, the queer, avant-garde, hippy theatre troupe The Cockettes travelled from their San Francisco home to play New York. Despite success back west, the east-coast gig was a disaster played out in front of many major celebrities unimpressed by their ad-hoc style and no-rehearsal policy.’ 
Read the full review. 

Why I Stuck A Flare Up My Arse For England
(Theatre) 
‘What started as one viral moment in 2021 has turned into an Edinburgh Fringe sensation. A simple ‘orite?’ begins proceedings and what follows is a down-right dazzling performance from writer-performer Alex Hill, full of charisma, wit and emotion.’ 
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MC Hammersmith: Hippity Hoppity Get Off My Property
(Comedy)
‘MC Hammersmith (real name Will Naameh) is a freestyle improv rapper… but a very middle class one, who went to private school in west London. He fully leans into his posh-boy image, with the premise of this new show a guided walking tour of his Hammersmith Hall mansion.’ 
Read the full review. 

Jazz Emu: The Pleasure Is All Yours
(Comedy) 
‘Striding onto the stage in his ludicrous, frilly and painfully colourful costume, Jazz Emu immediately sets out his stall: to ensure his audience is ‘gruntled’. To achieve this, he treats us to a series of upbeat musical numbers embellished with entertaining video accompaniment, the highlight of which is an extremely quick-cut video diary of his daily routine.’ 
Read the full review. 

Olaf Falafel’s Stupidest Super Stupid Show: New Improved Recipe
(Kids) 
‘Fringe veteran Olaf Falafel is many things: author, illustrator, dad, football team coach, comedian and complete idiot, to name but a few. Thankfully that’s the perfect skill set for a family show that’s been packing the bairns in for years (it’s lovely watching show returners get excited when their favourite bits are announced).’ 
Read the full review. 

The Listies: Make Some Noise
(Kids)
‘If chaos, comedy and unhinged musical mayhem are your thing, Make Some Noise is the gloriously silly kids show that adults will love just as much. Returning with their signature brand of slapstick, Rich and Matt deliver an hour of riotous absurdity and a display of rather questionable musical abilities.’ 
Read the full review. 

Betty Grumble: Enemies Of Groovieness Eat Shit 
(Theatre) 
‘For an artist who relishes clown’s playfulness (even the red nose makes a triumphant appearance), Betty Grumble engages with complex ideas and dangerous emotions. Variously celebrating the work of earlier artists, most trenchantly Annie Sprinkle’s eco-sexuality, she revives the ghost of her own previous incarnations and explores the emotional impact of being a witness in the justice system.’ 
Read the full review. 

Red Like Fruit
(Theatre) 
‘Within the Fringe, Red Like Fruit is a challenging proposition: two performers, a male and a female, address the ways in which patriarchal abuses force emotional and moral betrayals of the self. With the male speaking the woman’s words, it traces a personal history of discreet incidents which have festered before being brought into dramatic focus by a journalistic investigation into a political scandal.’ 
Read the full review. 

Susan Harrison: Should I Still Be Doing This?
(Comedy) 
‘Should I Still Be Doing This? is a gloriously absurd, laugh-out-loud one-woman show that defies expectations at every turn, even before the whole thing has officially started. Hilarious character-comedian Susan Harrison can confidently say that her new Fringe hour is the only one to feature a small girl  trapped in a well while also inside the stomach of a middle-aged woman. Yes, really.’ 
Read the full review. 

Champions
(Theatre) 
‘A naked man sits in an armchair at the centre of an impressionistic version of a family living-room. There’s a TV set, a lamp and a vintage record player, surrounded by walls with only one door out. As the man breathes deep in the stillness, voices of his homophobic father, his mother, and his therapist pierce the TV static like ghosts in the machine. Film footage of two men wrestling naked (in a field, on a beach, in the sea) beams onto the walls like a reimagining of Ken Russell’s Women In Love.  As we cut between recorded snatches of real-life conversations and the on-screen struggle, it is as if all the everyday agonies swirling around inside this man’s head are being transmitted as a living installation.’ 
Read the full review. 

Aubrey Levinthal: Mirror Matter
(Art) 
‘Tall, lissom female forms stretched over settees and bedsteads, gathering on street corners like ghosts, half-concealed behind flowers or mugs, or glimpsed in reflection in the corners of mirrors. This is the captivating, melancholy world of Aubrey Levinthal, a Philadelphia-based figurative painter currently enjoying her first UK-based show. The artist was featured in a recent exhibition at Ingleby documenting the influence of Pierre Bonnard on today’s crop of young painters. In fact, Levinthal’s work hums with the echoes of a whole swathe of art history, in which a figure as vibrant and sunny as Bonnard might seem somewhat on the periphery.’ 
Read the full review. 

Resistance
(Art)
‘With radical views fighting their way into our algorithms and screens, many people have never before experienced the chaotic and often puzzling state of today's social and political climate. Left with a sense of hopelessness, it may be that now, more than ever, we need to look back. The desire to resist imposed ideals and morally bankrupt legislation has been a part of a continued thread throughout history. And this could be no more obvious than when experiencing Modern Two’s Resistance exhibition.’
Read the full review. 

David’s One-Man Band (F*ck You, Steven)
(Comedy)
‘The sweary subtitle here captures just the right angsty, adolescent feel for this deliberately overwrought performance from writer and performer Laurie Stevens. She arrives onstage in the guise of emo teen David; it’s 2006 San Francisco, all ‘hello-Moto’ ring-tones and worshipful teen adulation of bands like My Chemical Romance. David is headlining a San Francisco band night called Sticky Floors. The only problem is that bandmate Steven is a no-show; can David conquer his negative feelings and go it alone?’ 
Read the full review. 

Lou Wall: Breaking The Fifth Wall
(Comedy) 
‘There’s irony in Lou Wall’s not entirely original observations on the similarities between (male) stand-ups and serial killers. While no-one’s accusing the gleefully renegade comic of going quite that far, the Australian’s shows have a villainous skew. Displaying wonderful tech mastery and manipulation of internet content, they meld storytelling, innumerous sight gags and even beat poetry at a rate faster than the human brain can often fully process, rapid-fire humour rhythms that reinforce and comment upon each another in an irresistible manner.’ 
Read the full review. 

There's plenty more where that came from. Check out our Edinburgh Festival site for new reviews every day.