Edinburgh Fringe 2025 Hot Tickets: Here are 18 already critically-acclaimed shows you can see this August
If you're not comfortable with nudity, then the last place you want to be this August is in Garry Starr's sublime show 'Classic Penguins'. The premise is that he's "hell-bent on saving books from extinction by performing every Penguin Classic novel ever written". The twist? He's "mostly naked (but with flippers)". His breathtaking performance earned a string of five star reviews last year, with the segment involving a large bear one of the most stupidly clever of the Fringe. No wonder he won the 2025 Melbourne International Comedy Festival Most Outstanding Show Award. He'll be at the Udderbelly from July 30 until August 25. | Contributed
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Edinburgh Live
an hour ago
- Edinburgh Live
Loved-up Fringe performers tie the knot on stage in first ever for the festival
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info A loved-up couple have tied the knot in a 'history making' performance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Linus Karp and Joseph Martin were married on Saturday in front of a sold-out audience at The Pleasance Grand on Saturday. The couple, known for hit shows such as Gwyneth Goes Skiing, are the first pair to marry on stage with a ticketed audience in the Fringe's 78-year history. At the ceremony, Joseph entered to Charli XCX's Von Dutch - while Linus was carried on stage to the tune of Jellicle Cats, from the musical Cats. The service was conducted by Edinburgh Council's Jackie Blackburn, who pronounced the couple husband and husband to a 'momentous' standing ovation. After the ceremony, Linus said: "This day was so fergalicious. Being in a room so full of love alongside the love of my life is a moment that will live with me forever. "We cannot wait for our incredible officiant Jackie Blackburn's debut comedy hour at next year's Fringe - she was an instant icon." Joseph added: "The nerves kicked in when we went to get dressed with our incredible designer Cosimo Damiano - then it felt real! But once we were in our outfits and backstage, it felt like the most natural thing for us to be doing. "Walking down the aisle to Charli XCX's 'Von Dutch' with bodyguards and spark machines wasn't necessarily how I saw my wedding going, but I don't think it gets any more iconic. I couldn't be happier to be Mr Ljunggren." The couple are also starring in The Fit Prince, which is on at the Pleasance Courtyard. Sign up for Edinburgh Live newsletters for more headlines straight to your inbox
Edinburgh Live
2 hours ago
- Edinburgh Live
Edinburgh local who 'despises' Fringe brands festival an 'embarrassment' in tirade
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info An Edinburgh local has shot out online about the Edinburgh Fringe, calling it an "embarrassment" where tourists have "no respect for locals". They posted an angry video to TikTok, showing a mobbed Edinburgh street packed with tourists amid the capital's busiest time of year. In the caption they included a tirade against Festival season and the crowds it brings to Edinburghers' doorsteps. They said: "Words cannot describe how much I DESPITE this sh**** festival. There's little in the world I hate more than the embarrassment that is the Edinburgh Fringe. "Nobody has any respect for the people who live here. Just full of the same unfunny middle class English shows every year. "I could write a book on why this festival needs to be terminated." Fellow capital residents joined ranks in the comments to share their frustration at the Fringe. One commented: "At this point Edinburgh is just a theme park for the English". A miffed parent added: "My daughter has to elbow her way to work from Waverley during August. She booked her own holiday days this year to miss some of it". Another shared: "I do wish BBC would give more coverage to the Edinburgh festival, not the Fringe". However, there were many Edinburgh residents in who disagreed with the hot take and offered alternative points-of-view on the festival. One said: "We live somewhere with the world's largest arts festival on our doorstep. We're so lucky." Another offered: "I stayed in Edinburgh for about 20 years and it's one of the best things about the city. Can't beat a wee sunny afternoon in the Pleasance Courtyard". A third penned: "Disagree and I've lived in Edinburgh during the festival. It's amazing for tourists and culturally important". Others added: "It's an essential tool for people who want to get into the arts and it's a feeder for some of the best British theatre and TV".
The Guardian
7 hours ago
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Ayoade Bamgboye: Swings and Roundabouts review – commanding comic's thrilling debut
The fringe is nothing if not a place where unknowns can write their names across the stars. Ayoade Bamgboye does so in a matter of moments in her debut show, Swings and Roundabouts, which makes instantly clear that, wow, here's a voice you can't help but listen to. It's a slippery one, mind you: the show is delivered now in a Nigerian accent, now in BBC Radio 4 RP, with no guide to the shifting register. It's ticklishly destabilising, and wholly justified by a show tracing the Londoner's journey (cultural, geographical, even metaphysical) from Africa to the UK. That makes it sound like a conventional fringe debut, but it's not, or at least, not to begin with. Thrillingly, Bamgboye pitches us straight into Swings and Roundabouts – no context, no handrails – with a giddy story about eavesdropping on a quarrel in a Co-op. Her command, the confidence in her delivery and how she makes the whole room her own, is quite something. There's no point denying that the set then reverts more to fringe-rookie type, flashing back to the story of where Bamgboye has come from and who she now is. In our host's case, that's an oldest (or in Yoruba culture, youngest) twin, unusually interested in the circumstances of audience members' births, with a name meaning 'crown of joy' and a superiority complex to match. A move to the UK in her twenties knocked that joy out of Bamgboye, though; one routine here workshops English terms for misery. Her outsider eye for native British idiom surfaces throughout the show, helping pep things up as its lost-soul protagonist turns to God ('I gave my life to Christ. He gave it right back'), loses her father (cue a lovely supermarket metaphor for parental bereavement), and turns to the Samaritans. None of this is downbeat – it's a show characterised by bright thinking, vocal variety and the kind of dizzying hairpin turns (into song, into sudden dramatic monologue) that explain why her therapist compared her to Jim Carrey. The impression is of a live-wire artist making up her own rules, and as striking a debut as I've seen at this year's fringe. At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 24 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews
