Category Archives: Theatre

Reviews of theatre work.

‘Murder She Didn’t Write’ (Venue 8, until AUG 24th)

Posted in 5*, EdFestivals 2025, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre by

“This show has energy like a tower full of bells in a fenland flood has energy.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

Let’s do something that never happens in a whodunit and cut to the chase. Does this show live up to the hype? Yes. Yes, it really, Really, REALLY does. How so? Because this cast could improv the phonebook (are those still a thing?) and make it funny. Besides which not one of them would look out of place in shot next to Carmichael as Wimsey or Suchet as Poirot. This show looks like this show should look. It’s as if Chris Van Allsburg had the idea of being trapped in a board game but stuck with Cluedo instead of pointlessly inventing Jumanji. 

We enter to find it’s Peter Baker in the detective’s hot seat today. Baker once played Trigger in ‘Only Fools And Horses The Musical’ at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, but today he’s in more Reg Rexis from ‘Health and Efficiency’ mode. He’s swave. He’s sexy. He’s a know-it-all who doesn’t quite remember to remember the corpse’s name.

Rachel Procter-Lane, Catlin Campbell (as Morag, the one what it was done to), Stephen Clements, Mathew Whittle, as well as Oh Bugger Chat GPT Can’t / Won’t Tell Me (as the one what done it) are an eclectic range of uniformly smart, sassy, and sophisticated improvers who fill the 70 minutes with stage traffic that’s as pacy as the Orient Express in summer. Campbell, the co-founder and Artistic Director of the Bristol Improv Theatre, has a properly lovely voice, more of that, please, especially since Sara Garrard is at the piano – seriously, Chat GPT I don’t think that’s the dude’s name (maybe their website needs updating?).

This show has energy like a tower full of bells in a fenland flood has energy. Sometimes it misses the really clever things I would have said. Today Campbell died with a caber up her backside – “It was alimentary, my Dear Watson.” Yet, this show is a witty and worthy annual presence in the city that’s home to both Conan-Doyle’s letter to his auld medical school lecturer crediting Joseph Bell as the inspiration for Holmes, as well as Doyle’s PhD thesis on syphilis – both written in a hand so neat as to unmask him instantly as a total bam.

Improv either works or it doesn’t. This format really works as stagecraft and light entertainment. It’s a crowd pleaser because the crowd is pleased, as well they should be. Come for the current cult classic. Stay for Christiean sumptuousity. Get your Burberry trench coats on and go see this!

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‘Biff to the Future’ (Venue 3, until AUG 24th)

Posted in 5*, EdFestivals 2025, Rated: Nae Bad, Theatre by

“Butt-head-ressed by a pedantic depth of knowledge of and nerdish insight into the immortally classic original material.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Nae Bad)

Blockbuster (yet cult) movie franchise PLUS double Olivier Award-nominated direction PLUS writing and performance by a Reduced Shakespeare Company alumn EQUALS theatre so sensational it might have been routed through a flux capacitor. “Tell me, Future Boy, who’s President of the United States in 1985?” There’s a charm and an innocence to the movies, none of which is generated by one of the greatest movie villains of all time, the bozo bully Biff Tannen – the possibly probably love child of Shooter McGavin and Dr Evil.

Here are elements of the trilogy mixed, mashed, and lovingly upcycled into a homage worthy of the great Thomas F. Wilson himself. The stories are told from Biff’s perplexed and (rather unpolysyllabic) perspective. As all of the parts, Joseph Maudsley, hits all the notes, from Marty McFly on C6 (≈ 1046.5 Hz) down to the irascible Mr. Strickland on C2 (≈ 65.4 Hz). It’s like Maudsley’s playing an 80s electric keytar – which he is at one point. There’s prop gags, word play, surrealist riffs and improv, plus some properly totes hilar audience interaction, all butt-head-ressed by a pedantic depth of knowledge of and nerdish insight into the immortally classic original material.

Biff in the movies is a rather two-dimensional character – more Gilray than Hogarth. The genius of Maudsley’s approach is to add on existential dimensions that have you feeling pangs of sympathy for Hill Valley’s gobbiest gobshite like he’s sitting in his tent the night before Bosworth Field feeling sorry for himself.

I properly love Piccolo Tent at Assembly George Square Gardens, but it’s not quite the perfect stage for this staggeringly affectionate tribute. There’s one prop gag which is impossible to see from the back, which is a shame because it’s one of the funniest. Maudsley fills the space like he’s filling a 1946 Ford Super DeLuxe with manure. The comedy piles on and on, for the first and only time this Fringe, I am wishing the running time was longer.

Come for the nostalgia. Stay for the freshness. Put your custom-made red quilted puffer vests on and go see this!

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‘The Bubble Show®’ (Venue 3, until AUG 17th)

Posted in 5*, EdFestivals 2025, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre by

“Mr Bubbles has toured the world with this show and every step on his journey has made it faster, higher, stronger.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

Happiness is very much like bubbles, and bubbles are very much like happiness. The potential for both is everywhere. Coming in every shape and in size, it just needs someone special to make the magic happen right there before our eyes. Beloved EdFringe fixture Mr Bubbles is that someone special. Over the years, his deceptively simple act has enchanted audiences young and auld, including some who were young and are now a wee bit aulder.

We enter Piccolo Tent at Assembly George Square Gardens to find the instantly recognisable and some less familiar tricks of Mr Bubble’s trade, as well as the costumes and props which make this show a game of two halves. First, there’s the science section. Helium bubbles. Square bubbles. Bubbles within bubbles. Bubbles with children inside. Bubbles filled with smoke, every bubble a wonder and delight. Second, there’s the sensory, super-chilled section. Finally, there are the supermassive (no, seriously, they’re chuffing ginormous) bubbles.

In her EdFringe notebook, the one with a woodcut of Agnes Pockels doing the dishes on the cover, Daughter 1.0 (10yrs) wrote: “I really enjoyed the bubble Man. I really liked how he created all kinds of Interesting bubbles. I also liked his adience Interactions and how he was bubbly and exiting. I also liked going Inside a bubble. I also enjoyed his bubble animals and his beautiful bubble art.”

A lifetime ago, in 2019, I wrote of Mr Bubbles, “He is young and his show feels like it will ripen with age.” Six years on, and that prediction has been fulfilled and then some. The same beautiful, delightful, twinkling energy is here. The same pace, precision, and purpose is here, but there’s that same powerful difference as between a photo taken with The Bubble Space Telescope versus one snapped by James Webb. The depth, the contrasts, the overall impact is lightyears ahead of where we were.

Mr Bubbles has toured the world with this show and every step on his journey has made it citius, altius, fortius. It is an Olympian feat, and rediscovering The Bubble Show® feels akin to a beachcomber finding blue seaglass or a narwhale’s tusk. In the delightful setting of Piccolo Tent, this show is fast approaching utter perfection.

Come for the bubbles. Stay for the bubbles. Get your Dolce & Gabbana 1990s Bubble Wrap Jackets on and go see this!

 

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‘Knightclub’ (Venue 53, until AUG 23rd)

Posted in 5*, EdFestivals 2025, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre by

“A pun-tastic crowd pleaser that’s as smart as it is sensationally funny.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

Spruce Moose Comedy build on their growing reputation for zany antics and playful performances in this latest comedy rocking our EdFringe world. This year, it’s monks getting into bad habits. Tamothy and Brother Jack are dreaming of life beyond the cloister and the cloying smugosity of their Abbot. Tamothy dreams of being a touring tournament knight and with the beefy and by no means adverse to bending an already broken taboo Brother Jack by his side, who’s to stop him… except a scheming rival and a pack of dastardly Frenchmen determined to wreak havoc, wreck the peace of Europe, and capture the King.

Here is that most glorious thing, a pun-tastic crowd pleaser that’s as smart as it is sensationally funny. This is the most fun cast you are likely to find. Horribly young, horribly cocky, horribly talented, having a horribly lovely time. It’s enough to make you stick Spruce Moose Comedy in your must-see column year after year. Their justifiable confidence in the work and in each other keeps the momentum steady as we hurtle through scene after scene packed with mirthful mayhem.

There’s slapstick, wordplay, character comedy, history jokes, farce and an (almost) deep and meaningful meditation on the value of friendship and the dangers of temptation. At 50 minutes, the show is razor sharp and packed to the gunwales. This is a cast you’ll be boasting of having seen back when. Come for the silliness. Stay for the feeling of being in on something at the beginning. Get your chainmail coats on and go see this!

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‘I’m Not Saying We Should, But What If We Did?’ (Venue 16, until AUG 16th)

Posted in 5*, EdFestivals 2025, Rated: Nae Bad, Theatre by

“As Maud and Agnes, Harriet Pringle and Lizzie White are sensational.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Nae Bad)

38%. That’s how much domestic violence rates increase when England loses a match. Between the fallen angel and the rising ape, few other statistics lay quite so bare the glaring awfulness of men’s behaviour towards women. In so many contexts. Across class and creed, culture and class something is wrong and it isn’t getting right by itself.

We enter to find ourselves about to go live. The TV studio is abuzz as aspiring leaders Maud and Agnes get ready to be grilled about their clickbait policy options – no men allowed out of the house without written permission, no men in gynaecology, no men allowed to drive. It’s crazy because these things are being suggested for men. Then again, go next door to The Surgeons’ Hall exhibition on ‘Women in Surgery’ and you can see how things once were in the city now so proud to have produced pioneers like Sophia Jex-Blake and Elsie Inglis.

This production asks some pointed, impertinent, and ultra-provocative questions. Are we trying to solve our problems, or are certain clownish performative politicians surfing the tides of frustration and despondency simply for effect? If a man can be elected to the White House or to Downing Street by playing a bafoonish persona for all it is worth, why not two women literally Pagliaccing themselves before the cameras? 

As Maud and Agnes, Harriet Pringle and Lizzie White are sensational. For all the comic exaggeration and effect, these are two highly nuanced performances which also deliver the counterbalancing expressions of anger, loss, and betrayal with heart-string-tugging urgency. Surely scaffolded by exceptionally strong supporting performances by Liz McKenna, Abbie Want and Mukuka Jumah, I have a feeling we will be hearing great things from Pringle and White in the not-too-distant future when this caustic and challenging (but bang on the money) piece of juvenilia (with its unaccountably clumsy ending) has been chalked up to experience.

Here is a show taking risks and winning. Here is a company (Minotaur of the University of East Anglia) living up to its reputation while refusing to rest on past laurels. If the plan was for ‘I’m Not Saying We Should, But What If We Did?’ to showcase talent, push boundaries, and challenge prevailing approaches and orthodoxies, then… job done. Top marks.

Come for the absurdly urgent premise. Stay because you’re going to want to tell folks you saw these performers back when. Get your coats on and go see this! (Chaps, please remember to ask permission of the relevant matriarch before leaving the house.)

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‘Paris in a Jazz Age: The Memoirs of Eloise Defleur’ (Venue 43, until AUG 16th)

Posted in 5*, Cabaret, EdFestivals 2025, Musical Theatre, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre by

“As Eloise, Airlie Scott, sparkles like a coupe of champagne at one of Gatsby’s shindigs.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

There are moments in human history which excite the potential time-travelling tourist more than others. Shakespeare’s London and Edo-era Tokyo have to be pretty high on the list, but Paris in a Jazz Age might well top the itinerary. The Hot Jazz Vagabonds have hit upon a genius way to conjure the glitz and the glamour, the triumph and the tragedy of that sparkling moment of bold artistic achievement. They have created a spoken word memoir, a parade of memories recalled to us by a charming central character, Eloise DeFleur. Eloise is a British upper-crust vocalist who arrived on the scene to get down and flirty in the nightclubs and cafes of the French capital at its most intoxicating. On these pacy vignettes is hung a string of familiar jazz hits played as well as they have ever been played by anyone, anywhere, anywhen.

As Eloise, Airlie Scott, sparkles like a coupe of champagne at one of Gatsby’s shindigs. Best known for her Doris Day Show, Scott looks the part in a trés chic red sequin number that leaves plenty of room for fancy footwork. Eloise’s story is told with a passion so intense that it lifts us from our (really rather comfortable) Space Amphitheatre seats and onto rickety auld wooden numbers in a smokey backroom off the Rue Reine d’Écosse. Scott’s audience interactions are lively and elegant, her voice strong yet supple, owning each phrase and lyric like they were especially written for her. The band she’s leading are simply magnifique. Not a note not in place, not a beat missed, every swing a sensation. 

This show was originally twice the length, and I would crawl over broken glass or maybe even use a French public toilet (if I really had to), to see the full version. As it is, distilled into its most essential, most vivacious, and most memorable triple-shot espresso form, it is a triumphal blend of music, theatre, comedy, and romance – the must-see late-night musical marvel of the moment. Come for the jazz. Stay for the sass. Get your cream double-breasted overcoats on and go see this!

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‘Dream Space’ (Venue 8, until AUG 24th)

Posted in 3*, EdFestivals 2025, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre by

“Director Jin-young Son has lost nothing in translation. This is the show that a mummy babel fish would take her fry to.”

Editorial Rating: 3 Stars (Outstanding)

Three stories. A young wizard dreaming of greater powers. Two castaways dreaming of release. A young girl dreaming of swimming with whales and experiencing the world from their perspective. Three stories, each told with dynamic precision by a company of puppeteers who genuinely conjure a truly immersive experience… so long as you aren’t in the wrong seat.

It’s not often that I see the same show in the space of 24hrs in two such very different venues. The day before, I had seen the third half performed in the Ballroom at the Assembly Rooms as part of the Korean Season showcase. It’s fair to say that something of the nuance was lost in the grand unintimacy of John Henderson’s 342m² space. The Crate George Sq., by contrast, is too constricted. The performers are too far forward for punters in the far edge seats of the semi-circle to actually see what is happening. EdFringe tickets are not getting any cheaper, and with children’s tickets being discounted by just £1, producers and promoters urgently need to consider family value for money alongside artistic excellence – which this exquisite production has by the undeniable bucketload.

In three unrelated but totally relatable stories, director Jin-young Son has lost nothing in translation. This is the show that a mummy babel fish would take her fry to. There is a prop gag in the Castaways chapter which flies over the heads of the little ones like a standard size 5 leather indoor volleyball, but which definitely lands with us oldies of a certain vintage. Any show that starts with bubbles is going to be a winner. A show that can go on to be so very chuffing poignant that it has your (not especially) humble correspondent in floods of tears deserves to be lauded with every laurel. There are deep moral lessons in each of the stories, reflections on wants and needs, maturity and growth, loss and discovery.

I’m not going to lie, I was worried about Daughter 2.0 (7yrs)’s reaction. She’s not the best at sitting still in every circumstance, but Dream Space had her truly enchanted right up until the end. She likes logic, and the internal logic of the Dream Space vision had her attention hooked all the way through. The show is promoted to ages 5+, which, for British kids, is too big a stretch. In a better-fitting space, with wiggle room for those whose grip on concentration is prone to lapse, this show would be perfection itself. It might also be kinder to allow the kinder space to rest and draw breath between the intensity of each marvelously meticulous monograph. Shows for kids need to be designed in every detail for kids. The creative content was astounding, the framing… not so much.

Like Goldilocks, this production needs – this production deserves – a venue space that is neither too big nor too small but one that is just right with space and permission for young minds and little bodies to dip in and out, especially if it is being sold to the very young.

Come for an all-star team delivering touchdown after touchdown. Stay if you’re in a good seat. Get your Joseon-era gwanboks on and go see this!

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‘Ginger’s Problem Area’ (Venue 17, until AUG 24th)

Posted in 4*, EdFestivals 2025, Rated: Nae Bad, Stand-Up, Theatre by

“Aunty Ginger is a deadpan whirlwind of good auld-fashioned filth and innuendo – in your endo.”

Editorial Rating: 4 Stars (Nae Bad)

What is there left to say about Aunty Ginger that hasn’t already been splashed across the red tops, scrawled on bathroom walls, or said through tears in a witness impact statement?

Manchester’s leading pansexual Dragony Aunt takes to the stage like a pack of boozehounds takes to a vodka fountain and with all the caution of a cockapoodle on a trampoline. This is a no-holds-barred experience not recommended for the coy or nervous. Aunty Ginger is a deadpan whirlwind of good auld-fashioned filth and innuendo – in your endo.

From a confident blend of audience work and audiovisual, sixty minutes of laugh-out-loud funny entertainment emerge, spotlighting a performer with a rising reputation – or is she just pleased to see me? Ginger is lightning fast. Already naturally well endowed, Ginger’s mind is as quick as her tongue is sharp. She is professionally trained, well-honed by just enough years in drag not to be a drag, and so obviously enjoys doing what she loves being great at. Those rather odd men who love to feel uncomfortable around drag and have got something to prove without having anything to say are swatted away as flies to wanton boys. Ginger is the boss and don’t forget it.

The trouble is that this show, in its current format, can only ever be as good as its audience. Good crowd? Good craic. Surly gobshite crowd? Less fun to be had. The format needs tweaking so that some content can be whipped out and milked without relying so much on the crowd if they turn up flaccid. Still, Ginger is gracefully maturing into an EdFringe stalwart, a reliable source of satisfaction for when you need your funny bone rubbed in just the right way.

Come for the solid standup. Stay for the sparkling wit and repartee. Get your glittery gladrags on and go see this!

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Everest Mallory 24 (With Stanley)’ (Venue 29, until AUG 23rd)

Posted in Theatre by

“It’s Andy versus the elements as he showcases the elemental art of storytelling.”

Editorial Rating: 4 Stars (Outstanding)

Andy Dickinson returns to EdFringe with his comic creation, Stanley, the plain-spoken everyman eyewitness to history. Last year, we listened in as Stanley recounted his time with Napoleon Bonaparte during the Hundred Days. This year, Stanley’s great-grandson is along on the 1924 Mount Everest expedition – the second British attempt to conquer “the third pole”. Even folks as terrestrial and gradient-averse as this Cambridgeshire fentrotter have heard of how, 101 years ago, Edward Norton set a world altitude record of 8,572.8 metres and how, on the expedition’s third ascent, George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine disappeared. Did they reach the summit before they perished? Could their still unrecovered Kodak camera contain the final proof that, despite some of the harshest conditions on our homeworld, the highest place on Earth was reached decades before Hillary & Norgay?

An awful lot of art and artistry goes into making something seem artless. Dickinson packs his shows like you’d want to pack for an expedition to the back of beyond. Nothing is coming with us except the most essential. It’s Andy versus the elements as he showcases the elemental art of storytelling. It’s a total and complete contrast to what’s on offer over at Assembly. There, punters can feast their eyes on the sumptuous costumes, sets, and staging of the massively emotive, pansori-style of theatre presented in the Korean season. Andy’s approach is more akin to Roald Amundsen’s straight there and back expedition to the South Pole.

What makes an Andy Dickinson production so memorable is the afterburn. As you walk out of the venue and into your favourite Nepalese restaurant, a flood of flashbacks wash over you, a reminder of just how much unadorned material has been presented in so short a span of time. As you hum and haw over whether to have the Machhako Tarkari or the Chicken Rumjatar (before finally settling, yet again, for the Solukhambu Lamb) it occurs to you that you have been witness to an exceptionally fine and informative presentation. You’ve actually learned a thing or six. Our narrator, Stanley, is put upon, trodden down, and occasionally even sneered at by history’s great and the good whose names we remember. The genius of Stanley is that he goes where no one else can go. He sees, and lives to recount, what few others have such precise knowledge of.

There is less tech in this production. I would like to have seen a side-on elevation explaining just how steep the climb really was, and just how sharply the path between life and death narrowed for the expedition between the Northern (Tibetan) Route’s primary camps – but then I would also like a ski lift. What I like best about Dickinson and Stanley is that they leave the audience entirely free to think and feel what they like. Subjectivity is left at base camp. The emphasis is on how objectively nuts and bonkers the whole premise of the story actually is, especially since it really did happen.

Come for the unadorned but always adorable storytelling. Stay for the inside track on one of the great moments of adventure, danger, and excitement. Get your windproof Burberry cotton smocks on and go see this!

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‘Wodehouse in Wonderland’ (Venue 17, until AUG 24th)

Posted in 5*, EdFestivals 2025, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre by

“There is a dramatic pivot in this piece delivered with such sudden, callous, earth-shatteringly precise cruelty that afterwards, for the first time ever, I find myself waiting by the stagedoor determined to shake the hand of the horribly talented actor who has just sucker punched us all in the gut.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

We enter to find ourselves in the study of one of the most celebrated writers of English since Chaucer’s pilgrims first set out to Canterbury. The seemingly uncomplicated genius of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881 – 1975) conjoured into being such immortals as Jeeves and Wooster, Ukridge, Mr Mulliner, as well as some of the most popular, zeitgeisty smash hits of the interwar years. Gershwin, Porter, Kern and Novello all knew him as an equal. He was big in America at a time when America itself was getting big.

Stage left there’s a home bar. Scotch and soda, martinis and the requisite stemware. In the centre, behind the writing desk, a picture window looks out over the Suffolk County landscape – Suffolk County, Long Island, not the East of England for reasons which will become obvious as the plot thickens. A red leather chesterfield armchair completes the scene. It’s the familiar haunt of someone whose literary oeuvre and immortal reputation became established in his own lifetime in the way that an auld oak tree or a gothic catheral might seem established only after the passage of centuries.

Robert Daws completely captures the chronological vertigo of this seemingly very ordinary Englishman towards the close of an extraordinary life. Daws is one of those faces familiar off the telly from ‘Midsummer Murders’, ‘Roger Roger’, ‘Robin of Sherwood’, and of course Fry and Laurie’s masterpiece ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ series. Daws is delivering one of the finnest bits of character work to be seen this EdFringe – this is the other show that us mega Pip Utton fans MUST SEE this year.

With a glove-like fitting, Daws inhabits the persona, personality, and personal space of Wodehouse, a familiar figure yet also an ultra private individual, a charmingly befuddled auld stick in the mud who came to public notice during the roaring exuberance of the 1920s. Wodehouse scaled the highest heights of celebratory fame and success. He became a legend in his own lifetime only to suffer one of those excrutiating moments of irrefutable British tabloid unfairness to rank alongside Michael Foot’s donkey jacket or Prince Harry’s entire adult life. The folk who love to loathe Wodehouse will never let us forget his ill-advised broadcasts from internment during WWII but this was not the only dark cloud that lour’d upon our Wodehouse. There is a dramatic pivot in this piece delivered with such sudden, callous, earth-shatteringly precise cruelty that afterwards, for the first time ever, I find myself waiting by the stagedoor determined to shake the hand of the horribly talented actor who has just sucker punched us all in the gut.

Here is a masterful performance to rank alongside Christopher Lee’s Saruman and for precisely the same reason. Lee was famously the only member of the LOTR cast to have actually met Tolkein. Similar magic has rubbed off on Robert Daws who has known, worked and collaborated with some of the very greatest Wodehousians – Carmichael, Fry, Laurie, Spall, Horden, Jarvis, and Mangan. Daws received the personal blessing and benediction for this production from Sir Edward Cazalet, the son of Wodehouse’s beloved daughter Leonora. Daws is himself of course the definitive Hildebrand “Tuppy” Glossop resoncibile for some of the most joyously side splitting moments of the 90s TV series. My only criticism of this show is that there isn’t a tie-in album of the seven or so Broadway songs written by Wodehouse which Daws merrily belts out with the calm, luxurious, powerful assurance of a 1932 Lagonda 3-litre Weymann.

Come for the candid yet reverential insight into a true great of English letters. Stay for simply one of the best solo performances you’ll see at this or any Fringe. Get your a trifle too exotic Sir white mess jackets on and go see this!

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