Edinburgh Festival

A young detective works against the clock as she questions a suspect who looks like the least likely person to be linked to a murder. He's a devoted son, a successful businessman and a respectable member of society. But as the minutes tick away, the detective starts to suspect that all is not what it seems... Inspired by real events, the debut play from the Tony Award-nominated co-director of SIX: The Musical is a gripping interrogation drama about power, deception, and our perspectives on the truth.

What’s the worst date you’ve ever had? Can you remember the exact date it happened and recount the evening in every detail? Sasha Ellen can, and she’s going to tell you all about it! Sasha Ellen: When Life Gives You Ellens, Make Ellenade is a stand-up show in which Ellen takes us through her recent dating life.

Trauma-based dark humour is plentiful in modern comedy – as Krystal Evans says herself, making comedy out of tragedy is the best way to take the power back from it – but none do it quite like The Hottest Girl at Burn Camp, Krystal Evans' debut hour at the Fringe.

BWW catches up with the team behind Blub Blub to chat about bringing the show to the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Nica Burns, the longstanding Director of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, has officially launched the biggest awards in live comedy at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.  

It’s a very American coming-of-age story. The script follows all the correct beats and the direction tackles the necessary points for it to be a well-paced and flowing piece of theatre, but the characters are walking clichés. Everything is done abnormally by the book, including the performances by the budding actors. It’s high-energy and quick, but it doesn’t say much. Szymkowicz covers angst and anger, attraction and pettiness, grief and overcoming it.

A frighteningly life-sized portrait of the patriarchy. Built over the course of seven years with extracts from interviews with male-identifying individuals and their own personal stories, Them is rightfully enraging. From inculcating servitude from a young age to weaponised incompetence, the company breaks open toxic masculinity to reveal its inner workings.

Dementia is a scary prospect. The fate of many and incurable, it’s inevitable and painful for the patient and their family. Featuring interviews with professionals in the field of aged care and real-life stories, The Fish Bowl is a compassionate piece of theatre.

Echlin is an incredibly gifted writer. She visualises the pain of youth and externalises it with quiet humour and breezy observations that hide deep heartbreak. With a magnetic personality and expressive, captivating eyes, she takes her audience through a confessional journey where she tries to find out who she is and why she is like that. She has no need for props or sets: a simple stool and a microphone to add dynamism to her characters are enough for her to craft a hypnotic performance. 

David Head crafts an exquisite exploration of the relationship between humanity and technology with a big dash of capitalistic doom. Five stories are tied together by the dread and threat of an artificial future. With deadpan, confidently dark humour, Head paints an alarming picture of a world that’s not too far off from where we’re standing.

Edith Alibec writes a charismatic personality with a bitter edge and a silver tongue. She is incredibly funny, with a darkly sarcastic worldview cemented by side glances and sardonic asides. We are witnesses to her pain, becoming the confidantes of her most private thoughts. She is a universally relatable individual to most millennials. From her relationship with her mother and her abandoned dreams to the search for love in the wrong places, Alibec pinpoints the contemporary malaise of the women in their 30s.

It’s dreamlike and nightmarish. Confusing and alarming. The piece works on a subliminal space, has a few jump scares, and it is, frankly, quite weird. While in earlier productions the concept was clear and definite, this instance sees a puzzling storyline that doesn’t entirely make sense.

Amongst a raft of anonymous Air BnBs in Edinburgh, thirty-something Zara is running her own business and trying to make her way in the world. A new client has just arrived, but her colleague is running late. Tensions are high

Desperate to shake her insomnia, Faye enlists the help of her brother, Naoise, to try a form of exposure therapy. But Naoise has a devastating secret that's about to explode.

When shy Aaron joins the hotel’s ramshackle team he’s faced with emotionally volatile guests, apathetic staff and inept management. Not to mention the rumour of a pair of singing ghosts haunting the corridors.

Ben Target is a critically-acclaimed performance artist and multi-award-winning comedian (yawn), but in 2020 he gave this up to become the live-in carer for an irascible octogenarian prankster. A life-affirming story about death, conveyed through the popular mediums of storytelling, servitude to the audience and live carpentry, a combination not seen on the world stage since Nazareth (circa 30AD).

My salad days were spent growing up as a teen in the Blair era. My life has been shaped by Cool Britannia, The War on Terror and Sexed Up Documents. It's in my blood and created the outline of my now fully-formed Millennial Angst. Therefore, of course I wanted to review a show, examining and laughing at the very first Pop Prime Minister. I'm just not sure I enjoyed it.

If you have a couple of hours to spare and you want to try smoky, deep, fruity, warming, delicious whiskies, while also listening to folk tales, tasting notes that will blow your mind, and live singing that will haunt your heart and soul - look no further and make sure you get a ticket to Whisky & Witches. 

If you enjoy RENT then go and see this. If you, like me, hadn't seen it and would like to, go and see this. It's not Broadway, but it's pretty close. 

“How much time do you spend worrying about your decisions?” This is a show for anxious people. Theatre-director-who-was-nearly-a-doctor Adam Lenson steps on stage directed by Hannah Moss and delivers a life-affirming piece about the what-ifs we all come across.

Tipping into the contemporary interest in murders, Chasing Butterflies is a compelling, engrossing play that will have you hooked until the very end. While the suspicions of the farsighted may be correct from the start, a riveting origin story and an extensive list of gory details keep them on their toes. While the actor is slightly too young to come off as the weathered veteran of the law, he gives an impressively intense performance. As his character slips into compulsion, he amps up the pace of his delivery to a machine-gun speed before morbid moments of silence break up the horror he hears on the news.

The town where Anna and Eireni are studying has been hit by a number of racially provoked murders. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern, except that the victims are all immigrants. While a non-existing strand of organised crime is being blamed, the two women meet after a shocking event and decide to infiltrate a far-right festival to find out what’s going on.

All in all, the production feels like it’s only at the beginning of its life, as is the company, so there’s plenty of scope to grow and become the big feminist project it strives to be. A stronger script, more decisive vision, and an external eye will make all the difference.

An audience of two steps into a small black box. They’re separated by a wall and can only hear each other through headphones when they talk into a microphone. Without Sin is an intriguing project that tugs at our contemporary need to feel.

There’s loads of theatre at the Fringe. Some is excellent, some is average, some is… questionable. Polish company Song of the Goat present a retelling of Shakeseare’s Titus Andronicus in what could simply be described as a gothic, choral, impenetrable behemoth of a production. It’s transfixing for all the wrong reasons.