Review Category: Events

 Weddings are a useful topic when it comes to comedy. Weddings are expensive, filled with people who are either drunk or emotionally vulnerable (or both), and tend to gather together a collection of folk who don’t really hang out. Absolutely perfect ground for both comedy and tragedy. But mostly comedy, because weddings are supposed to be happy events.

Mark Vigeant’s  The Best Man Show is a comedic one-man show about an older brother who has been asked to deliver a speech at his brother’s wedding. We open with Mark’s character, Paul, talking loudly on the phone and setting the scene. We, the audience, have been to an unconventional wedding; it was a polyamorous, Lord of the Rings-themed affair with crystals and elvish, apparently.  Paul is drunk and has a speech prepared. And he’s totally going to go over his allotted five minutes. Things will not go well for Paul, and we are here to laugh at his misfortune.

This is a fun idea for a comedy show; Vigeant wheels about the stage, sloshing his can of (obviously water) whilst interacting with the audience. Various folk at the show are recruited to be in the wedding party, and this is mostly done by sticking hats on someone and giving them a simple line or task. There is one extended scene about Paul’s daughter and wife, which uses volunteers from the crowd and is all too real in terms of embarrassment, however. This makes it incredibly funny. It’s solid crowd work, and very well done.

As a showcase for Mark Vigeant’s talents, this is excellent, and we will be seeking out their stand-up and keeping an eye on what they do next.

The Best Man Show works because it feels relatable, and then Vigeant kicks it up a notch into absurdity.  Vigeant is incredibly good at reading the crowd, and even though you can see much of the humour coming a mile off, you can’t look away and end up laughing even harder. Hilarious, chaotic and utterly enthralling; go see if you can.

You can book tickets for the Edinburgh Fringe show here and learn more about Mark Vigeant here.

Short stories told by one performer work quite well in the intimate spaces that you find with fringe theatre. Shallowspace Cryotech Feverdream is a sci-fi short from Elastic Fantastic, a queer storytelling group. It’s the tale of August, a person selected to be one of twelve humans launched into space in an attempt to preserve something of humanity’s story, following the collapse of the Earth.

August is mostly frozen in place, left to ‘sleep’ in a highly advanced spacecraft intended to go far into the stars and warn future civilisations of the folly of mankind.  It’s an archive of humanity, vainly sent out into the stars in the slim hope that something of our civilisation will survive. August is meant to be woken up once every thousand years or so, perform some safety checks and return to their rest. Of course, all is not what it seems, and things start to go wrong.

Stories like this are incredibly character-dependent, and fortunately, actor Callie O’Brien nails it. They are both believable as a candidate in this strange space program and also as a human being lost in space and time, stranded with no hope of anyone else to talk to. There is some mild body-horror and the story wobbles a bit in terms of tone.  Though the story works perfectly fine as it is, we’d have love to have seen a version that had been given more funding. 

This sci-fi take on a desert island story, with added climate change and identity messaging, really does work. Engaging and fascinating science fiction, with an incredible performance and an important story. Haunting and well thought out, a wonderful mix of old sci-fi tropes and modern storytelling. 

You can book tickets for the Edinburgh Fringe show here and learn more about the creators here.

One of the things we love about Fringe theatre is the way that topics and ideas that simply wouldn’t be discussed aren’t just aired out, but can often be celebrated. Take, for example, shunga, the ancient Japanese erotic art produced in the ukiyo-e/woodblock style. Essentially naughty art, but in a 17th-century style.

This established has come under attack in recent years, partially due to Western standards of art invading another culture, sidelining and censoring this peculiar art style, which has deep historic roots in Japanese art history. Shunga Alert is a comedic show about Shunga and its history. Part lecture and part cartoon-clown show, it’s a rare yet fascinating collection of ideas.

We’ve got two teams of performers working together: the excellent Book of Shadowz (who also do Space Hippo) on the projector screen using shadows and puppets, and the excellent clown theatre group GUMBO. It’s a good team up, the silliness of GUMBO works well with the light projections to allow for a cartoony style of story-telling. It feels very much like a radical art style, even though it draws on some very established techniques to get its message across.

Shunga Alert combines projector-based animation and clown comedy to tell a silly tale of censorship. We have three heroes: Mame, Pleasure, and Pain. One is a terrible artist who lacks confidence in themselves, one is an AI girlfriend, and the final member of our team is a pleasure robot who keeps forgetting who they are. Together, they help fight the forces of censorship and promote personal and consensual freedoms.

This is bawdy fun for grown-ups who enjoy a good innuendo, and don’t mind the odd lesson in art history. After all, most of art history is founded in human passion, and this will always be the case no matter how hard we try to rewrite history.

Stand-out weird fun, exactly the sort of thing we come to the fringe to see.

You can book for Edinburgh Fringe shows here, find out more about future shows here.

Foxdog Studios has been pushing the envelope in terms of technology and comedy for years now.  The former IT consultancy shifted to comedy some time ago, and we’re very glad they did. We previously reviewed the last RoboBingo show back in 2023, and the new iteration keeps the same silly fun whilst continuing to be innovative.

Getting technology right on any stage is tough, especially when it comes to fringe shows. Getting it wrong and you either have an audience sitting around doing nothing, or worse, the energy of the show falls into a black pit, as computers are famously bad at improv. The genius of Foxdog is that it’s essentially a prop comedy show, but the props are just a bit more complicated.

Robo Bingo 2.0 is the second iteration of a show that isn’t really about robots or bingo. The audience is invited to use their phones to access a specialised webpage. From there, one can create a little cartoon avatar and also vote on things going on in the show.  The audience will fiddle with this new toy, and much of the humour comes from that.

There is bingo, and the lack of excitement that bingo generates is part of the joke; every time things get a little stale, we return to trying to mark numbers on an electronic grid.  At times chaotic whilst still being controlled, this is a very daft show, with audience integration rather than participation; you are part of the show, but only as much as you want to be.

It’s a surreal, well-balanced bit of comedy fun, hosted by two superb comedians with incredible improv chops and a very dry-seeming sense of British fun. A show you can enjoy again and again. Much like regular bingo, but without the gambling.

You can book tickets for the Edinburgh Fringe show here and learn more about Foxdog here.

Space Hippo is a shadow-puppet show from the Book of Shadowz, a pair of puppeteers who combine Japanese and American art styles and disciplines to tell fairly unique stories.

The premise of Space Hippo is that the planet Earth is going to die due to climate change, and someone tells the Trump-shaped American President that we’re as likely to send a hippo into space as we are to fix the planet. So they send a hippo into space.

This style of slightly odd humour is the basis of this show. It’s shadow puppets on a projector, which essentially makes it live-action animation of a sort. (Turns out you can do cartoon animation live without it being a terrible strain on the animator’s wrists, who knew? )

Our heroic hippo is taken away from her baby, kidnapped and sent into space. Where they become embroiled in an intergalactic space war. And then get worshipped as a god. At one point, there’s a Lizard-Man who mostly just says ‘Lizard-Man’.

There’s a serious message about kindness, the planet and keeping one’s promises here, but mostly it’s about a hippo in space.

As a performance art piece, this is very much a curate’s egg. It feels like a live-action version of a Heavy Metal / Métal Hurlant comic strip at times, and at others just a child’s creative fever dream. The combination of light and shadow makes this a murky and strange experience, but certainly a memorable one.  Very much the spirit of the fringe for 2025.

It’s an odd show. And it’s a little bit too dark for small kids, so take the 12+ age warning seriously if you go to see it. If nothing else, you’ll be able to tell everyone that you’ve seen a hippo go to space.

You can book tickets for the Edinburgh Fringe show here and learn more about the Book of Shadowz here.

There’s been a slow but steady decline of comedy drama with a large ensemble cast over the years, which is a pity because when it’s good, it’s really good. I Kissed Batman is a comedy-drama about students who are also fond of cosplay. It’s also about young love, parties and figuring out exactly how to talk to your loved ones.

The central drama revolves around Damian and Tim, two young men who are currently dating. Damian hasn’t told his sister, Steph, that he’s dating Tim. Oh, and Steph considers Tim to be one of her best friends, to whom no secret shall be kept. A master at figuring stuff out, Steph hasn’t quite twigged that her brother is gay. ( Which, for so many people, will be a highly relatable experience.)

Added into the mix is Steph’s boyfriend Jason, who’s nice but dim, and Cass, who isn’t paying too much attention to everyone’s drama.

Everything comes to a head when they’re all off to a fancy dress party. Steph has insisted they all go as Star Wars characters.  Cass has arrived as Princess Diana, not realising that Princess Leia is fictional.  Damian and Tim have gone as Batman and Robin, and yes, they know that’s possibly inappropriate, but it’s fine.

Wackiness ensues, with plenty of comic timing, some wonderfully scripted zingers, some superb acting from the cast and some very fine use of Chekov’s gun. (Well, lockpicks, but still.)

It’s full of lovely touches; every character is named after one of Batman’s Robins, for example, and it gives you some hint as to their character; Damian is brash, Steph wants all the gossip now (so is big on Spoilers), Cass has actually useful skills, etc.

Brilliantly written, superbly performed, we’ll be following the production team, Sharkbait Theatre, with interest.

You can find out about future Sharkbait Theatre productions here.

Can you truly say you’ve been to a Fringe theatre show until you’ve encountered a dancing urinal? Readymades is a bizarre show, a mix of overhead projector cartoon work and prop comedy that tells a completely incoherent tale about a runaway toilet.

Professional clown Levi Meltzer and puppeteer Sam Berlin have teamed up to tell this rather odd story, which is really a collection of fun skits, mild audience participation and at one point, potential cabbage juggling. It really is a mixed bag of madness, but all the more delightful for it.

This is a fun show, that’s just a little bit too cheeky to be accessible to kids, which is a pity because this is literally toilet humour, something beloved by the under-12s. Though slapstick and cartoons aren’t everyone’s cup of tea (or indeed, porcelain bowl), this is a superbly performed, if frankly weird, show.

There is some potential mild mess, so bear this in mind if you’re sitting at the front.

If you like to claim you’ve seen it all, then you really need to add ‘dancing urinal’ to your collection of experiences.  If you have fond memories of comic books like The Dandy or The Beano (or even, to some extent, Viz), then this will tickle your brain in a rather pleasing sort of way. It’s also nice to see an overhead projector used for something, given that the poor things have been made rather obsolete by PowerPoint.

A strange, fun, but very entertaining experience.

You can book tickets for the Edinburgh Fringe show here and learn more about Levi Meltzer & Sam Berlin and their future shows here.

In Encounter: A Space Cabaret, Zena Wood takes on the role of Space Weather Girl, a spunky sci-fi cliché in a shiny costume who really needs to tell you everything you need to know about all of the interesting phenomena the Sun is spitting out into the cosmos.

This is a charming, smoky roomed cabaret show that mixes actual space facts with music, personal anecdotes and an invasion of relatively horny aliens. There’s also a song and dance routine, because there is.

We open with some science facts and an extended series of jokes on how some terms can sound quite rude. (Let’s be honest, we’ve all sniggered at the term coronal mass ejections, even if it is just a fancy term for solar flare.)

Our charming host then goes into a bit of a tangent about how they became the Space Weather Girl, and even though the premise of the show is that we’re watching a sci-fi style science broadcast, it’s got much more of a lounge-room vibe to it.  As the plot thickens, aliens arrive. Lonely aliens, looking for love. And Space Weather Girl is single…

This is charming, camp and silly fun. It’s very much a showcase; a mix of different skills and moods specifically targeted at sci-fi-loving audiences. We have three performers in total: Rober Briggs on keyboard, Zena as our host and Brandon M Weber as our charming yet desperate alien visitor.  There’s an extended metaphor here about growing old as the cosmos carries on regardless, but mostly this is a nice, if strange, hour of your time.

You can book tickets for the Edinburgh Fringe show here and learn more about Space Weather Girl here.

King Arthur’s Body is a production which takes the legends of King Arthur, and says ‘but what if we made it gay?’. This is not a new question. Whilst there was a significant increase in fanfics which sought to explore that possibility following the 2008 broadcast of Merlin on BBC One, there have almost certainly been people applying queer readings to the stories for hundreds of years.

What’s happening in this production is a narrow focus on Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere. Merlin and Archimedes are along for the ride, the former in the role of narrator/guiding hand through the story.

From early on, it’s clear that there is no fourth wall, as the audience are strongly encouraged to join in with a ritual ‘for practicing feelings’ that Merlin has enchanted onto a teenage Arthur. We quickly skip to six years later, and Arthur is now 19, and about to become King.

There’s a funny bit of audience participation as volunteers try, and fail, to pull the sword from the stone, before Arthur is victorious and becomes the true ruler of the Britons. Enter Guinevere, because Arthur needs an heir, even though he’s already been making very unsubtle glances towards Lancelot.

We go through a lot of bluster around Arthur and Guinevere getting married, and failing to produce an heir, which is treated as something very light-hearted, but which for a lot of people, absolutely isn’t a topic for comedy.

And so, for reasons that are lost in the mass of confusion that has been thrown onto the stage, we are then doing a sex magick ritual to make Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot into some sort of blessed polycule.

This entire production is a mess. Every character appears to exist in their own narrative, and the presentation of ‘queerness’ is mostly reinforcing outdated tropes around shame and the need for secrecy if you’re queer.

Now, it’s possible that there’s been a clash of humour styles here: the production team is American, but this was a show being presented in the UK. Admittedly, at the Edinburgh Fringe with an international audience, but the crowd seemed to be mostly British.

There are occasionally moments that suggest a better project lies underneath the chaos. Lancelot channels Hamlet at one point, and does so with genuine nuance and feeling. Archimedes does some great juggling.

But so much of this just feels misjudged. It feels like a teenager’s early attempt at a Wattpad Fanific, where they’ve incorporated every idea that their readers have suggested, however badly misjudged. There’s just no understanding of where the narrative is going.

There’s a semblance of an interesting idea buried somewhere deep inside here, but significantly more development is needed, and perhaps a total return to the drawing board, to consider what story the creative team are trying to tell.

King Arthur’s Body has concluded its run at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Yellow is a sort of sequel to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, set in modern times, using mostly modern language, which asks ‘what might happen next’ to Malvolio. 

The premise is that this is ‘Shakespeare meets The West Wing’, or ‘Shakespeare meets The Thick of It‘, and Malvolio used to be some sort of SPAD, as far as we can gather. Various of the other characters are either lawyers, or in politics – or both, and Olivia, never seen, is the Minister for the Environment. 

We begin with Rosie Arden coming to meet Tony Merchant at the law firm of Hathaway’s. Tony is an old school solicitor, lifted right out of the 1970s. He drinks in the office. He’s loud. He’s a total HR nightmare. Although the chances that his firm has an HR department is minimal. 

Doing much of the actual work in the office are Ben and Trixie, who don’t have a great deal to do in the narrative, other than to provide the occasional pithy nugget of wisdom. 

Despite having a cast of six, this is really a two-hander in disguise, with most of the action passing in one very long scene between Rosie, and yellow-tie wearing Malvolio, ‘but call him Mal’. They discuss who they are, and what they want, and, very obliquely, the incident that led to Mal having to leave his political job.

This scene is very long, and because of that, it drags somewhat. It’s also unclear a lot of the time as to what is going on, because much of the back story is not explained in enough detail. This isn’t even a case of needing to understand the plot of the Shakespearean original – knowing that story won’t help you here with the translation to politics and the law that possibly hasn’t been thought through enough. 

There needed to be much more backstory introduced. It’s unclear whether there was such background covered in a longer version of the play, because there seems to be so much missing here which might have explained the motivations of almost everyone, including Mal. This may well be the case where a 90 minute running time, or even a traditional two act play, might be more suitable for the story being told. There also isn’t enough of the ‘walk and talk’ common to both The West Wing and The Thick of It, and not enough humour to be playing homage to Iannucci’s portrayal of the corridors of power. 

What is good are the performances, by the actors playing Mal, Rosie and Tony especially. The use of Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’, also helps to set the mood nicely. Finally, the set is very well conceived and put together, suggesting a fully-realised office. Given the short change over time in this Fringe venue, this is particularly impressive.

Yellow is a good idea, but the script needs more development, and each character’s story needs to be thought through, and fully realised. The plotline of investigating a financial abuse case also needs to be developed more fully, and woven into the narrative more completely. 

A bold attempt, and it does rehabilitate the character of Malvolio somewhat. 

Yellow continues at The Space at Niddry Street at 12:15 daily until August 23. Their Instagram is here.