Kate Butch’s previous Edinburgh Fringe run, Wuthering Shites, was a masterful homage to the drag queen’s inspiration, Kate Bush. Butch’s new show, A Kate in the Hand is Worth Two in the Butch, is a different creature entirely. Nominally about idioms and cultural quirks in language, but mostly it’s a stand-up show about how hard it has become to be your authentic self in 2026.
There are no songs here, just a very solidly performed stand-up show. Butch hails from Yorkshire, so we start gently with some Northern humour and a bit of a chuckle about language and Coronation Street. We roll on to some fun anecdotes about growing up and how children can be very cruel. There’s one particular angle of attack here that feels both true and hilarious at the same time, in a ‘so funny it hurts’ sort of way.
Two in the Butch feels like a careful move into the territory of ‘most beloved drag queen’ territory, with the routine diving from ‘save for TV talk shows’ before smashing forwards into decidedly not-safe-for-anything territory. Fun is poked quite firmly at the fringe itself, including the ‘Joke of the Fringe’, a marketing gimmick that escaped containment a long time ago.
We get a bit of gossip about RuPaul and all of that malarkey, but honestly that’s pretty much on the side here; the main event is Butch herself, being as real and as brutal as their heels will allow them. There’s an extended section on online bullying, namely idiots responding to Butch’s existence, and though this is a fun segment, it does lurch into therapy at points. But then one could describe the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as a thousand artists working through their trauma, so that’s fair enough.
Well-staged and full of solid gags all the way through, this is a great show. Now someone get Kate her own prime-time talk show.
