From a Bonnie Blue-based drama to a drink-addled rom-com, the best plays at Edinburgh 2025

Telegraph

a day ago

The world's biggest arts festival is back, with another mind-blowing quantity of shows to savour in more than 260 venues, ranging from a shopping centre car park to a new venue at Hibernian FC's Easter Road stadium, plus all the usual suspects – including Assembly, Pleasance, Gilded Balloon, Underbelly – besides.
Undaunted by the estimated 50,000 performances taking place this year, I've duly blistered my feet pounding the pavements and developed a hunch ducking between insistent flyer purveyors. I've sat through sorry disappointments, but also experienced knock-out sensations. With the clock still ticking, more discoveries await, but the opening week has yielded Fringe marvels to shout from the castle battlements about. Here's my best of the fest, to date:
Lost Lear ★★★★★
Rising Irish theatre-maker Dan Colley has done something remarkable with Shakespeare's King Lear: he has made it freshly distressing and stingingly insightful, invigorating our thinking about a familiar text and contemporising its world of cognitive loss and parental dereliction.
Initially, it's as if there's something satirically analogous between the starry, impulsive behaviour of a youthful actress (Venetia Bowe's Joy), rehearsing a modern, experimental production of the play, and the erratic, high-handed Lear she's playing; she treats a quiet, middle-aged understudy with scornful disdain.
But we soon piece together the confusions: Joy is an elderly actress with dementia who has retreated to a stagey world she feels at home in, indulged by her carers, and, with reluctance but some resistance, by her grown-up, estranged son, a Cordelia-like figure. Even though Joy shares Lear's bewilderment, she obtains a kind of reassurance from inhabiting the part but the re-enactments compound the hurt on her son's side.
Shakespeare's language proves, as ever, a matchless tool of communication, but it also enables Joy to deflect appeals to her feelings, and avoid confronting past actions. Much like a tug of love and hatred between a child and a resented parent, the action honours the original but also endeavours to break from it, to establish a new honesty – thereby attaining a potent examination of family power dynamics and the difficulty of forgiveness. Making ingenious use of video and puppetry, it's a succinctly clever and a palpably poignant triumph.
At Traverse (1), until Aug 24; times vary (75 minutes); traverse.co.uk/whats-on
Body Count ★★★★★
A one-woman show about a glamorous sex worker who has resolved to break records, and risk scandal, by sleeping with 1,000 male online subscribers and filming it – while being quizzed for a documentary – could hardly be more timely. Former model Issy Knowles – who has written and stars in Body Count – has rustled up a serious-minded, but also provocatively light-hearted, response to the cause célèbre of Bonnie Blue, whose money-spinning, recorded sex marathon with 1,057 strangers caused huge controversy this year, re-stirred by this month's Channel 4 documentary.
Male members of the audience are invited to don balaclavas on entry but there the gimmickry ends. Knowles appears in minimal clothing, sporting fake breasts and a replica waxed vagina; and she adopts a gamut of explicitly suggestive poses on a giant double-bed mattress. As her OnlyFans character Pollie interacts with a recorded, unseen male interviewer and her male 'clients' – evoked by her versatile suggestion alone – we delve into rewardingly complex questions about empowerment.
In a hypnotic performance and a brave one – especially in such a boudoir-sized studio – Knowles is commanding and playful, luxuriating in her allure, but also vulnerable and uncertain, sometimes mixing all this together. Parts of her backstory explain Pollie's fixation with trying to control her sexual autonomy, and, broadly, this creatively confident, highly charged hour holds a feminist mirror up to 'now' issues of objectification, male insecurity and the commodification, nay the pornification, of intimacy.
Pleasance Courtyard (The Green), until 25 Aug; 19:15 (1 hour); edfringe.com
Ohio ★★★★☆
Producer Francesca Moody has an enviable reputation for finding unusual small-scale shows that achieve a phenomenal impact – witness past Edinburgh shows Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. So high expectations attend her latest venture. It's another curveball proposition: a husband and wife US indie-folk duo called The Bengsons have created something between a DIY seminar, a homespun gig (albeit with nifty computer-assisted musicianship) and an ecstatic happening.
In a warm, unhurried, welcoming way, he – Shaun – discusses an early near-death experience as a child (he hails from Ohio, hence the title), his abandonment of religious belief and salvation in music, but ongoing urge to fathom existence as he contemplates the incremental loss of his hearing from tinnitus (its effects perturbingly simulated at points).
For her part, Abigail – the more personable of the two, her voice blissful and capable of arresting kookiness – talks about Judaism, which she views as a religion of doubt, her incessant singing as a child, her adoption of earth worms as pets ('a tiny god of earth and s--- … that could take my pain and compost it'), and the death of her brother. The onus is on us all (besides bits of audience participation) to confront mortality, and savour the strangeness and mystery of life.
The ringing sensation of tinnitus comes poetically to be viewed as a blessing rather than a curse, a sign of something otherworldly, like an eternal prayer: 'The afterlife of an ear cell, the singing of a choir of stereocilia after they've died'. Amid the mad hurly-burly of the Fringe, this show (directed by Caitlin Sullivan) feels like a spiritual oasis, and its own afterlife is already assured – it will run at the Young Vic for a month from Sept 30.
Monstering the Rocketman ★★★★☆
Few performers have reinvented themselves more than Henry Naylor – who emerged on the Fringe as a springy comedian in the early 1990s, in a double-act with Andy Parsons (Parsons and Naylor). Tall and capably goofy, he also made an impression as Rowan Atkinson's sidekick in a successful Barclaycard campaign.
But his writing skills have become ever more pronounced, with impressive plays – usually showcased in Edinburgh – tackling major topical subject-matter, most prominently the Middle East post 9/11. A few years ago he gave us a droll, self-mocking account of a foolhardy fact-finding mission he went on in Afghanistan in 2002. In Monstering the Rocketman he again casts a lacerating eye on scoop-chasing impetuosity. It feeds, brilliantly, off the real-life case of The Sun's bid, in 1987, to shame and hound Elton John with fabricated allegations that he had sex with rent boys.
In this solo tour de force, Naylor gallops through the madness – which resulted in the pop star suing, and getting a substantial settlement – assisted by dashes of judicious fiction. Diving in and out of various dramatis personae, including 'Reg' himself, his main vantage is that of a Sun cub-reporter, propelled into the heart of the tabloid's campaign, and forced to consider the ethics of Fleet Street at its most inventive, and infernal. It's enjoyable rather than finger-wagging, but in revisiting the dark days of the homophobic 1980s, it duly leaves a sour taste.
Pleasance (Dome), until Aug 24; 16.10 (1 hour); edfringe.com
She's Behind You! ★★★★☆
A one-dame homage to panto might sound as fitting for the season as sledging, but there's something so ebullient and joyfully unfettered about Johnny McKnight's insider's guide to the past, present and future of the form that it fits the Edinburgh Festival spirit like that lost slipper on Cinderella's foot.
McKnight's claim to dame-fame is impressive: he has played 18 of them, and written more than 30 shows for Scottish audiences over the past 20 years. But this isn't a predictable trot through career highlights.
Instead, kitted out in a Wizard of Oz Dorothy costume and abounding with camp mischief, McKnight offers not just a celebration but an energetic critique of panto, with a mea culpa about his own succumbing to cheap stereotypes in the past ('I wasn't standing on the shoulders of giants … I was getting a piggyback and hoping to get away with it.') He broaches his own hubris, too, about being tactile with the audience – and his rethink on consent.
Mainly, across 75 frolicsome minutes he charts his resolution to raise panto's game with better gender-balances, and scripts with something meaningful, as well as subversively playful, to say. This culminates – accompanied by a magical glittery transformation – in a recap of a 2018 Mother Goose at the Tron in Glasgow which put romantic same-sex attraction centre-stage and elicited not howls of outrage but cheers of delight. 'Good theatre reveals an empathy we maybe didn't know we had. It can change us,' McKnight concludes – and in ensuring we have a ball, recruits us to that view in real-time.
At Traverse, until Aug 24; 21:30 or 21:45 (75 minutes)
Seating Plan ★★★★☆
Coming across plays that have charm, wit and the will-they won't-they tease of a rom-com is rare: for Seating Plan to have all those qualities and be Izzy Radford's debut play is the stuff of fairytale discoveries.
Radford's simple, sparky idea is for a young man and woman to be forced into conversation by being placed at the end of a table by a seating-plan at a mutual friend's birthday party, with time jumping in between scenes to catch them at different stages of their lives and shifting attitudes to each other, as birthdays roll by.
It's an Alan Ayckbourn-ish conceit but it has its own contemporary flavour, and gets to the heart of how we bunglingly converse, especially when addled by drink. Radford herself plays Mavis, who's apparently in recruitment, resolutely unimpressed in the face of George Airey's dishy David, a waspish statistician, but beneath that is angling to end her singledom, her typically random opening conversational gambit running thus: 'I'm a bit late David because I got distracted by a video of an alien landing in Woking.'
Radford has the measure of how lives can come together, and also fall apart, in your 20s, and as we get to know both, and become enamoured of their flirtations and recriminations, it's as if we're peering at the what ifs, and chance encounters, of our own lives too. The show, directed by Florence Carr-Jones, is getting billed as 'Think One Day meets Sliding Doors with a dash of Julia Davis's Nighty Night'. That's overstating things, and the ending feels abrupt, but a big find in a little room, no question, and beautifully played.
At the Nip Patter House, Gilded Balloon, until Aug 25; 17:00 (60 minutes); gildedballoon.co.uk
Fuselage ★★★★☆
This is an extraordinary piece of theatre, directed by Makaela Milburn, that gives us a first-hand account of what it was like to be caught up in the tragedy of the Lockerbie bombing of December 1988, and what it felt like to be spared death but suffer an unimaginable agony of loss.
Annie Lareau, who recently served as artistic director of Seattle Public theatre, was studying drama in London at the time with fellow students from Syracuse university. She could easily have boarded Pam Am Flight 103 to travel home for Christmas with many of them, including her best friend, Theodora Cohen.
She couldn't afford to change her ticket to do so, and waved them off to Heathrow airport, never to see them again. Their faces, though, we do see again now, in projected old photos, gleaming with youthful hope. Lareau and two other actors (Peter Dylan O'Connor, Brenda Joyner) construct the count-down to the terrorist outrage, taking in failures of intelligence and security, and Lareau's own strange, dread-filled nightmares that seemed to warn her not to fly, but weren't enough to make a difference for her pals.
The piece does a lot – including hearing from those who suffered the trauma of being in the town that night – but even if at points it feels too busy, too crowded, the raw pain and Lareau's quest to rebuild and make sense of a life upended forever, in an instant, makes this a theatrical weepie like no other.
At Pleasance Courtyard (Above), until Aug 25; 15:45 (70 minutes)
Philosophy of the World ★★★★☆
For those seeking something more confrontational, unexpected and exhilaratingly bizarre, all roads lead to the alternative-minded, and experimentally flourishing Summerhall Arts complex, and a late-evening assault on bourgeois conformity in the shape of In Bed With My Brother's latest demented opus.
The maverick troupe (Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory) have been inspired by the story of the 1960s New Hampshire rock-band The Shaggs (four sisters corralled by their domineering father Austin Wiggin). Their music was hailed as awful, but so awful it perhaps broke new ground – Rolling Stone likened them to 'lobotomised Trapp Family Singers'.
The content warning flags: 'Distressing or potentially triggering themes, nudity, scenes of a sexual nature, scenes of sexual violence, scenes of violence, strong language/ swearing'. True, but that belies the darkly comic and enjoyably unsettling nature of the hour, with much deadpan complicity between the trio and the tightly packed audience.
At times it's as if you're watching Macbeth's three witches go berserk, with the oppressions of patriarchy (embodied in the much brutalised figure of Austin Wiggin, as played by Nigel Barrett) being assailed in a counter-cultural ritual of exorcism. The thing to be most apprehensive about is the punishingly loud closing section which rises to a ranting crescendo, but you're offered ear-plugs at the start; they're not monsters.