Kate Wyver

Several Edinburgh Fringe theatre productions make performers’ physical exertion central to the drama. Megan Tomei cycles 16km per performance in SpinQueen™, a darkly comic portrait of toxic positivity, perfectionism and emotional avoidance. Connor Delves cycles 27km while portraying Australian Tour de France winner Cadel Evans in Cadel: Lungs on Legs, while Ben Norris runs about 8km in The Distance, which examines the lives of athletes who fall short of elite success. The performers describe intensive training, injuries and the psychological costs of repeatedly pushing their bodies to the limit, exposing both the allure and danger of ambition.

Ten Ways to Die Happy is an English-language Italian interactive gameshow by Emanuele Aldrovandi and Jacopo Giacomoni, hosted by Perla Ambrosini at Edinburgh’s Underbelly. Audience participants symbolically spend limited supplies of flowers on work, art and family while navigating stages of life and tracking happiness. The production offers earnest reflections on mortality and the value of time, but its sedentary pace, cringe-inducing interaction and lack of genuinely difficult choices limit its dramatic impact.

A Guardian critic recommends a selection of standout 2026 Edinburgh Fringe shows spanning comedy, theatre, magic, dance and circus. The picks include personal comedy from Kirsty Mann, Ayo Adenekan, Lizzy Hoo and Demi Adejuyigbe; experimental and socially engaged theatre such as HAM, The Plot and Sanctuary; and international work including Border Bodies and The Palestinian Circus: Step and a Half, which combines Palestinian folk dance with contemporary circus. The recommendations emphasize inventive staging, LGBTQ+ perspectives, trans experience, true-crime criticism, political history and community, offering a varied guide to the festival’s most promising productions.

Laurie Kilmartin’s London debut at Soho Theatre showcases a crude, dark and sharply delivered comic voice shaped by her work for Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien and the Oscars. The review praises her strongest anecdotes and bullish performance style, while criticizing the show’s fragmented structure, dated material, awkward audience participation and difficulty adjusting to British audiences. Her standoffish tone ultimately becomes one of the show’s funniest qualities.

Ben Platt stars as Trevor Copeland, a 1960s New York bar singer looking back on his relationship with songwriter Arthur Brightman, played by Gregor Milne. Set in an intimate cabaret at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, the musical combines American Songbook-style songs with a story about two gay musicians whose public love songs attract both support and hostility. The production explores whether they should protest or assimilate as political pressures reach their underground club. Platt’s vocal performance and Milne’s grounded portrayal are praised, while the show’s bittersweet themes of love, loss, memory and music are balanced by a slightly overlong ending.

Malmö Dockteater is bringing its Swedish-language puppet adaptation of Jackie Collins’s 1968 novel The World Is Full of Married Men to London’s Yard Theatre. Using anatomically modified Barbie dolls, dollhouses, live puppeteering and projected video, the production explores the novel’s explicit sex, swinging-1960s film culture and themes of bodies, beauty and exploitation. Director Erik Holmström says puppets allow sex to be examined with both distance and openness, while the company aims to challenge the assumption that puppetry is primarily for children. The production reflects Malmö Dockteater’s broader effort to establish adult puppetry in Sweden and highlights The Yard’s support for experimental international theatre.

The Kneebone Cadillac, Carl Grose’s comedy about a young banger racer and her family, has found an unusual home at Cornwall’s United Downs Raceway in St Day. Directed by Kyla Goodey and staged by Wildworks, the production has attracted local racers and families, many of whom rarely attend theatre, by reflecting the track’s dangerous excitement and strong community spirit. Drivers describe banger racing as addictive, costly and physically risky, while women racers such as Lexi Crosbie and Caitlin Emery highlight its changing gender balance. The production uses affordable tickets, music, puppets and the racetrack setting to make theatre accessible and celebrate the world it portrays.

The popularity of the queer hockey television series Heated Rivalry has sparked at least four musical parodies, including Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody and Puck Bunnies, which are both heading to the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe. Their creators say the projects were written rapidly out of affection for the source material and use musical theatre’s emotional intensity and queer tradition of self-aware comedy to expand on it. The productions differ in scale, from privately funded commercial theatre to largely self-financed fringe work, while their makers welcome the overlap as an opportunity for cross-promotion rather than competition.

The Guardian highlights ten Edinburgh Festival 2026 productions that have already received strong reviews, spanning theatre, comedy, circus and performance. The selections include climate-focused memoir, understated improvisation, documentary theatre about deaths in custody, a joyful account of growing up in Jenin, acrobatics, musical satire targeting Andrew Lloyd Webber, absurdist clowning, autobiographical performance, an HIV-related story of acceptance and a transgender-themed comedy sketch. The pieces are praised for combining technical skill, emotional depth, social commentary and humor, with several confronting climate change, prison conditions, conflict, stigma and identity.

Greg Doran’s revival of Shakespeare’s Venus & Adonis at the Barbican combines Simon Russell Beale’s nuanced narration with Lyndie Wright’s intricate puppetry. The production portrays Venus’s passionate pursuit of Adonis, whose rejection and devotion to hunting lead toward tragedy. Witty direction, Nick Lee’s live guitar and Robert Jones’s ornate set balance the raunchy humour with the poem’s emotional darkness, resulting in a tender and enduring production.

Ted Walliker’s one-man play Ron begins as a struggling standup routine before veering into a violent, absurd odyssey involving kidnappings, gangsters and cannibalism. Although Walliker’s performance, visual design and creative ambition are praised, the review finds the framing device too quickly abandoned and the central character Tony insufficiently developed, making it difficult to understand what drives his breakdown or emotional turmoil.

Joshua Harmon’s drama We Had a World explores the fractured relationship between his mother Ellen and grandmother Renee, with Harmon’s younger self caught between them. The review praises Suzanne Bertish, Anna Francolini and Ryan Kopel for sharply drawn performances and finds emotional power in the play’s treatment of duty, care, memory and the possibility of reconciliation. It criticizes the uneven pacing and considers the climate-crisis element forced, while praising the production’s precise handling of intimate, fleeting family interactions.

Georgie Dettmer’s play at London’s Royal Court follows two teenage girls discussing disturbing material encountered online, while rapid-fire scenes depict child abuse, rape fantasies, deepfakes, dead bodies and other forms of voyeuristic violence. Directed by Jess Edwards, the production powerfully examines how screens create emotional distance and implicate viewers in the content they consume. Its forceful approach is undermined by a choppy structure, predictable climaxes and a tendency to focus on extreme cases rather than morally ambiguous forms of participation. The use of AI and the inclusion of Gisèle Pelicot’s rape case connect the drama to urgent real-world concerns about image abuse, exploitation and online spectatorship.

Carmen Nasr’s stage adaptation of Babak Anvari’s 2016 film Under the Shadow relocates its supernatural horror to a Tehran apartment during the 1988 Iran-Iraq War. Directed by Nadia Latif and starring Leila Farzad, the production uses a djinn haunting to dramatize the effects of war, political repression, motherhood and displacement. Its creators connect the story’s themes to the Iranian revolution, Palestine and contemporary missile attacks on Iran, arguing that horror can make distant mass suffering intimate and personal. The play runs at London’s Almeida Theatre from 2 June to 4 July.

Jordan Luke Gage’s musical Redcliffe reimagines the true story of William Critchard and Richard Arnold, two men who fell in love in mid-18th-century Bristol. Set against persecution and restrictive social expectations, the production combines comedy, bawdy humour and anguished love songs to imagine the joy and devotion absent from official historical records. The performances, particularly those by Gage, Daniel Krikler, Rebecca Lock and Jess Douglas-Welsh, are praised, although the ambitious new musical still requires some refinement.

Lindsay Posner’s revival of Peter Shaffer’s Equus at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory explores desire, religious devotion, power and the consequences of psychiatric treatment. Noah Valentine gives a convincing performance as Alan Strang, a disturbed teenager who blinds six horses, while Toby Stephens portrays psychiatrist Martin Dysart’s growing loss of authority and sense of self. The production’s ensemble of human horses and physical staging are especially effective in its most intense moments, although the review finds the production solid overall rather than consistently transcendent.

Philippe Quesne’s Farm Fatale presents five abandoned scarecrows running a pirate radio station in a near-future devastated by climate change, where breathable air and birdsong have become scarce. The production uses surreal interviews, music and comic set pieces to argue for art as a source of hope and farms as essential to humanity. Its inventive design and committed cast are highly effective, although the second half becomes distracted and less coherent, including an underdeveloped concert for eggs and a violent vigilante attack.

Dave Harris’s play Tender, directed by Matthew Xia, is set in the failing Dancing Bears strip club and explores sexual pleasure, masculinity, power and vulnerability. Harris and actors Dex Lee, Jessie Mei Li and Kwami Odoom describe research with male strippers and sex workers, physically demanding pole training, and the production’s safeguards around consent. The audience is given paddles to signal willingness to participate in interactive scenes, reflecting the play’s interest in blurring the boundary between performer and spectator. The creators hope the show provokes strong, personal reactions, leaving audiences aroused, emotionally exposed and prompted to reconsider intimacy, gender expectations and family relationships.

Christopher Brett Bailey performs a live reading of his surreal 2023 novella at Soho Theatre, portraying an accidental road trip through small-town America with a sexually voracious, conspiracy-minded Satan. The stripped-back production relies on Bailey’s slurping, hissing and whispering delivery, along with Alex Fernandes’s red-toned lighting, to create a gross, gruesome and occasionally sweet fable. Although the story sometimes meanders and the show runs longer than scheduled, Bailey’s unusual voices, intense gaze and escalating performance drive it to a memorable, fiery conclusion.

Mark Gatiss stars as Arturo Ui in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, directed by Seán Linnen and featuring an original live score by Placebo. Gatiss and Placebo members Brian Molko and Stefan Olsdal see strong parallels between Brecht’s allegory of Hitler’s rise and contemporary political rhetoric in Britain and the United States, particularly the language of disease, violence and protection. The production embraces the play’s comic nightmare, brutality and flexibility rather than treating Brecht as untouchable theatrical doctrine. Its urgent staging aims to reach audiences beyond the political choir and concludes with a call for active resistance to fascism.

Sarah Power’s play Welcome to Pemfort follows a team working in a castle gift shop as they prepare a living-history event. The arrival of Kurtis, a former offender, and his disclosure of a violent past disrupt the group’s easygoing routine, forcing them to confront guilt, shame and the difficulty of separating a person’s present identity from past actions. The production questions how historical violence is stripped of tragedy and turned into entertainment, with strong performances—particularly Sean Delaney’s—and Ed Madden’s restrained direction underpinning the drama.

Neil LaBute’s America the Beautiful: Chapter 1 presents three short plays centered on violence, murder, misogyny and damaged masculinity. The review finds Hate Crime and Kandahar overly unsubtle and emotionally flat because their male characters show little remorse, while The Possible offers a more intriguing and energetic exploration of human strangeness. Performances by Borris Anthony York, Maya-Nika Bewley and Anna María receive particular praise, but the production as a whole is judged more sour than provocative.