This August The Deaf and Hearing Ensemble will be performing their first full production, People Of The Eye as part of the Northern Stage Programme at Summerhall. In addition they have teamed up with Fringe Central to provide a number of workshops exploring the process of developing new work with D/deaf and hearing artists. The

The first full week of the Edinburgh Festival means there’s a wealth of cultural delights to indulge in. Here we take a look at some recommended shows for the next seven days. Monday: Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs The Scottish Broadway star comes home for a late-night residency at The Hub. The Olivier Award-winning Cumming

An aubergine, a naked magician and Jesus Christ on a BMX stroll into a bar … is this the start of a strange joke? Well, yeah, but it is also some of the performers you might find at The Last Drop bar in Edinburgh after a day’s work at this year’s Fringe. The arts festival

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

You’re going to have to indulge us on two counts with this month’s carefully selected round-up of Scottish musical highlights, we’re afraid. The first; it’s obviously August, and try as we might, we just can’t avoid filling half of what follows with recommendations for things to do in Edinburgh (see below). And second, the album

The revival of circus at the Edinburgh Fringe – from the creation of the Circus Hub as part of Underbelly’s portfolio of venues to the inclusion of more intimate shows in venues like Summerhall – reflects an international trend towards the incorporation of circus skills into theatre and dance. With Elixir and Only Bones, both

The Stage’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe team – Paul Vale, Stewart Pringle, Nick Awde, Gerald Berkowitz, Brian Cooper and myself – will be reviewing a huge array of shows over the next few weeks. In the meantime here are a few of the shows I’m looking forwards to seeing. Don’t Wake the Damp – Pleasance Dome,

The owner and director of one of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s biggest venues has lamented the domination of the English language at the festival. Robert McDowell, who with his family bought the former Royal Dick School of Veterinary Studies building in 2011, establishing the 650-room academic building as a major arts venue and now key

Little ripples. That’s how it starts. Little ripples getting bigger. And then suddenly you’re eye to eye with a dinosaur. The Edinburgh Fringe is the T-Rex of arts festivals and it has a way of creeping up on you. For ages it’s a faint shape on the horizon, reassuringly far away, and then it pounces.

Our section editors narrow down their Edinburgh Festival picks to an tick-’em-off-as-you-go top five; here are their music, books, comedy, art and theatre selections Best Music at the Edinburgh Festivals 1) Anohni: Hopelessness “A scream of fury against the evils of today’s world: mass surveillance, drone warfare, ecocide.” It’s fair to say that margin walker

None of my other theater festival travels have ever compared to Edinburgh in August. By scale alone EdFringe dwarfs most other events. But even more than size, the fact that you could see children’s theater, performance, comedy, and circus all under the same festival umbrella speaks to its unusual nature. The January festivals in New

Cadging lifts, begging spots on sofas, scouring Gumtree, getting scalped by Virgin Trains: the annual struggle to get to Edinburgh’s festivals is upon us. But just before we all embark on a month-long theatre adventure, here’s a handy collection of some things that Exeunt’s writers are excited about seeing. A few returning favourites, a few

This venue has arguably grown to become the Fringe’s most exciting theatre hub. Highlights this year include Blank (6.30pm) by acclaimed Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour, which will feature performers encouraging audience members to fill in gaps in the script; Macbain (3-14 Aug, 8.55pm), which will mash up the stories of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth with

Bricking It | Underbelly Cowgate | 4-28 Aug (pictured) A show in which an actual father and daughter actually swap jobs sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Pat is a 73 year old builder, his daughter Joanna is a 29 year old writer and performer, and for the sake of creating a piece of theatre, he’s going

Venues helping to make the festival more inclusive, with accessible spaces and programmes featuring signed, captioned, relaxed or audio described performances Charlotte Square The Edinburgh International Book Festival has a fully accessible site for wheelchair users with level access or ramped access into all venues. The Book Festival schedules some British Sign Language (BSL) performances

Wind Resistance | Rehearsal Studio, The Lyceum Theatre | 5-29 Aug There are a few musicians at this year’s Festival who have broadened their performances to something that fits into the theatre programme, and we find that quite intriguing. In this International Festival presentation, award-winning Edinburgh singer songwriter Karine Polwart combines story and song to

WHEN Tim Crouch brought his show The Author to the Traverse Theatre in 2010 as part of that year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, his dissection of the right to be offensive onstage provoked several walk-outs. While this was in part a conscious provocation for such a reaction, the fact that Crouch’s then teenage daughter Nel was

Edinburgh is not cheap, and an awful lot of shows that look promising in the programme turn out to be duds. But the shows listed below have all been seen either by me or a member of the Guardian reviewing team, and they get our vote as being worth your time and money. Thread a

It’s the world’s biggest arts event – and this year the Edinburgh Fringe festival is host to 3,269 shows over the month of August. To that you can also add the Edinburgh International Festival, with a strong programme this year of music, dance and theatre, and spin-offs like the free, always-interesting Forest Fringe (11-20 August;

Whether you’re looking to see a show are not, these venues are at the heart of what makes the Fringe such a lively and widely admired celebration of culture This year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe will take place across 294 venues, which will host more than 50,000 shows between them. Now in its 69th year, the