The final stretch of Edinburgh Festival season is upon us. In that time, our band of reviewers have descended from fresh-faced youths to sallow-eyed husks of human beings, dragging their exhausted frames through hundreds of shows (it’s a fun job but my god is it tiring). 

Below are all the four- and five-star reviews we’ve scribbled over the past week. Want more? Here are our round-ups from Wednesday 13 August, Friday 8 August and Monday 4 August.

Five stars 

Cat Cohen: Broad Strokes 
(Comedy)
‘If the irrepressible Cat Cohen can survive her adolescent drama teacher telling her that she was “normal”, then the peerless American performer can survive anything. The comic and cabaret star was preparing for the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe when she had a stroke, a terrifying event for someone only 32 at the time. Into each life a little rain must fall, however. And Cohen, who’s experienced more than her fair share of precipitation, fashions a dazzling silver lining from the clouds of that dark summer. With her delivery of glam, glittering showtunes laced with puckish wordplay, self-lacerating wit and aloof snark, all woven through stream of consciousness, oversharing stand-up and tickling of the crowd’s bellies, Broad Strokes is a tour de force of musical comedy.’ 
Read the full review. 

The Genesis 
(Dance) 
‘How spoilt for circus we have become at the Fringe, when the first human tower of three which the Copenhagen Collective build in The Genesis barely draws a gasp. The bar is high for August acrobatics in Edinburgh, raised by companies like Circa and Gravity And Other Myths, both of whom have now made the shift from the Fringe to the International Festival. But what the global plethora of circuses, all with elite acrobats, have created is a culture that is constantly pushing itself, always evolving, and striving to dream up more challenging and impressive feats, both in virtuosic flashiness and in texture and grace.’ 
Read the full review. 

Small Town Boys 
(Dance) 
‘Right from the start of Small Town Boys, there’s a sense of something different in the air. Even climbing the steps at Zoo Southside feels a bit like piling up one of those difficult-to-negotiate staircases at some dingy Cowgate club. As the audience enter, we become part of the action (bring your dancing shoes) and the cast of eight professional dancers are supplemented by a community cast that fill the stage. It’s clear that Thomas Small’s Dundee-based Shaper/Caper company is serious about engagement and inclusion; a burning desire to create, to process and to protest drives the urgency of this piece as much as the Hi-NRG beats of its fabulous soundtrack.’ 
Read the full review.

Philosophy Of The World
(Theatre) 
‘Tom Cruise take note: this is not a tribute show to The Shaggs, the 1960s all-female trio who were once described as the best worst band ever. This latter pronouncement may partly explain why Mr Cruise bought the rights to the story of those New Hampshire sisters who were forced by their father to form a band which they named after a hairstyle; but that’s not what this show by the three dervish-like provocateurs who make up the In Bed With My Brother troupe is about.’ 
Read the full review. 

Mary, Queen Of Scots
(Dance) 
‘If you tried to count the interesting creative decisions that have made their way into Scottish Ballet’s new production, you would run out of fingers in the first ten minutes. And then completely lose count by the half-hour mark. Co-creators Sophie Laplane and James Bonas may be at the helm of this remarkable ballet, but the entire collaborative team has let their imagination run wild. Stylistically, choreographically, musically and dramatically, Mary, Queen Of Scots isn’t just a gift that keeps on giving, it’s like a game of pass-the-parcel with a fascinating new layer to unwrap every few minutes. ‘ 
Read the full review.

La Clemenza di Tito
(Music) 
‘It’s no secret that funding uncertainty has impacted the scale of this year’s EIF programme, which is surely no small part of the reason two of this year’s operatic highlights are in concert, rather than staged form. Operas in concert often invite a deeper intimacy with the music though, and this performance of Mozart’s final opera, La Clemenza di Tito, was a perfect example.’ 
Read the full review. 

Thanks For Being Here
(Theatre) 
‘Despite being Fringe veterans, Ontroerend Goed remain on another level. Ostensibly an act of gratitude to their audience, Thanks For Being Here replaces the aggression of their earlier work with a sly, intellectual wit while deconstructing the nature of performance itself. The boundaries between stage, auditorium and even the outside world are made porous, and the use of pre-recorded speech, live video and humour offer a lesson in theatricality that simultaneously eschews and embraces the spectacular.’ 
Read the full review. 

Piotr Anderszewski
(Music) 
‘Piotr Anderszewski is an extraordinary pianist. Modest in demeanour but colossal in what he achieves, his Queen’s Hall recital was profoundly rooted in two composers. His selection of a dozen or so Intermezzi and other short pieces by Brahms, one leading straight into the next for a non-stop three quarters of an hour, wasn’t exactly as listed on the printed programme; but that hardly mattered. This was an immersive experience of Brahms, where the pianist’s absorption in an outpouring of music written towards the end of the German’s life was, in turn, totally absorbing for the audience.’ 
Read the full review. 

Four stars 

Falling In Love With Mr Dellamort 
(Musical) 
‘Meet Mr Dellamort. Like his cinematic cousin in Meet Joe Black, his name barely disguises a personification of Death. The saturnine Mr Dellamort (Robert Tripolino) is the Grim Reaper himself in this new musical from MTTM Theatrics, but in an unexpectedly romantic narrative, maybe he’s not so grim; three strangers get letters inviting them to Dellamort’s secluded seaside manor on New Year’s Eve, but why?’ 
Read the full review.

Vołosi
(Music) 
‘”I’m amazed they’re not knackered,” an audience member remarked as the members of Vołosi enjoyed a final bow to rapturous applause. Indeed, this Polish five-piece commit to their rocket-fuelled, high-energy interpretation of traditional music with a nerve-shredding intensity that leaves them near breathless at each song’s close.’ 
Read the full review. 

Ian Smith: Foot Spa Half Empty
(Comedy) 
‘Dressed head to toe in green, Ian Smith is instantly disarming as he bounces onto the stage. Considering it’s barely a Saturday afternoon, he’s packed out the room, the audience eager to be regaled with tales of infertility, identity struggles, and a sort-of avian armageddon that takes place in a beer garden. The laughs come easily as Smith is a natural storyteller, the kind of high-school class clown who’s aged into a sharper comic without losing his charm or likability.’ 
Read the full review.

Alabaster DePlume
(Music) 
‘Alabaster DePlume bounces on stage like a hippy Tigger for his intimate show. The sofa and bean bag arrangement for the audience is as perfect as the patchwork of rugs set up for the artist also known as Angus Fairbairn to hold forth as the other Mancunian maverick to headline Edinburgh last week. Drawing from his recent A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole album, DePlume’s mix of spiritual jazz saxophone and homespun poetic wisdom is given low-slung texture by wordless vocalist Mikey Kenney, Rozi Plain on bass and drummer extraordinaire Seb Rochford. The sitar on the ground goes teasingly untouched until the end of the set, but when finally used makes for an unforgettable finale.’ 
Read the full review.

Creepy Boys: Slugs
(Comedy) 
‘When Sam Kruger and SE Grummett commit, they truly commit. The Canadian clown duo previously set themselves apart with their adolescently anarchic 2023 show Creepy Boys. But Slugs takes the pair’s boundary-pushing art-comedy to the extreme. Oozing onto stage as ghastly, outsize gastropods, viscously vomiting up all manner of paraphernalia, it’s a solid visual metaphor for the abrupt manner in which they share everything over the course of this hour.’
Read the full review.

Ria Lina: Riabellion
(Comedy) 
‘‘Your face doesn’t look British’. That’s the opener: a slur from a member of the public, met by a furious Ria Lina. The verbal obliteration he receives has the crowd in pieces. Lina kicks off with fast, funny, forensic takes on race, gender and the baffling things strangers think it’s fine to say out loud. As a mother of three teenagers, she’s used to feisty debates; yet she’s gentle with the audience, interacting in a pally way, even darting around before the show begins to make sure everyone’s comfortable.’ 
Read the full review.

Eat The Rich (But Maybe Not Me Mates x)
(Theatre) 
‘Meet Jade. Like many ambitious working-class young women, she’s too smart to stay where she is for long. As Scouse as a Ken Dodd joke and with attitude to match, when life in a call centre no longer appeals, Jade works her false eyelashes off and gets herself into Cambridge. Soon, Jade has a crash course in campus snobbery as she gets a job as a cleaner to subsidise her course fees, bags herself a dim but fit posh boy, and is left with an imposter syndrome the size of the Mersey despite being smarter than pretty much anyone else there. Only when she meets a kindred spirit on the train north does her real education begin.‘ 
Read the full review.

By A Thread
(Circus) 
‘The simple joy of a game of cats’ cradle (where string is tangled into shapes by fingers) is given a giant upscale in this inventive show from Australian circus company One Fell Swoop. The string here is a ships-rigging thick rope on a double pulley which spans the stage, while the fingers are replaced by seven acrobats who pull, twist, knot and dangle themselves into all manner of patterns; and look as if they are having a whale of a time doing it.’ 
Read the full review.

Jena Friedman: Motherf*cker
(Comedy) 
‘US comedian and writer (and Oscar nominee for the Borat sequel) Jena Friedman makes her long-awaited return to the Fringe with a blistering hour of righteous fury. After entering the stage to the turgid caterwaul of Lee Greenwood’s now-Trump anthem, ‘God Bless The USA’, while waving her Star-Spangled Banner, Friedman quickly punctures any notions of genuine American patriotism by furiously dismantling the current regime with a scalpel-sharp diatribe. Not long into her warm-up, she makes a satirical joke conflating the tragedies of 9/11 and Donald Trump that clearly establishes her impeccable writing skills before segueing to extraordinary material that Friedman gets away with thanks to her scrupulous delivery.’ 
Read the full review.

Joe Tracini: Ten Things I Hate About Me 
(Comedy) 
‘It’s been a tough few years for Joe Tracini. Lockdowns, a botched book launch, even the queen dying. It’s not easy for someone living with borderline personality disorder as he explains in Ten Things I Hate About Me. From dancing on Twitter to stints in rehab as ‘the ugliest guy on Hollyoaks’, this show is a deep dive into the inner workings of Tracini’s mind. Interspersed with moving songs on the ukulele and hilarious pictures from his childhood, he leads the audience on an emotional multimedia journey through his day-to-day life. It’s not a laugh-a-minute show, nor does it try to be. Instead, it’s a tender mix of comedy and storytelling where the humour is soft, unhurried and all the more powerful for it.’ 
Read the full review.

Bryan Safi: Are You Mad At Me??
(Comedy) 
‘Fans of Bryan Safi as the co-host of the hit podcast Attitudes will be familiar with his comedic skills. However, there’s no doubt that he will have a surge of new fans after his Fringe debut. In a word, it’s hilarious. After arriving on stage and singing about some cold-hearted snakes in his life, Safi is raring to go. After a truly excellent joke about a British supermarket, he explores his nature of people-pleasing and leads the audience in a game of ‘Homophobia Or Serving?’, inspired by his mother’s remarks to him growing up. When it comes to his audience interaction, it’s a blast. Climbing all over the seats and sitting down next to us, he’s earned that trust.’ 
Read the full review.

Apocalypse Cabaret: Songs For The End Of The World
(Cabaret) 
‘Scout Durwood’s Apocalypse Cabaret: Songs For The End Of The World is a Malbec-drenched, anarchic solo spectacle that lures audiences in with karaoke chaos and nihilist humour; only to subvert expectations with an emotionally resonant journey. Beginning as a riotous end-of-days cabaret, where Durwood belts out pop bangers and existential musings with deadpan wit and flair. Beneath the satire lies a brilliant script that gradually deconstructs its own absurdity.’ 
Read the full review.

Cutting The Tightrope
(Theatre) 
‘A year after Arts Council England warned arts companies against making political statements comes Cutting The Tightrope (subtitled The Divorce Of Politics From Art), a collection of short plays interrogating censorship and the UK’s complicity in genocide. The show begins with a satirical speech from the ‘festival director’ asking us to be considerate of those who might be offended before transitioning into an imagined pitch-meeting between the ghost of Hind Rajab (the six-year-old who was killed in Gaza last year by the Israeli army) and a theatre programmer, who can’t or won’t put on her play.’ 
Read the full review. 

Mending Nets
(Theatre) 
‘Gentle yet resonant, Janis Mackay and Nada Shawa’s Mending Nets, is a weaving of poetry, dance, and storytelling into a tapestry of shared humanity. Created as a bridge between Scotland and Palestine, the show is intimate in scale but expansive in emotional reach; and the entire room can feel it. Punctuated with Shawa’s poetry, which is lyrical, direct and unflinching, her reflections on Gaza through spoken word sequences like “Indigenous Soul”, pierce through the gentility of the physical performance with a quiet urgency. Yet even in its most painful moments, the show never loses grace. Shawa and Mackay’s movements merge seamlessly, integrating into the storytelling, each complementing the other’s fluidity.’ 
Read the full review.

Krystal Evans: A Star Is Burnt
(Comedy) 
‘For anyone who didn’t catch Krystal Evans’ show last year, she opens with a video featuring a chirpy song recounting her childhood trauma as a burn victim so you can catch up, littering her intro with a slew of punchlines before even arriving onstage. From there, she picks up where she left off, recounting waitressing jobs in hotels for the super-rich, finding love with a Scottish chef, and harbouring a dream to try stand-up comedy (à la A Star Is Born). There’s always a risk of setting yourself up for a fall when discussing your rise to (near) stardom, but Evans has more than earned her bout of self-congratulation.’ 
Read the full review.

Midnight In Nashville
(Theatre) 
‘Marcy Aurora is back. After 20 years in the slammer, the former country music queen is in the studio with a fistful of songs and a story to tell. The only tale the press is interested in, alas, is how Marcy ended up in jail. Marcy, however, has a record to make. The everyday heartache of Lee Papa’s new play could be set to a million country numbers and is brought to life here by Biz Lyon as a hard-bitten Marcy. She is accompanied by Catherine Mieses as Colleen, the studio engineer coming along for the ride, who knows Marcy’s real-life back-catalogue better than anyone else, egging her on with brutal honesty.’ 
Read the full review.

Lily Blumkin: Nice Try
(Comedy) 
‘Twelve-year-old Lily Blumkin time-travels in to make fun of her 28-year-old self for still clinging on to a childhood dream of becoming a star. But New Yorker Blumkin has done well to ignore her inner smartass cynic and focus on the many other voices in her head instead. Like the wannabe stand-up comic Rabbi grabbing the mic at a Jewish funeral to drop some ‘zingers’, or her ex-boyfriend accidentally confessing his crush on his best dude-bro friend. Nice Try is a one-woman show, with help from Chappell Roan and Charli xcx, Blumkin sliding competently between the painfully supportive dad trying to be down with the queer kids and grinning like a try-hard klutz showing allyship to his gay daughter, to embodying the drunk HR woman singing at the office party like a canary about the gender pay gap.’ 
Read the full review.

Float 
(Theatre) 
‘Indra Wilson sits on stage, surrounded by boxes filled with the items that will help her recount her life experiences of loss and grief. Dressed in a silver spacesuit, Wilson shares her lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut and travelling to space. With the help of NASA (and a sweet-talking, smooth-jazz playing, wine-drinking, small-talking box), she embarks on a mission. Float’s exploration of space, with its simple yet striking set design, uses handmade props, light, reflections and colour to create the vessel for a poetic journey into the galaxy, where every word carries a double meaning.’ 
Read the full review.

Hot Mess
(Theatre) 
‘The Earth is recovering from a long-term relationship with the tyrannosaurus rex and is ready to mingle. An appearance from the slightly odd Humanity does not seem promising at first, but once desire has been kindled, the inevitable heartbreak and climate chaos is only a matter of tunes away. A musical exploring the destruction of the climate by an idiot species is a break from generic romances, but by setting the toxic behaviour of homo sapiens in the context of dating opens up both humour and insight.’ 
Read the full review. 

The Box Show 
(Kids) 
‘Keeping kids glued to their seats for an hour usually calls for junk TV. The Box Show pulls it off with junkyard theatre. And all without even speaking a real language, just a bubbling gibberish fizzing with random bursts of English, French and Spanish (there may be other tongues in there). There’s no real plot for little minds to lose, only four big personalities in technicolor outfits, a towering set of cardboard boxes and a soundtrack built live from every boom, bang and boing the performers can coax out of their surroundings.’ 
Read the full review.

Shunga Alert
(Theatre) 
‘A classic romance featuring the quest by an artist, an AI girlfriend and a sex-bot to save the world through the creation of heritage-protected pornography, Shunga Alert is a late-night romp through Japanese sexual culture. Bawdy and hyper-kinetic, it uses shadow puppetry and interludes featuring the traditional shunga erotic paintings to cast a sex-positive eye over unfamiliar activities, before defeating a demon and reuniting the artist with his missing beloved.’ Read the full review. 

About A Hero 
(Film) 
‘”A computer will not make a film as good as mine in 4500 years.” This Werner Herzog quote acts as the launchpad for a knotted examination of generative AI, in which a machine-learning tool has been trained on Herzog’s body of work to write a murder mystery. Within a matter of minutes, the line between reality and deepfakery becomes impossible to distinguish as the meme-able Bavarian’s aesthetic is (somewhat) replicated. Who is a real actor and who is a synthetic recreation? Are the visual artefacts appearing on screen a product of machine learning or a deliberate red herring from director Piotr Winiewicz? Is the absurdist dialogue and baffling structure an artistic choice in the manner of F For Fake or a technical glitch? 
Read the full review. 

Dregs 
(Theatre) 
‘Opening with the tranquil lilt of the ocean, society’s fractured relationship with nature thrums in the background of this inventive two-hander performed in spoken English and BSL simultaneously. A human and a selkie meet in a Glasgow club and soon find themselves on a chaotic adventure as they travel through the city’s nightlife to discover exactly how this magical creature’s life has become straitjacketed by dry land.’ 
Read the full review.

Cutting Through Rocks
(Film) 
‘Cutting Through Rocks is a striking new documentary that captures one woman’s quiet rebellion in the heart of rural Iran. It tells the story of Sara Shahverdi, the first woman elected to the village council in her rural community. Co-directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, the film chronicles Shahverdi’s attempts to challenge patriarchal norms that pervade the very sand around her. She does this by fighting for the rights of women, teaching teenage girls to ride motorcycles and working to end child marriage.’ 
Read the full review.

Susie McCabe: Best Behaviour
(Comedy) 
‘To put it very mildly, Susie McCabe has not had an easy time of it lately: in July last year, she survived a heart attack aged just 44. After some delightful warm-up material here, she launches into Best Behaviour with some wonderful gags at what she sees as the inevitability of her almost-fatal condition. Jokes about Scots’ ill-health are rife at the Fringe (usually by English performers), and it takes real skill to make this stuff work. Deservedly performing on one of the Fringe’s biggest stages, McCabe makes use of her vast space well, pacing around and occasionally teetering on the front edge to make a point. Her observational material hits every mark, including a long section on the industrial toasters used for hotel breakfasts that would have been rote in other comedians’ hands.’ 
Read the full review.

2025 Salem Witch Trial
(Theatre) 
‘”Love thy neighbour” is one of the most commonly quoted phrases from the bible, and yet it’s one which not all Christians ascribe to, as Gretchen Wylder discovered in alarming circumstances. Wylder was raised in a religious household, and for a while believed she was a good Christian: this must be why she didn’t fancy boys. Fast forward a few years and she came out as a lesbian and developed an interest in tarot. On moving to New York her parents offered to pay her rent for a year if she would submit to conversion therapy, including electric shock treatment. You can see why doubt in her faith began to creep in. How could a religion that professes love treat people so cruelly?’
Read the full review.

Derek Mitchell: Goblin
(Theatre) 
‘Derek Mitchell steps on stage in a quintessential early-2000s emo-kid outfit: eyeliner, choppy black wig, long-sleeve striped shirt under a black-skull t-shirt, and skinny jeans. Welcome back to high school, where Eliot faces all the angst of puberty and the pressure to fit into the status quo. In a room full of ‘goblins’, no audience member is safe as Mitchell commands the space with piercing eye contact, intensity, and emotion, calling upon even those in the back row.’ 
Read the full review.

Rosco McClelland: How Could Hell Be Any Worse? 
(Comedy) 
‘Rosco McClelland begins How Could Hell Be Any Worse? by explaining that he poured everything into his last Fringe show, one that included a revelation about his diagnosis of Long QT (sometimes known by the less-formal and more-horrific sobriquet ‘sudden death syndrome’). He says that he needed to ease off this Fringe and he starts his new show by lamenting that, while the past year was good for him professionally, it was not a good one for him personally. On the plus side, he won the prestigious Sir Billy Connolly Spirit Of Glasgow Award, a cachet that puts him in the legendary esteem of Susie McCabe and Janey Godley. And he demonstrates just how he achieved that with this engrossing hour packed with smart observations and hilarious stories.’ 
Read the full review.

Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares
(Theatre) 
‘In a city rammed to bursting with sequins, rock anthems, dancing potatoes and stomach-churning acrobatics, sometimes what really sets a performer apart is quality star power. And Tony Award winner Laura Benanti brings it in resplendent glory. But for all that influence and prestige, Nobody Cares lets the Broadway star get a little more grounded. Featuring original songs co-written with Todd Almond, this one-woman cabaret is a masterclass in showbiz storytelling enabling this people pleaser to realise that everyone has their own problems.’ 
Read the full review.

Scott Turnbull Presents... Surreally Good
 (Theatre) 
‘Teesside’s silliest billy, Scott Turnbull lights up a Summerhall basement in this projection-based hour of absurdist comedy. The show is a succession story of sorts: Turnbull seeks to preserve the legacy of his father by saving the family ‘edutainment’ enterprise from falling under the too-sensible control of one David Wilkes-Booth. The trademark Turnbull blend of education and entertainment, by contrast, is delightfully bizarre. For the education element, his live animations follow loose narratives that might very tentatively be categorised under the theme of social decay, with certain substantial caveats. An animation about youth degradation, for example, inexplicably centres a vampiric-rabbit seductress from Stoke-on-Trent.’ 
Read the full review.

Flick
(Theatre) 
‘Flick is no angel working as a nurse on the frontline of a palliative care ward. When hunky pyrotechnics expert Mark moves into Room 13, his presence puts a much-needed spring in her step and a rustle in her scrubs. This leads Flick to break a heap of professional protocols as she imagines fireworks of her own that don’t turn out quite as planned. Writer/performer Madelaine Nunn hits the ground running as Flick with a quick-fire series of gallows-humour gags that only health professionals could get away with. ‘ 
Read the full review.

Jamali Maddix: Aston
(Comedy) 
‘Before Jamali Maddix even appears, the atmosphere is set: Busta Rhymes on the speakers, a restless late-night crowd. When he takes to the stage, it’s with a relaxed swagger, chatting loosely, giggling at his own thoughts, and instantly pulling the room into his orbit. Maddix begins by teasing the audience with some questionable opinions on cheating; he’s deliberately poking the bear, daring the tipsy 10pm crowd to bite back. This is where he’s at his best: reactive, fiery, sparring with whoever takes the bait. His set meanders through relationships, politics, ethnicity, body image and travel, spoken with a masculine, bantering energy that feels intimate and conversational, like you’re shooting the shit in a McDonald’s drive-thru at midnight. You get the feeling he’d laugh at your jokes, too.’ 
Read the full review.

Priscillified: Drag, Disco And Desert Drama
(Cabaret) 
‘Priscillified: Drag, Disco And Desert Drama takes place in a small venue but Dean Misdale clearly intends on bringing the house down at Freddy’s. After a note-perfect rendition of “It’s Raining Men”, the audience are introduced to the queen herself, unapologetically queer and living her fabulous life out loud. Seeing such a glamorous drag show outside of the wee hours and watched by an audience not normally associated with such a thing is refreshing. Misdale absolutely thrives on the attention and the applause they most certainly deserve. In between musical numbers, Misdale shares stories from their drag career (such as navigating the pandemic to embracing their growing confidence) and those stories are just as engaging as the songs.’
Read the full review. 

Score 
(Dance) 
‘Three dancers sit in front of us, strapped into vests of tangled wires and electric boxes that connect to various tapes and pads on their bodies. It looks for all the world as if something terrible is about to happen, and perhaps for the dancers it is. These boxes are wired in to a computer which has been coded with a ‘score’ of electronic pulses, each of which will fire zaps into their muscles making them twinge and twitch. The choreography is pre-determined, and the robots make the decision as to which of the dancers’ body parts move.’ 
Read the full review.

Issy Knowles: Body Count
(Theatre) 
‘Body Count is a one-woman show about autonomy, revenge, god, girlhood and the audacious project of sleeping with 1000 OnlyFans subscribers at the Fringe. Bold, confrontational and unapologetic, it blends humour, discomfort and cultural commentary in equal measure. With Channel 4’s Bonnie Blue documentary airing only weeks before, this show comes to Edinburgh as a zeitgeisty satire on sex work at a moment of national fixation. Onstage, Issy Knowles (as Polly) greets subscribers in a blue silk robe, body parts flashing as she scatters condoms across the crowd. Steely-eyed and defiant, she insists that she’s doing something she loves. It’s funny, but uneasy. A spectrum of vile men enter the room, all played by Knowles, who switches between them with ease: crying, humiliating, attacking and pulling off a spectacular south London accent.’ 
Read the full review.

Biff To The Future
(Comedy) 
‘Those of us who lived through the cult teen films of the 80s are often a little perturbed when revisiting them some 40 years later. Whether it’s the gaping plot holes, glaring misogyny or general daftness, they rarely hold up to the scrutiny of today’s sensibilities (but don’t you dare come at Dirty Dancing). Cleverly, that’s part of the schtick of Biff To The Future, a Back To The Future parody show that doesn’t gloss over the nonsensical science, heavy-handed foreshadowing and (ahem) almost-incest plotline of the original. But it does it from a place of love, and the viewpoint of antagonist Biff Tannen, which creates a fun hour of comedy theatre.’ 
Read the full review.

Hold The Line
(Theatre) 
‘Hold The Line is a powerful and deeply moving exploration of those unseen heroes working behind the scenes at the NHS 111 helpline. The play follows Gary, a Geordie actor (played by Sam Macgregor) who relocates to London and takes on a job as a health advisor at the height of covid, only to find himself, five years later, still tethered to the headset. Through sharp, darkly comic episodes and poignant drama, the show immerses the audience in a high-pressure world of emergency call handling. The ringing never stops, the calls never slow down and the emotional whiplash is relentless.’ 
Read the full review.

Josh Elton: Away With The Fairies 
(Comedy) 
‘The absolute madness of the comedy industry means that a comedian like Josh Elton can have a decade of experience but also be launching his debut hour in a windowless conference room in a four-star hotel in the Grassmarket to an audience of ten. That said, he’s clearly put his time to good use, creating a finely crafted, well-balanced set that brings the laughs and tugs on the heartstrings. Growing up in Swansea is the starting point for his comedy journey, and he deftly weaves together childhood bullying, sibling rivalry and the necessary narcissism of any comedian. Truth and the nature of jokes is a well-trodden path (there’s that narcissism again) but Elton brings fresh insight in his final third that lands more than a few truth-bombs.’
Read the full review. 

Lucy Pearman: Lunartic 
(Comedy) 
‘Looking like Su Pollard got trapped in one of those small shiny pop-up tents when it snapped shut on her, Lucy Pearman plays The Moon. Bored with being outshone by all the stars, she’s popped down to get some attention. This is a thorough delight of a show with such a simple set-up, the success of which lies in the performer’s complete commitment to her charming celestial character. Pearman frequently leaves the stage to move about the audience having been hilariously helped off it by a burly man: it’s clearly very difficult to manoeuvre around when you’re trapped in a circular disc.’ 
Read the full review.

ROTUS: Receptionist Of The United States
(Theatre)
‘Performed with appropriate vim and perky enthusiasm, ROTUS: Receptionist Of The United States plunges into the politics of a Republican White House to reveal that party machine’s cynical brutality. Chastity Quirk believes that she is a player, the receptionist to the President and a spy for a power-broker. Her ambitions are matched by an effective manipulation of male insecurity and arrogance; a desk full of baked goods and sweets is enough to win trust and establish herself as a not threatening presence while the administration plots to save the nation from liberals.’ 
Read the full review. 

Main Picture: Dev Bowman.