Edinburgh Festival Planner: Three Shows to See Today

The Guardian / Lyn Gardner and Brian Logan


Goggles
2pm, Pleasance Courtyard (until 29 August)

Edinburgh is full of young companies making fluffy, whimsical theatre, and at first sight This Egg’s two-hander about love, friendship and breaking free seems to be just one more. But there are hidden depths in a hugely enjoyable story in which the performers also play two goldfish, and where the metaphor for escaping the fish bowl of a suffocating relationship is handled with humour and a lightness of touch. Lots of fun. LG

Letters to Windsor House
1.35pm, Summerhall (until 28 August)

London’s housing crisis and its effects upon relationships is explored with beady-eyed sharpness and a large dollop of humour in the latest from Sh!t Theatre. It’s deceptively rackety stuff, but it gets to the heart of a situation in which the social cleansing of London’s poor is taking place almost without comment, and people’s lives are becoming dominated by the need to find somewhere affordable to live. LG

Sam Simmons
8.15pm, Underbelly Potterrow (until 28 August)

“The best comedian in the world,” the Age newspaper in Australia has taken to calling Sam Simmons. It’s no idle boast: in 2015 he did, after all, become only the second comic ever to win Melbourne’s Barry award and the Edinburgh comedy award in the same year. Now the love-him-or-feel-confused Aussie who calls himself “the coriander of comedy” is back with the follow-up, Not a People Person. Reportedly lighter on confessional material than last year’s hit, it should see Simmons return to the outright cod-surrealist madcappery – with added rage – with which he made his name. BL