Sound Cistem
This searing, sweaty disco is a heady exploration of identity through dance. Ayden Brouwers and Lizzie Morris interviewed transgender and non-binary people aged between 18 and 25. Distanced from the assumptions and expectations that come with being seen, the interviewees speak freely; their disembodied words are revealing, insightful and emotional. Over pumping synths and hi-hats, their audio unpacks the performativity of gender in dance, the constant awareness of how they’re perceived, and the choices they have to make in nightclubs to stay safe. Read the full review. KW
Pleasance Dome, 23-29 August.
Bloody Elle
One of the reasons we go to the theatre is to feel. It’s that skin-tingling, pulse-quickening, heart-expanding sensation that comes from being in a room together sharing stories. That particular feeling is stirred up almost immediately by Lauryn Redding’s joyful new solo show. Striding on with beer in hand, toasting the audience before picking up a guitar, Redding has the musician’s swagger and the storyteller’s confiding tone. What follows is a classic chalk-and-cheese love story. Read the full review. CL
Traverse, 4-28 August.
My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?)
A decade before selfie culture kicked in, Rob Madge was a child ahead of the curve, demanding their family home-video every flamboyant performance they ever staged in their Coventry living room. It’s as well they did: those videos have propelled Madge (who is non-binary) via social media celebrity to their own autobiographical solo show. Madge, a Midlands Alan Cumming in vest and pants, replays the act-outs and homespun theatrics of their youth but, in time, this childhood diva melts into the background and their loving family emerge as the stars of the show. Read the full review. BL
Underbelly, 4-29 August.
Jordan Brookes: This Is Just What Happens
It’s quite the project, converting what Jordan Brookes does on stage – experimental, unstable, disconcerting – into something that would “work on Live at the Apollo”. But that’s Brookes’s stated ambition with his first show since the award-winning I’ve Got Nothing, three summers ago. His weirder excesses are reined in here, in what – apart from the usual formal trickery – is at least recognisable as standup. But let’s not get carried away: this remains comedy quarried from the darker subsoil of a disturbed soul, delivered by a man whose warmest smile still stirs a tincture of unease. Read the full review. BL
Monkey Barrel, 3-28 August.
This Is Paradise
Kate Regan is a woman defined by the men in her life. There’s her gentle old Belfast dad, disappointed by the company she keeps, there’s Big Joe, the teenage crush she lost in a daredevil accident, and there’s her attentive but unexciting husband, Brendy. Above all, there’s Diver, a charismatic lowlife more than 20 years her senior whose lust for life matches his appetite for destruction. If that makes Kate sound like a walking affront to the Bechdel test, there’s no sense of that in Amy Molloy’s excellent performance. She is a woman absolutely at the centre of her own story. Read the full review. MF
Traverse, 4-28 August.
Tim Key: Mulberry
Mulberry is “the story of a celebrity sealed away”, charting Key’s professional crisis, through an escalating thirst for craft beer and surprise appearances on TV quizshows. His lockdown companion, a five-foot teddy bear, stars in a handful of the funniest punchlines, while mentions of his past glories become a pleasing refrain. Key’s gift, the reason his shows always have great pace, is his poetry. He balances the swift and silly with more languorous, even poignant, prose. Whenever we veer towards pandemic tropes, there’s a poem to redirect us. Read the full review. RH
Pleasance Dome then Pleasance Courtyard, 3-28 August.
Nish Kumar: Your Power, Your Control
At a 2019 charity gig, with anti-Brexit gags blazing, Nish Kumar had a bread roll thrown at him before being booed off stage. The incident, much embellished in the press, triggered death threats, which in turn prompted a reckoning for Kumar with his brittle mental health. He’s seldom before spoken about his mental fragility, not least because (as he says in this show) he was totally in denial about it. But the keynote here is still uproarious and self-mocking, as the 36-year-old holds himself up for relentless ridicule. Read the full review. BL
Assembly George Square, 22-28 August.
La Clique
Taking the Edinburgh festival by storm back in 2004, La Clique was the show that ushered in the new wave of alt cabaret in the 00s, and its spiegeltent hosted everyone from singer Camille O’Sullivan swinging on a trapeze to Bath Boy, singers Meow Meow and Le Gateau Chocolat, and hula hooper Marawa the Amazing. Director David Bates is still seeking out the cream of the nu-cabaret scene from around the world for an edgy, sexy, joyful show full of giddy thrills and celebration. Read the full review. LW
Underbelly’s Circus Hub on the Meadows, 5-27 August.
Eavesdropping
If this were a regular show it would be something like One Million Tiny Plays About Britain. The characters of Eavesdropping include an exploited care worker, a woman in the grip of sexual arousal and a couple recalling the clubs and pubs of their youth. Together, they form a snapshot of urban life. But this is not a regular show. Rather, it’s part of ThickSkin’s Walk This Play franchise, adding to versions in Manchester, Ancoats and Huddersfield, in which you listen on headphones while walking an hour-long circuit through the city. Slickly put together, it makes for a colourful walk in the company of strangers. Read the full review. MF
Edinburgh city centre, 5-28 August.
Godot Is a Woman
Madonna released her album Like a Prayer in the same year that Samuel Beckett died. The singer’s strident sexuality trumpeted a new female confidence that the playwright would never see. If he had, theatre company Silent Faces argue, he might not have forbidden women from performing Waiting for Godot. Why does this matter? Because it excludes half of the world’s population from seeing themselves reflected in an existential parable that speaks for the whole of humanity. In a joyous song-and-dance show, this is both a burning #MeToo issue and a cheeky, geeky reflection on the patriarchal structures of authorial copyright. Read the full review. CA
Pleasance Dome, 3-28 August.
Destiny
Destiny is preparing for a big Thursday night out in rural Wiltshire. She leads us to her local nightclub, Karma, where the drinks are 50p and the evening will ultimately go sour, setting her on a path of desperate longing for love. Though her existence is littered with misfortune – including distant parenting, limited finances and sexual abuse – she is full of hope. It is difficult not to warm to Destiny, written and performed by Florence Espeut-Nickless. If her story is one we’ve probably heard before, it doesn’t make it any less authentic – and it is captivatingly told in the West Country vernacular of Destiny’s community. With endearing personality, she does them proud. Read the full review. AR
Underbelly, 4-28 August.
Catherine Bohart: This Isn’t For You
Catherine Bohart turns heartbreak into very engaging comedy as she tells the story of her journey from smug coupledom via breakup and through a year of social isolation, in which her OCD spiked and her friends assailed her with terrible advice on emotional recovery. Or was it terrible? There’s learning here as Bohart comes to an understanding of her own role in her romantic downfall after a show that pours entertaining scorn on “learn to love yourself” bromides. Read the full review. BL
Monkey Barrel, 4-28 August.
Donuts
The programme notes for Jamaal Burkmar’s show quote scenes from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Scrubs and The Office, a taster of the 90s and 00s sitcoms that inspired Donuts. There is no laugh track or wordy jokes here, but there is something warm, fun and very watchable. It’s based around three friends, sitting around at home. They play and tease, riffing off one another in choreography that is thoroughly conversational and very well observed: the delicate dynamics of friendship and the way interactions happen, how energy moves around a group and we mirror people as we connect with them. Read the full review. LW
Assembly George Square Gardens, 3-14 August.
Bloody Mary: Live!
You might consider the fraught life of Mary Tudor, England’s first queen, for a long time before thinking: standup comedy. But that’s the leap Olivia Miller has made with this punky solo, first performed in her home town of New York. It reimagines Mary as an in-yer-face Gen-Z teen, back from the dead to reprise her lurid life story, defend her name and justify that small matter of 280 heretics burned alive. Read the full review. BL
Pleasance at EICC, 3-29 August.
Far Gone
“Will you favour me with your eyes, your ears and your voice?” asks John Rwothomack, the writer and performer of this intense, atmospheric monologue. He invites us to play a child’s game while in character as a squeaky-voiced boy. But his questions become commands and take on chilling overtones as he begins his story about Okumu, a Ugandan boy abducted and forced to become a soldier and executioner. No matter how bleak the outcome, Rwothomack proves himself a captivating performer with a powerful story to tell. Read the full review. AA
Zoo Southside, 5-20 August.
Jack Docherty: Nothing But
After four decades as a sketch comic, chatshow host and most recently star of the sitcom Scot Squad, Jack Docherty is starring here for the first time as “himself”, in a solo show that recounts the fallout from a one-night stand 30 years ago. It conjures compellingly with ageing and regret, lives unlived and the painful difference between the real world and the movies. The stripped-back aesthetics, Docherty’s direct address and the verifiable biographical details all suggest a true story, which begins when the Absolutely star is riding high on his 1980s celebrity at the fringe. Read the full review. BL
Gilded Balloon at the Museum, 3-19 August.
Luke Wright: The Remains of Logan Dankworth
Luke Wright is a poet for our day and today in particular. This dramatic monologue, spoken in verse, is soaked with political – and marital – malaise. It takes us from the death of Jo Cox to Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, the EU referendum and the age of Brexit, alongside its picture of a slowly crumbling marriage. This is the third in Wright’s trilogy of political verse plays and it is an artful cross between spoken word, standup and the soapbox. Having previously explored Thatcherism and New Labour, this show sees a character called Logan Dankworth rise from student politics to mainstream political punditry. Read the full review. AA
Pleasance Courtyard, 3-29 August
Chloe Petts: Transience
Chloe Petts has established herself as one of our most compelling young comics. What she can do is wade into the thorniest conversations of our time – to do with gender fluidity, male privilege and toxic masculinity – and emerge with a show that’s all sweet nature and smiles. That she does so without soft-soaping or compromising on her own beliefs is the sign of a skilful comic – as are the jokes, which keep proceedings buoyant throughout. Read the full review. BL
Pleasance Courtyard, 3-28 August.
Hungry
At first glance, Chris Bush’s two-hander is a study of a workplace romance. Lori is a chef, stressed about getting her high-end food on the table. Bex is the new waiter, considerably less invested in the art of fine dining. They are opposites attracting. Jumping back and forth in time, the script is all snappy flirtation and lovers’ tiffs. On second glance, Hungry is a rather more nuanced study of social attitudes to food. In Katie Posner’s spare and speedy production in the Paines Plough Roundabout tent, the tension between the women reflects the values associated with what they eat. Read the full review. MF
Roundabout @ Summerhall, 3-28 August.
Liz Kingsman: One-Woman Show
Fleabag established a template for messed-up, sexually candid, ultimately redemptive female narratives, which conquered all before it – until now, when it meets its match in Kingsman’s whip-smart and delightful mickey-take. Kingsman misses no opportunity here to pull the rug from under solo-show artifice, make mincemeat of liberated-woman cliches and spoof the look-at-me egotism that – occasionally – animates one-person theatre. Read the full review. BL
Traverse, 16-28 August.
