MORNING SHOWS
Us/Them
10am, Summerhall (until 28 August)
This remarkable piece of theatre – playful, surprisingly and painfully funny as well as moving – presents the Beslan terror siege of 2004 from the point of view of two unnamed children who were there. It makes you question the way such events are usually presented and the way myths are constructed. Most extraordinary is that this show was made with family audiences and the over-nines in mind. Lyn Gardner
Tank
10.30am, Pleasance Dome (until 20 August)
Tackling that difficult second show with real confidence, Breach Theatre – who debuted last year with The Beanfield – offer an engaging deadpan satire on John Lilly’s 1960s research programme, which remains best known for its use of LSD on captive dolphins and because one of the researchers, Margaret Lovatt, lived for a period in close proximity with one of the males. This is likely to be the only time you will ever attend a show that features verbatim contributions from a dolphin. LG
Bridget Christie
11am, Stand Comedy Club (until 29 August)
Death and mortality were the intended subjects of Bridget Christie’s new set: a swerve away from the overtly political material that’s made her a must-see in recent years on the fringe. But then the EU referendum happened and her show, she told interviewers, “just didn’t seem that interesting to me any more”. The hastily put-together hour that’s replaced it, which takes Brexit as its subject, is far more than an adequate substitute: it’s a hilarious, bumbling, impotent, furious tirade against what Britain is becoming. BL
Equations for a Moving Body
11am, Northern Stage at Summerhall (until 27 August)
How do we make our own milestones in life? It’s a question considered by Hannah Nicklin in this engaging performance-cum-lecture, inspired by her decision to take part in an Ironman triathlon before she turned 30. On one hand it’s an account of her personal journey, but it’s also a metaphor for life itself: the way you lose people along the way, and how the heart is a muscle that requires exercising. It’s a tad long, but it’s full of questing intelligence, fascinating facts and wry humour as Nicklin considers what drives her – and us – on. LG
World Without Us
11.30am, Summerhall (until 28 August)
One of the great things about the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed is that every piece they make is different. They’ve always dared to take risks – some of which pay off and some of which definitely don’t. That’s just as it should be, and in this latest piece they take the risk of trying to get us to contemplate the unimaginable: a world in which every human has vanished. LG
Once …
11.30am, Assembly George Square (until 29 August)
A fairytale for adults … Once by Derevo. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
Love makes fools of everyone in this clowning show from the Russian company Derevo, who swept the board with awards when it was seen in Edinburgh in 1998. Even Cupid gets it wrong in this fantastical tale: a ragged old man falls in love with a beautiful waitress in what is effectively a Harlequin and Columbine story. It’s cute as hell, and often quite kitsch, but it would be a frozen heart that didn’t respond to the sweet openness and pain of this fairytale for adults – or admire the skill with which it is executed. LG
Fabric
11.55am, Underbelly Cowgate (until 28 August)
Nancy Sullivan is completely engaging and utterly heart-breaking as Leah who grew up dreaming of marriage and who thought she had found her prince in Ben. Abi Zakarian’s script for this one-woman piece is beautifully observed and funny too. What initially seems to be a whip-smart contemporary version of an Alan Bennett Talking Head turns into something far darker as romance gives way to reality and Leah’s life is stained in many different ways. Clever set and sound design, too, in a show that brings dirty little male secrets out into the light. LG
AFTERNOON
Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons
12.10pm, Roundabout @ Summerhall (until 28 August)
Last year, playwright Sam Steiner’s debut show was in the hottest room on the fringe, but it (and the audience) will have room to breathe now that it is staged in Paines Plough’s Roundabout tent. This smartly conceived, pared-back love story imagines a world in which everyone is only allowed an allocation of 140 words a day. The effects on life, and in particular relationships, are explored in a really neat show about being forced to say less but mean more. LG
Last Dream (on Earth)
1.25pm, Assembly Hall (until 28 August)
Part of the excellent Made in Scotland programme, Kai Fischer’s piece created with the National Theatre of Scotland is quality stuff, a headphones show and sound installation that offers an often achingly beautiful meditation on risk and travel in search of a better – or another – life. It weaves stories of space exploration with accounts of those who risk their lives on leaky boats to make the perilous journey between Africa and Europe. Last Dream (on Earth) may feature live music but it’s not a piece with bells and whistles – rather, it takes audiences on a quietly rewarding journey of their own. LG
Austentatious
1.30pm, Underbelly, George Square (until 21 August)
When I reviewed Austentatious: An Improvised Jane Austen Novel a few years back, I was happy to help spread the word about a very funny long-form improv show making hay with the conventions of Regency-era period drama. I didn’t know then that Austentatious would also become a production line for eminent solo comics: in the years since, musical act Rachel Parris and multimedia innovator Joseph Morpurgo have joined co-star Cariad Lloyd as acclaimed performers in their own right. (Other cast members are going solo this year, too.) Meanwhile, Austentatious goes strong, and promises a skilled and highly enjoyable hour of off-the-cuff, gowns-and-ballrooms comedy. BL
Love, Lies and Taxidermy
1.35pm, Roundabout at Summerhall (until 28 August)
Why isn’t life more like the movies? Maybe sometimes, against all the odds, it can be. So it proves for the unhappily named Valentine, son of a Polish taxidermist, and Ashley, daughter of Mr Tutti-Frutti, a debt-ridden ice-cream salesman in a town where it’s too cold to eat ice-cream. Alan Harris spins a piece of very funny popular theatre about the need for dreams, seizing the initiative when all seems lost and bringing people together. LG
Read the full four-star review
Giants
3.15pm, Pleasance Courtyard (until 28 August)
Born two days apart, apparently, and – if their show is to be believed – boon companions in infancy, Barney Fishwick and Will Hislop (son of Ian) now debut in Edinburgh with their double-act Giants. Former Oxford Revue presidents, there’s a sense here of a duo still working out their USP, in a show that brings nothing blazingly new or distinctive to the sketch world. But they’re engaging and watchable hosts, whose charm offsets the weaker sketches, and who have enough strong alternatives (including the one where Fishwick amusingly misplaces his cup of coffee) to make this maiden set worth a visit. BL
Lucy, Lucy and Lucy Barfield
3.30pm, Pleasance Courtyard (until 29 August)
I love the fringe because it throws up small, thoughtful, moving and unassuming shows such as this one in which Lucy Grace sets out in search of Lucy Barfield, the girl to whom CS Lewis dedicated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A piece about growing up and discovering that you are locked out of Narnia forever – and about trying to make a future when the magic is lost – it may not be very sophisticated but it has an unaffected grace (in more ways than one) as it unravels the mystery. LG
Bilal Zafar: Cakes
3.40pm, Just the Tonic at the Mash House (until 28 August)
Bilal Zafar won the prestigious New Act of the Year award earlier this year, after which you might expect he’d hit Edinburgh eager to show off his acclaimed standup chops. Instead, he makes his debut with a gentle PowerPoint show, telling the story – illustrated by screengrabs from Twitter – of how a fake identity he adopted online attracted the ire of the far right. The show’s charms arrive in a fairly low key: the Islamophobic e-kerfuffle he kicks up is a minor one, and there are no great surprises in the revelation that Twitter is permanently manned by idiots. But Zafar’s wry circumspection is well-judged, and the material cribbed from his online persecutors duly delivers some big laughs. BL
The Interference
3.45pm, C Chambers (until 16 August)
In American football, an interference is when one player obstructs another using his body. In Lynda Radley’s play it takes on many meanings when Karen is raped by one of the campus’s brightest sports stars, Smith. Will the police take her seriously? How will the university deal with the matter? Everyone has got an opinion on the internet, and soon Karen finds that it’s Smith who is being cast as the victim. There’s a questing intelligence to a gripping drama that doesn’t shirk the complexities of the case and cleverly uses a fragmented style to reflect the noisiness of a connected media and online world where all the chatter interferes with justice. LG
Ada/Ava
4pm, Underbelly Potterrow (until 29 August)
If you love the work of Paper Cinema you will also fall for this macabre little charmer by the Chicago company Manual Cinema, who hand-craft a movie in front of your eyes using puppetry, live music and action. It’s got a real black-and-white, silent-film retro appeal as it tells the story of an elderly woman learning to cope alone when her identical twin unexpectedly dies. Full of loving detail, skill and ingenuity, the show takes grief very seriously as it plays with mirror images to clever effect. LG
Radio Active
4.20pm, Pleasance Courtyard (until 28 August)
Inspired by the staging of old Hancock’s Half Hour scripts on the Fringe last year, Angus Deayton is now doing the same with Radio Active, his commercial-broadcasting spoof, co-written with the late Geoffrey Perkins, that ran for seven years in the 1980s on Radio 4. It’s a jolly hour of media mickey-takery, albeit one that seems tame 30 years on and may indeed have seemed fairly tame in the first place. Brian Logan
Infinity Pool: A Modern Retelling of Madame Bovary
4.35pm, Bedlam (until 29 August)
Here’s something completely different and deliciously quirky. Bea Roberts, who wrote the terrific And Then Come the Nightjars, reimagines Madame Bovary for the 21st century without actors but with considerable help from two screens, a TV monitor, an overhead projector and a sound deck. Our heroine is no French provincial housewife but an admin assistant in a Plymouth plumbers with a ruinous Asos habit and a marriage long gone stale. Imagine Bridget Jones meets The Office meets 19th-century realist fiction. Even with technical difficulties at the performance I saw, this original show proved painfully funny and oddly moving. LG
Katy Brand: I Was a Teenage Christian
4.45pm, Pleasance Courtyard (until 29 August)
Katy Brand has a fine story to tell of her youthful obsession with revivalist Christianity. In the telling, it lacks dramatic shape or climax. But what it loses in artfulness, it gains in honesty: Brand feels the cringe and does it anyway, parading her teenage egotism and delusion to diverting, if not uproarious, comic effect. It’s an entertaining account of a teenager’s search for herself and of the impulses that drive some of us into religion’s comforting embrace. BL
How (Not) to Live in Suburbia
4.50pm, Summerhall (until 28 August)
Annie Siddons turns personal disaster into art with witty, engaging satire that sends up both herself and the inhabitants of Twickenham as she succumbs to fiscal failure and professional paralysis in the leafy suburbs. Of course it’s not really about suburbia but about a corrosive, creeping loneliness and depression. It’s dark, but it’s also playful and inventive with a lovely Jane Austen-style leave-taking spoof and a brilliant scene in which she is evicted from the book club for making everyone else feel stupid. LG
Barrowland Ballet: Whiteout
5pm, Zoo Southside (until 27 August)
Natasha Gilmore has a warm, witty and poetic eye for the nuances of ordinary life. In her previous fringe hit, Carmel, she assembled a vividly assorted cast (ranging from an 18-month-old baby to an 82-year-old dancer) to explore the dynamics of family life. In Whiteout she uses her own marriage to a West African as the springboard to probe the possibilities and the problems of falling in love in a multi-racial society. Set to a soundtrack by Luke Sutherland, Gilmore’s work promises a rich choreographic mix, layered with her acute observation of everyday human behaviour. Judith Mackrell
Daphne’s Second Show
5.45pm, Pleasance Courtyard (until 28 August)
They were the buzziest new sketch troupe in the run-up to last year’s fringe, and Daphne (Phil Wang, George Fouracres and Jason Forbes) duly delivered with their seductively off-beam debut. Peter Pan, Henry V and the American slave trade featured in the sketches; arch self-consciousness attended every punchline. And yet, here was a trio that didn’t quite work like other sketch troupes. Their unevenness was part of their considerable charm. Might the intervening year have planed down Daphne’s jagged edges, or will their second fringe outing build on their first? BL
EVENING
Kiri Pritchard-McLean: Hysterical Woman
6pm, Pleasance Courtyard (until 29 August)
In this bold solo debut, Kiri Pritchard-McLean – director of sketch troupe Gein’s Family Giftshop – explains how women seldom get to appear alongside other women in comedy clubs, and how all-female bills get called “Paralympic nights”. She talks about how she has internalised that thinking; how she’s scared of ever not being funny and letting down all womankind. Credit to her for making a show that’s raucous and good-humoured without stinting on the protest. BL
Read the full three-star review
Scorch
6.05pm, Roundabout at Summerhall (until 28 August)
Produced by the fine Northern Irish company Prime Cut, Stacey Gregg’s play is clearly inspired by the case of Justine McNally, who was convicted of “gender fraud” after starting a sexual relationship with a teenage girl who believed her to be a boy. The in-the-round space works beautifully as Kes sits before us and talks as if we are at a meeting of an LGBTQ group. Amy McAllister is utterly mesmerising, with confusion and hurt etched across her face as Kes comes to terms with lost love. LG
Read the full three-star review
E15
6.30pm, Northern Stage at Summerhall (until 27 August)
Loud, raucous and angry, but also deceptively disciplined and focused, Lung theatre company’s verbatim-style piece tells the story of the Focus E15 campaign, started by a group of mums – many of them teenagers – who in 2013 were issued with eviction notices from the mother-and-baby unit of a hostel for vulnerable young people. The show’s real joy here is in watching these women – played by a brilliant young cast – discover their ability to speak out. LG
Read the full four-star review
Rachel Parris: Best Laid Plans
6.50pm, Pleasance Dome (until 28 August)
Best Laid Plans is about the grown-up Parris expected to be when she was six – house, car, husband, kids – and how real life has refused to play ball. At the show’s tender heart, though, is an account of Parris’s recent breakup, which pitched her for the first time into depression. She’s endearingly frank and funny about the experience, even if the sometime jauntiness of her Samaritans correspondence sits uneasily with the air of emotional candour. But it’s all beautifully crafted and performed. BL
Read the full four-star review
Zoë Coombs Marr: Trigger Warning
6.50pm, Underbelly (until 28 August)
Zoë Coombs Marr made a splash last year with her first show, Dave, playing an old-school, sexist standup floundering against self-hate and a changing world. Impressive though it was, its satire wasn’t especially close to the bone. I prefer the follow-up, which won the Barry award at Melbourne’s comedy festival. Here, Coombs Marr maintains the burlesque on chauvinism, but adds a timely mickey-take of Doctor Brown-style silent clowning, as Dave tries and fails to reinvent himself for a 2016 crowd. BL
Read the full four-star review
Heads Up
7.05pm, Summerhall (until 28 August)
This is the news from the end of the world … Kieran Hurley in Heads Up. Photograph: Niall Walker
Kieran Hurley’s new solo show is a quiet hurricane blowing through the city. It is an anxious whisper that becomes a shout; a moment of silence that turns into the high-pitched whine of catastrophe. Sitting behind a desk, unassumingly dressed in a suit like someone regretfully delivering bad news, Hurley tells of the end of the world through the stories of four people whose lives are disconnected. LG
Natalia Osipova and Guests
7.30pm, Festival theatre (until 14 August)
Natalia Osipova and Sergei Polunin reveal new facets of their talent in this triple bill of contemporary dance works. They are dark, trashy and funny in Arthur Pita’s Run Mary Run, a story of doomed young love set to music by the 1960s girl group the Shangri–Las; while in Russell Maliphant’s Silent Echo they re-invent the logic of the classical pas de deux in a dance of fluid sensuality. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s airborne trio Qutb sees Osipova’s exceptional suppleness and strength pitted against two other men; the evening is a fascinating instance of ballet dancers who are willing to perform outside the box. JM
Sofie Hagen: Shimmer Shatter
7.50pm, Liquid Room Annexe (until 28 August)
The Danish standup Sofie Hagen won the best newcomer award at last year’s fringe with Bubblewrap, a show addressing her teenage self-harm. It was also about her Westlife obsession, which usefully anchored the riskier material in extracts from her adolescent boyband fan-fiction that couldn’t fail to amuse. Her follow-up, Shimmer Shatter, lacks those bulletproof set pieces. But if the laughs are less raucous, Hagen confirms her skill at combining confessional intimacy with some laser-guided gags. BL
Nish Kumar: Actions Speak Louder Than Words, Unless You Shout the Words Real Loud
8pm Pleasance Courtyard (until 28 August)
Nish Kumar: What can a satirist do with our post-truth politics?
The night after the Brexit vote, 10 years into a distinguished standup career, Nish Kumar was playing the Comedy Store, and received his first racist heckle. “Go home!,” shouted the heckler, to a comic born and raised in the UK. Kumar has featured prominently in pre-festival articles about Brexit and comedy, and chances are high he’ll address the changed climate and racism revival in his new show. Thoughtful discussion of front-line culture and politics (leavened by his keen eye for the ridiculous) is what we’ve come to expect from Kumar, after a breakout 2015 show about leftwing culture and humour that saw the Croydon man nominated for an Edinburgh Comedy award. BL
Nazeem Hussain – Legally Brown
8pm, Assembly George Square (until 28 August)
Cartoonish but smart … Nazeem Hussain. Photograph: Jonny Weeks for the Guardian
On his last visit to the fringe, Nazeem Hussain was the perkier half of the Aussie double act Fear of a Brown Planet. It’s not hard seeming perky, mind you, when your sidekick is the stern – and superb – Aamer Rahman. Now both are making waves with their solo standup, and in Hussain’s case, with the televised sketch show Legally Brown. This stage version, which played in London last year, offers an upbeat, cartoonish – but smart – take on interracial misunderstandings, everyday discrimination, and being a brown man in a white man’s country. BL
Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat
8.10pm, Underbelly (until 28 August)
She can sing, act and dance – but the real threat of this show created by Getinthebackofthevan’s McCormick is that you will no longer be able to think about the New Testament without associating the Three Wise Men with Christina Aguilera’s Dirty – or Doubting Thomas with anal fingering. Listen, this irreverent, provocative and vastly enjoyable show is definitely not for everyone. Or for anyone who is easily offended, doesn’t like live art and has never thought that the body of Christ needs reclaiming by a woman. This is a sly, funny piece that knows exactly what its doing and boasts an unholy trinity of brilliantly skilled performers. LG
Spencer Jones Presents the Herbert in Eggy Bagel
8.50pm, Heroes @ the Hive (until 28 August)
An out-of-nowhere hit at last year’s fringe, Spencer Jones’s alter ego the Herbert disarmed audiences with his gormless, goofily attired prop-comedy. Litter-picking tools mouthed off and squeegee mops sang soul music in this dorky clown show about a misfit’s struggle to hold down a proper job. No such difficulties for Jones, who’s been in demand ever since – witness his prominent role in Ben Elton’s Shakespeare sitcom Upstart Crow. But – while he’s been warning in interviews that the Herbert may soon be put out to grass – Jones brings the character back in two shows on this year’s fringe: last year’s hit revisited, and a new offering entitled Eggy Bagel. BL
Burnistoun Live at the Fringe
9pm, Gilded Balloon Teviot (until 14 August)
There’s no doubt that Burnistoun Live – visiting the fringe after a successful tour – is primarily for fans of the TV show. Some characters (Connell’s bedroom-bound internet star Jolly Boy John, say) barely make sense out of context. But I still found plenty to enjoy in the duo’s brusque humour, which couldn’t be more Glaswegian if “Clyde-built” came stamped on every punchline. BL
Michelle Wolf: So Brave
9.30pm, Pleasance Courtyard (until 28 August)
You could call Michelle Wolf brave for opening her first gigs outside the US with material on failed presidential hopeful Ben Carson. But Wolf hates that nowadays everyone gets called brave or beautiful. This kind of blandifying trope comes under sustained comic attack in So Brave, in which the new Daily Show correspondent announces herself as a supremely confident new voice at the Edinburgh fringe. BL
Kieran Hodgson: Maestro
9.30pm, Voodoo Rooms (until 28 August)
Mad about Mahler … Kieran Hodgson. Photograph: Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi for the Guardian
“I listen to [Mahler’s] music every day and dream of writing a show about him,” Kieran Hodgson told an interviewer last year. Well, it’s the fringe, where dreams come true – and lo, last year’s Edinburgh Comedy award nominee returns with a new show addressing his love of the Austrian composer. It’s the latest in a series of rites-of-passage autobiographical shows by the unassuming Hodgson, after 2014’s French Exchange, and last year’s all-conquering Lance, a terrific and tricksy story about his teenage cycling obsession. Maestro is billed as “a story about trying to find love when you’re the kind of loser who writes classical music instead of playing football,” and it’s on the Free Fringe. BL
Goodbear
9.30pm, Bedlam (until 28 August)
A highlight of last year’s comedy lineup was the sketch troupe Minor Delays, whose stripped-back style made ample space for their tart burlesques on (usually) bourgeois life. This year, one third of that trio, Joe Barnes, doubles up with Henry Perryment in another excellent – if not quite so eye-catching – sketch hour. The conceit finds Barnes and Parryment presenting “a selection of characters and occurrences from around the world on a single day in 2016”. In practice, that plays out much like any other sketch show, save that, when this twosome are good – Perryment deploying his acting chops; winsome Barnes flirting with the audience – it can be very funny indeed. BL
LATE NIGHT
Chris Gethard: Career Suicide
10pm, Pleasance Dome (until 29 August)
Even by the standards of today’s mental-health-conscious comedy, Gethard’s show is intimate and explicit. Obviously, this isn’t as jolly as your usual standup show. Sometimes, when Gethard is detailing his OCD thought processes, or how medication affected his ability to ejaculate, you may want to run screaming to the nearest Spencer Jonesgig. But Gethard’s openness and frankness are affecting, and he has built a comedy set around them with considerable skill and good humour. BL
Oliver Reed: Wild Thing
10pm, Gilded Balloon (until 29 August)
The one-person show about a celebrity is the stuff of the Edinburgh fringe but Rob Crouch’s account of the life of hell-raiser Reed – star of Women in Love, Oliver! and many far more forgettable British movies – is genuinely intelligent and thoughtful as it considers the pitfalls of fame and the dangers of falling for your own myth. Crouch is just phenomenal as Reed, a swaggering, fist-swinging mess of a man trapped in the crowd-pleasing image of his own making and so doomed to endlessly repeat himself. LG
Mouse: The Persistence of an Unlikely Thought
10pm, Traverse (until 28 August)
Daniel Kitson does Sliding Doors? Even if his shows didn’t sell out in minutes, that’d be a hot ticket. In this new solo play, Kitson portrays William, a lonely writer cooped up in his “warehouse” office, 12 years into creating a story about a woman and a communicative rodent. Kitson interrupts the action to narrate, in flashback, the events that led William to this point. It’s a story about friendships and their absence, and about the tiny moments on which a life hinges. BL
Read the full four-star review
TIMES VARY
Showstopper! The Improvised Musical
Pleasance Courtyard (until 28 August)
These performers are really talented and clever, and they have an Olivier award to prove it. Taking suggestions from the audience for scenarios and for musical theatre styles, they think on their feet and with their vocal chords to create original material, paying homage to and sending up some of the great musicals with a wicked wit. It’s more enjoyable if you have sufficient knowledge of the musical form to recognise the cribs, but even if you don’t, you will admire the comic ingenuity. LG
The Red Shed
Traverse (until 28 August)
Funny, raw, angry … The Red Shed. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
The Red Shed is Wakefield’s Labour club. Mark Thomas has been going there since he was a student at nearby Bretton Hall. This show is Thomas’s love letter to the Shed and to half a century of Labour activism, embracing the legacies of the miners’ strikeand the dangers of mis-remembering – or not remembering at all. This is a storytelling show at its simplest: funny, raw and angry. LG
The Glass Menagerie
King’s theatre (until 21 August)
Long before he was one of the masterminds of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, John Tiffany directed Tennessee Williams’s 1944 play for the American Repertory theatre at Harvard. He has now revived that production with its original star, Cherry Jones, who is a legend on Broadway but little-known in Britain. The triumph of this production is Jones’s performance as Amanda, the former southern belle who dreams of finding a suitor for the socially gauche Laura. MB
Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs!
The Hub (until 27 August)
Making mischief … Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs! Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
There is plenty to exclaim about in this unashamedly sentimental and old-fashioned showbiz evening, which transforms the Hub into “Club Cumming”, complete with a pink neon sign and waiters taking the drinks orders. Alan Cumming holds court like a naughty Puck intent on making mischief but who can’t help showing us a glimpse of his fragile, oft-broken heart. He is accompanied by a fine three-piece band in a set that developed out of after-show sessions in his dressing room during his Broadway run in Cabaret. LG
Greater Belfast
Traverse (until 28 August)
The musician and theatre-maker Matt Regan, alias Little King, hasn’t lived in Belfast for five years but he can still smell the sea and feel the salty wind on his face. He makes us think that we have felt and smelled it too. There are moments of exquisite beauty in this indefinable and utterly distinctive show that makes a mockery of all the old boundary-defining labels such as “gig”, “theatre” and “spoken word”. LG
Diary of a Madman
Traverse (until 28 August)
In Nikolai Gogol’s short story Diary of a Madman, Poprishchin is a lowly Russian civil servant driven mad by his lack of status and his confusion at a changing world. In Al Smith’s play, he has become Pop Sheeran, whose family trade is painting the Forth Bridge. This production is well worth seeing, though, for Liam Brennan’s tender performance as Pop, a tragic clown out of time and out of a job. LG
James Acaster: Reset
Pleasance Courtyard (until 28 August)
At the best of the jokes in James Acaster’s new show, you can only sit back and marvel: the trajectory of his line of thought contrives to be both obvious and mind-blowing; the “how does he do it?” factor is high. Added to the exquisite writing and beady performance that we expect is some satirical bite, with a routine about Britain’s colonial plunder and a gag proposing peppermint tea as a metaphor for Brexit. BL
Panti: High Heels in Low Places
Traverse (until 14 August)
Being a national treasure in Ireland, says drag queen Panti Bliss, comes with its burdens. Getting laid is harder, as potential partners are prone to think of it as “like masturbating on Stonehenge”. There’s plenty here about sex, but more still around gender (one of the Edinburgh festival’s hot topics this year) and masculinity. A show that leaves lipstick traces on both heart and mind. LG