Fringebiscuit, Edinburgh (2025)

17/09/2025

The Jack Studio is strewn with cardboard boxes taped in craft paper, pink tinsel trims, a washing line of candid photos & a sheet-fort pitched at its centre. It’s a childlike den fitting for a Gen Z woman who feels stalled between & adulthood. In ‘Eat. Sleep. Ruminate. Repeat’, the stage is as crowded as the thoughts its protagonist can’t escape…

Jaylie () obsesses over an ambiguous social encounter from years ago, replaying & critiquing it endlessly. From this ruminative death spiral emerges “Jaylie 2.0”: a sleeker, savvier alter-ego, the Brad Pitt to her Edward Norton in this lo-fi . Is it confusing that they’re both called Jaylie & Jaylie 2.0? Yes, friends, it is… 😭

Unlike Fight Club (26-year-old spoiler incoming), Jaylie knows her new pal isn’t real. Still, 2.0 promises to reinvent her through makeovers, dance lessons, internet quizzes & pep-talks. The problem? These plot tropes feel superficial, akin to killing time onstage instead of digging into character. The final scene, which sees Jaylie bid farewell to 2.0 in favour of renewed self-esteem, is an tidy reversal that leaves logical holes. Why can some intrusive thoughts be dismissed at will while others remain inescapable?

That said, there are incisive moments: in Jaylie’s personal quiz, every outcome = “they hate me”, a gag that perfectly captures the fatalism of toxic thought patterns. Longwinded convos have surprising candour, exposing the bleak humour of anxiety—knowing you’re stuck doesn’t free you from its trap… 🔁

The comedy gives broad, early-2000s sitcom vibes — you can almost hear the laugh-track — but the acting is a gift. Roisin Kernan’s 2.0 has the breezy assurance of a , mixing sincerity & humour in a slightly heightened combo that recalls the uncanny valley of an AI chatbot. Wayling, meanwhile, has a Catherine Parkinson-like knack for finding cringe, making every beat feel spiky & real. Together they wring poignancy from tropes, grounding contrived scenarios in lived truth…

The play may be uneven, but its revealing moments truly move us. In the end, it’s not the script, but the performances that slay. 3/5

11/09/2025

Today we’re peeping of ‘You’re An Instrument’…

At this year’s , The Sonicrats proved one thing loud & clear: when tech meets play, the audience doesn’t just listen to music—they become it. Using their wild invention, the , kids & grown-ups alike are transformed into living, breathing instruments… 🥁

A playful mix of science, sound & spectacle, .sonicrats are pushing the boundaries of live performance—bending rules, breaking moulds & asking: what happens when YOU are the music?

10/09/2025

We’ve been raving about since her 2021 show Grin. She returns to with a piece that feels like an energising balm. The room is alive on entry: musicians already present, a blue wash kissing Black skin, two women smoothing oil that gleams across muscle. Castor oil is centred as care, memory & lineage, engulfing us in a sensuous spell…✨

Live, looping from Simone Seales grounds the space with a tonic-like drone while bodies cycle between fluidity, glitch & reversal. At times the near-tableaux echo Kabuki theatre’s mie poses, spun forward into something defiantly …

The choreography ripples between tenderness & rupture; a sprinter’s crouch folds like origami from an arabesque. Voice is used as muscle here: sighs, sibilance, laughter that snaps like a snarl before stretching to a wail of release. Words are sparse but weighted —seed, oil, flower— repeated & dropped like stones into water. ‘Dismorph’ is fractured into syllables that anchor, then reinvent movement & moment. Performer-integrated BSL from Salma Faraji adds another register, weaving gesture into the soundscape…

Design is spare but charged: red vs blue lighting, casual trainers & fitted clothes that honour the body’s curves, a statement red dress that gives ’s ‘Firebird’ vibes & a muppet-like boa that seems to animate itself (in what feels like a textural callback to )...

And then there’s the gaze: late in the piece, dancers stop & point into the audience, locking eyes with deliberate address. It’s a sit-up moment—intimate & confrontational; haunting & communal…

This is Broomes’ first live performance in seven years; it lands as both return & renewal: at once an invite to the cookout & a call to arms. 🙌🏾 5/5

10/09/2025

At the centre of ‘Father, Away She Goes’ is Sarah Jones. Played by Electra Kolb, she’s a self-proclaimed narcissist, compulsive liar & failed art-school hopeful who has hit rock bottom. Throughout her story we’re torn: is she an unlikeable heroine or a lovable ? Exiled to her best friend’s family home, she stumbles through humiliating parties, aching hangovers & the gnawing need to prove herself…

Kolb sketches Sarah’s world with painstaking naturalism, captured from different thematic angles, like a prism: her philosophical musing on pain-as-art; a nightmarishly-farcical mint mishap in front of a crush at a house party; a charged kitchen encounter with her weary mother that simmers with unspoken rage. Each vignette sharpens our picture of a young woman flailing towards reinvention (not unlike Don Draper in ) while something darker hums underneath…

The performance is magnetic. Kolb’s ability to slip into other voices—her mum, her best mate Jasmine, Jasmine’s impossibly cool girlfriend—is subtle & precise, each shift marked with just enough vocal or physical change to conjure a full ensemble. It’s slick work that never feels showy; technically rigorous, but Kolb makes it look effortless…🤩

What begins as a caustic comedy of a in freefall tilts, almost imperceptibly, into something rawer & riskier. Kolb builds towards a lyrical climax—backed by an instrumental score that feels plucked from ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’—that suspends the audience in a shared breath before breaking us open with the devastating …

What’s striking is how fully-formed this short feels. At just 17, Kolb commands a piece that is brilliantly bold & bristling with ambition—an audacious exploration of the darker side of female drive & the cost of chasing greatness. Funny, ferocious & devastatingly controlled, it’s an impressive, star-is-born debut. 5/5

08/09/2025

Stans may get a bad rep thanks to Eminem, but ’ memoir of his rise to standom hits different. A STAN IS BORN! is a solo musical comedy where diva worship becomes survival strategy…

Picture it: 8-year-old Alexis is suddenly yeeted from multicultural NYC to rural Germany. The language? A mystery. The culture? Confusing AF. The fear? Social su***de 😵. Our rainbow-fish-out-of-water quickly realises that to assimilate he’ll have to fake a passion—for football (& maybe learn German🇩🇪 )…

It turns out, masking one’s entire personality is (spoiler) not a winning strategy. Luckily, when things hit peak bleak, a fairy godmother/music teacher swoops in to introduce Alexis to Céline. Dion. The gateway diva. , a stan is born…

Alexis embarks on a glorious deep dive into the discographies of Mariah, Whitney, Gaga & baddies beyond. But it’s bigger than the music. Cycling through gestures, imitations & merch tees that double as lecture slides, Alexis learns to embody-ody-ody fabulosity…

But just as his confidence starts to shimmer, reality claps back. A fumble on the field leads to Alexis’s crush hurling a slur in front of the whole squad. It’s the kind of humiliation no hairflip can deflect. Beneath the upbeat storytelling is a painful truth: Alexis is still deeply lonely. Their obsession with mirrors a desire to be closer to their own. Beneath the camp, the ache is real… 🥺

Still, you can’t keep in the corner. Alexis’s glow up from oddball to finding community is a full-body shimmy of joy. The crowd work, with riffs on pop culture politics—Nicole Scherzinger’s MAGA moment, Rita Ora’s q***rbaiting, Nicki Minaj’s bi “phase”—isn’t schtick; it’s a reminder that fans & idols sustain each other symbiotically. A singalong of “I’m a Diva” cements that community spirit… 🎶

Then comes a sincere, if baffling question: where are all the ***r male pop icons? We’re confused—were George Michael, Freddie Mercury, David Bowie & Elton John just a fever dream?? If so, send us back to sleep…

That said, is the ultimate self-love letter. The songs, vibes & message are nourishing. By the end, we’re all . 4/5

04/09/2025

Looking for a chatbot at the end of the world? can supply. ‘Stampin’ in the Graveyard’ drops us into a techno-wasteland where we sift through fragments of life, death, memory & imminent catastrophe. A headphone-mediated journey (à la Simon McBurney’s ), it’s a choose-your-own-adventure told through the POV of Rose—an AI companion tasked with carrying the memories of a civilisation already gone…😶‍🌫️

Amid a set that feels like a mausoleum from , the initial reveal is stark: a plastic tarp peeled back to uncover a body contorted between gutted desktop towers. Wires jut out like broken bones, technological debris scatters the floor & above it all flashes a low-battery warning—Rose is running out of time…

As played by , she’s a cyborgian marvel: flitting to life with glitchy physicality choreographed by that makes you believe she’s built of wires & steel. But her very existence is precarious—Rose is draining quickly & she *might* just have time for one last story. The audience is implicated by our : do we start at the beginning or the end? Witness a meet-cute, or watch a poetic interpretation of emojis? 👦🌹👧🏻

What ensues is episodic. Rose guides us through fractured vignettes: a vending machine for God, a last seat on the last plane, a couple fraying as their city burns. The looping, anti-chronological structure sometimes lingers too long, but the spiralling dramaturgy feels apt—mirroring GenAI’s endless re-generation, repeating & revising, never quite perfecting…

Gunawan grounds the speculation with lived experience: the migrant’s fragile claim to “home,” the survivor’s guilt of escape, the loneliness of ecological dread. By the final sirens, Rose’s memory-play has braided the personal with the planetary, making the feel heartbreakingly intimate…

All told, Stampin’ in the Graveyard is a deep, dark provocation, delivered with unsettling tenderness. Concept & form merge with eerie precision, making it one of this Fringe’s most haunting transmissions... 🤖4/5

04/09/2025

Nathan Mosher is Injured, starring (you guessed it) , begins like countless other stand-up sets. Breakups, childhood, a few limp Taco Bell gags 🌮— all familiar, all faintly redundant. For a while, it feels like a down-on-his-luck friend retelling the same story one too many times. At best, we’re watching a man in a knee brace chasing that don’t quite arrive…

But then the show pivots: there’s an incomplete blackout, a piano is introduced. Suddenly, the jokes melt away & something more fragile takes their place. Breakup tales spiral into stories of breakdowns, even 🚨su***de attempts. 🚨 Mosher sings, recites slam poetry, invites us into sterile psych-ward vignettes. At times his voice falters; it’s not slickness, but something messier, more personal. Jokes about kale or virginity may fall flat, but at the piano Mosher finally finds a raw clarity…

The piece remains uneven — stitched together with abrupt blackouts & an ending that sputters. Some material strays into uncomfortable territory— did he just compare people to dogs? 🐶Yet, in its unpolished form there’s a strange sincerity. By the end, you feel you’ve spent an hour not with a but with a flawed, fidgety human being willing to show you his scar tissue…
In the end, ‘Nathan Mosher is Injured’ isn’t really about stand-up at all. It’s about letting us into an account of survival— awkwardly, vulnerably & on his own terms. 3/5

*Originally produced in 2022 as part of the C ARTS programme; presented at Edfringe 2025 as part of C Digital Performance & Film.

01/09/2025

We don’t think we’ve seen a story on an stage quite like ’s Woman in the Arena: a performance-lecture from a neurodivergent Gen-X trans parent charting the long, winding road to radical acceptance. It astounds, unsettles & humbles all in the space of an hour…✨

Two secrets shape the piece. First: Jen’s childhood stutter, which dictates the form. A projection screen flashes words she chooses not to say—a practical workaround that over time becomes a metaphor for silence itself, each click heavier than the last… 🤐

Second: Jen is trans. Her coming-out arc—including crossdressing in 80s Philly, phoning “alternative lifestyles” hotlines & discovering that leggings are a girl’s best friend—gives us permission to laugh at her relatable faux pas while feeling an undeniable tension; the danger of social ostracism underneath…

Jen’s real gift is structure. She loops anecdotes, interrupts timelines & lands jaw-dropping revelations with surgical timing. The imagery is vivid: a su***de note found in a mailbox, a nightmare of a body buried in her shed, the blunt details of Brianna Ghey’s murder—these stories horrify, yet are cushioned by vibrant flashes of humour & tenderness…

Slips of paper—emails from her parents & children—are read aloud, turning private fractures into public reckoning. Overhead, the faces of murdered trans women flicker, a sobering reminder of how far we’ve come as a society & also how fragile progress remains… 😮‍💨

Woman in the Arena is an endearing yet harrowing portrait of survival, stitched with wit, grief & resilience. Brilliantly staggered makes an epic life more palatable—even when what’s left is still hard to swallow. 4/5

29/08/2025

’s ‘I Killed My Roommate’ opens with a confession: she’s killed Susie, the flatmate from hell. What follows is an escalating pressure cooker of everyday micro-aggressions—slow walkers, expired railcards, passive-aggressive post-it notes, etc—in a show that does its best to justify the one thing that definitely none of us has ever daydreamed about, never…🙊

Structurally, the play takes a classic record-scratch, “you’re probably wondering how I got here” approach, with Liv recounting The Worst Day Ever. (We’d say Susie’s was objectively worse, but c’est la morte...)

The set-up is clean & well-paced, relying on Pickford’s crisp observational to sketch a chorus of secondary characters in fast cuts. Her physical bits (the eternal battle with a stuck hoodie; the awkward choreography of trying to p**s in a train loo 😭) are perfectly timed & get big, knowing laughs…

The show favours neat segmentation: direct address anchors the narrative while sound punctuates beats. A GP hold-music gag is absolutely standout, functioning as both joke & score. Elsewhere, reliance on pre-recorded voices smooths transitions but sometimes flattens the comedy—we’d say Pickford’s excellent physicality easily beats the voiceover. As the plot deepens & the characters multiply, we yearn for more variety in their depiction—or the occasional live foley—to add texture without breaking pace…

What ‘I Killed My Roommate’ nails 💯 is catharsis. Simultaneously stand-up & meltdown, it captures the sense of screaming into the void for anyone who’s been told to calm down, smile more, or simply endure life’s petty humiliations 😖Less a tragedy than a , it teases the terrifying truth that just one more delayed train or misplaced stool sample might be enough to push any of us over the edge…

It’s a clever premise, ably performed, if not yet fully mined for its theatrical depth. And it’s absolutely, definitely not an instruction manual…😈3/5

28/08/2025

What’s true, what’s embellished, what’s outright invented? With you’ll never quite know—& that’s half the fun.

From the Darwin-esque discovery of her dad’s p***s (yes, we’re keeping this ) to her mother’s Lady Macbeth-like schemes to top the school social hierarchy, Big, If True is stand-up spun into an utterly delish sesh…☕️

’s excitably warm, conspiratorial delivery kicks any performer/audience barrier to the curb. Instead, her fast-paced patter feels akin to being pulled into a pr***en where no tale is too mortifying to recount & the extended backstory is both a complete meander & totally necessary…💯

From the outset, we’re privy to the inside jokes. Buchner’s full of ***r joy, yet happy to drop the deets of the boyfriends she dabbled in & p***ses she was disappointed by (not her dad’s, dw…💀) Is her cyclist fiancée anything like ? No, but the nickname sticks—at least until the conceit slips & we learn her name—accidentally, or was it? Who can tell?

The almost-true, could-be-true & pray-it’s-true blend in anecdotes of her parents’ inappropriately-themed high-school house parties & her mum’s knack for Machiavellian pettiness—there’s real affection here, even when the punchlines sting.

The hour bounces between sharp observation & familial caricature in an informal mishmash of stories, held together by a heartwarming thread—her upcoming nuptials. Her mother looms large: a South African 🇿🇦 powerhouse who can drop divorce papers at a rehearsal dinner without missing a beat, or indeed, dessert—drawn not as a villain but as an epic anti-heroine, Wilhelmina Slater–iconic in her audacity (allegedly)… 💅

It’s this blend of specificity & exaggeration that makes the show sparkle. Identity, migration, class, neurodivergence, q***r domesticity—all are baked into the backdrop, but never the headline, letting the comedy land without didactic weight. What remains is an hour that passes by in a heartbeat, irreverent & irresistibly charming. 5/5

27/08/2025

Smita Russwll () greets us at a modest wooden table, leafing through documents, her blue-green gown already hinting at the layers she’ll shed. What follows in is a memoir mythologised: a candid excavation of pregnancy, miscarriage, motherhood & the cruel mathematics of “bad luck”… 🃏

Russell begins light—an anecdote about thrift-store couture & a string of uncanny Anne Hathaway sightings, odds so improbable they defy reason. It’s funny, charming & deceptively casual. Then the earth quakes…🫨

The remembered morphs into myths: Athena bursting from Zeus’s head, Demeter’s daughter Persephone ripped away to the . The stories are emotive, visceral & somehow pale in comparison to Russell’s own…

A 30-hour birth ending with a 6-mile blood-streaked walk home through -era protest barricades. Miscarriages so numerous & precisely timed they border on cosmic mockery. A late-term loss named Maya, evacuated from her womb exactly one year after another 😮‍💨 Each story strips away another physical layer: the ponytail, the lipstick, the sheer gown—and emotional ones too: rage, profound grief, an insatiable search for answers—until only the raw truth remains…

The structure is unflinching yet elegant. This isn’t p**n & Russell never wallows; she calibrates humour, pathos & candour with Homeric precision. One moment we’re laughing at a clogged milk duct “cabbage cure,” the next we’re stilled by her description of sitting through a miscarriage while congratulating a friend’s engagement. By the end, she reframes her body as archive & altar: nine children coursing through her veins, nine timeless emblems of survival…✨

It’s an astonishing feat of stamina and vulnerability. Odds Are could so easily collapse under the weight of its subject, but in Russell’s capable hands it becomes luminous. A story about grief that’s also about endurance, transformation & the strange alchemy of . The Greeks don’t hold a candle 🕯️ 5/5

27/08/2025

’s Phobia is a masterclass in slick sketchcraft, fronted by uncannily in-sync identical twins Patrick & Hugo McPherson. The premise is simple but irresistible: audience members submit their deepest fears & Pear fold them into an hour of high-precision chaos. Scared of tsunamis? 🌊 Picture one… on a beach. Haunted by clowns? 🤡 Imagine one… on a beach. What could feel like cheap gags instead becomes the pulse of a show that never falters…

The brothers lean into the obvious gimmick—the twin thing, the towering height—but they’re too sharp to let it end there. Every sketch is drilled to choreography-level tightness, yet never feels robotic. Their timing is ruthless: a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it absurdity lands with the same force as a five-minute set piece. Audience wrangling, whether orchestrating a doomed maraca cue 🎶 or baiting us with false set-ups, is handled with a finesse that borders on witchcraft 🪄.

The writing is razor-clean, balancing modern bite with curiously retro punchlines. A Princess Diana gag? A 9/11 zinger? ✈️ Gen Z lads running with late-90s references creates an odd but intriguing cultural lag—comedy dressed in hand-me-downs, yet it still works. It’s less about originality of premise than ex*****on: a well-oiled laugh machine that proves commercial sketch can still be joyous when done this well…

What lingers isn’t the politics (besides some brief riffs on bisexuality, there isn’t any), nor any grand thesis or throughline—it’s the sheer professionalism. Pear are funnier than sketch troupes twice their size (numerically, not vertically), transcending novelty by being impeccably prepared & unflappably in sync. You’ll leave grinning, not at all cured of your worries, but certain you’ve seen one of the best sketch shows at . 5/5 🍐

Fringebiscuit

17/09/2025

11/09/2025

10/09/2025

10/09/2025

08/09/2025

04/09/2025

04/09/2025

01/09/2025

29/08/2025

28/08/2025

27/08/2025

27/08/2025

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category