At the Edinburgh festival, an extraordinary show lays bare the enormity of grief | Brian Logan

Or What’s Left of Us by Sh!t Theatre is a playful and starkly profound hour in which the duo share their bereavements and stir reflections of our ownWhen someone you love dies, the grief can be almost unbearable, but there can also be a sense of someth…

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Zoë Coombs Marr: Every Single Thing in My Whole Entire Life review – an act of heroic overreach

Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh Armed with spreadsheets and her usual playfulness, the comic attempts to evaluate the worth of her life so farHas autobiographical comedy reached its apotheosis? You might think so given how Zoë Coombs Marr’s show Every …

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Alfie Brown: Open Hearted Human Enquiry review – ‘cancelled’ comic offers complicated mea culpa

Just the Tonic at the Caves, EdinburghBrown engages in good faith with questions of guilt and remorse, while perceiving bad faith in his critics’ responses to an old routine that included the N-word‘Give me a cheer if you’ve ever experienced remorse!” …

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Edinburgh fringe theatre 2024 week one roundup: comfort food, wassailing and reasons to carry on

Satirical musicals are trending at this year’s fringe, but there are plenty of intense one-person shows too, a knockout coming-of-age drama, and the unmissable return of Every Brilliant ThingMy biggest mistake of the Edinburgh fringe wasn’t mixing up i…

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Hannah Platt: Defence Mechanism review – compelling body dysmorphia comedy

Pleasance Courtyard , EdinburghMaking her fringe debut, the comic performs a droll, unsentimental and occasionally heart-stopping pas de deux with the critical voice in her headHannah Platt has body dysmorphia and doesn’t like being looked at – but her…

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Failure Project review – a reality check about being ‘booked, busy and blessed’

Summerhall, EdinburghIn an often raw performance that retains a light touch, Yolanda Mercy delivers a bittersweet and valuable reflection on the theatre industryScroll through the listings on the edfringe app and you’ll find dozens of productions have …

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At the fringe with your kids? Edinburgh festival shows for families

Younger audiences can choose from fart jokes, dancing lizards, acrobatic bees and plenty of other monkeying aroundPleasance Courtyard, 11.30am, until 25 August Continue reading…

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Luke Rollason review – shock-haired standard bearer of UK clown boom riffs on fairytales

Pleasance Dome, EdinburghRapunzel, Hansel and Gretel and a lot of toilet roll feature as the star Disney+ comedy Extraordinary explores wishes and their fulfilmentAll very well being part of comedy’s current clown boom, you may think, but what are the …

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Batshit review – grandma’s moving story highlights pathologisation of women’s mental health

Traverse theatre, EdinburghLeah Shelton plays her grandmother, incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, in this one-woman show that draws on research, recordings and videos to link 1960s Australia to todayMrs Gwen Couper is having “delusions” about leav…

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Yurts, a cruise ship, my flat: all the city’s a stage at the Edinburgh fringe

From the backseat of a moving car to a swimming pool, what constitutes a venue at Scotland’s sprawling arts festival never fails to surpriseOf all the extraordinary things about the Edinburgh fringe, the easiest to take for granted is that performances…

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