Edinburgh festivals 2025: the best theatre, music and dance shows ranked

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August in the Scottish capital has become such a huge phenomenon in the cultural calendar that hotel prices rise to become the most expensive in the world, with some performers opting to camp in tents or stay in Glasgow to make sure they can afford it. If you are one of the lucky ones who has managed to find a place to stay, we have compiled a list of the best theatre, music and dance shows reviewed by our critics (comedy recommendations are in a separate list). It's ranked by star rating and will be updated regularly throughout the month. Feel free to contribute in the comment section, telling us about your highlights.
★★★★★Nobody can say the Edinburgh International Festival shies away from epic work. This year its opening concert featured John Tavener's The Veil of the Temple. Lasting eight hours, it is possibly the world's longest vocal work and for obvious reasons hasn't been performed complete since its 2003 premiere. Congratulations, then, to the EIF not just for throwing the kitchen sink at it — well, 250 singers, tam-tam, organ, temple bells and the terrifying Tibetan horn — but also for presenting it so effectively.Richard MorrisonRead the full review
★★★★☆Do you need to be a jazz aficionado to get the most out of the writer-director Oliver Kaderbhai's portrait of Miles Davis at Summerhall? Well, it helps if you want to catch every one of the throwaway references to musicians who came into the orbit of the trumpeter some called 'the prince of darkness'.
But this hypnotic play with music, structured around the making of the modal classic Kind of Blue, works superbly on its own terms, thanks in part to an extraordinarily charismatic performance from the newcomer Benjamin Akintuyosi. The 21 year-old Rada graduate captures Davis's unmistakable rasping voice and summons up his utterly distinctive mixture of swagger and sensitivity.
If the references to drugs and race are the stuff of conventional jazz bio-drama, there's a crucial extra ingredient to this show: the Canadian-born trumpeter Jay Phelps supplies remarkable echoes of Davis's sound. Not content with exploring fragments of Freddie Freeloader and other tracks from the Forties and Fifties, Phelps — who's credited with the play's original concept — rises to the challenge of voicing some of Davis's thoughts. He also portrays a formidable list of characters including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Clark Terry.
We still tend to think of Miles as an utterly contemporary figure so it comes as a shock to realise next year marks his centenary. In Kaderbhai's script, the great man, truculent as ever, listens back to studio tapes and offers advice to Phelps about making a career in the 21st century.
From there, the piece travels back through the bebop years and the short-lived Paris romance with Juliette Gréco, who is represented by a video clip of that wistful ballad Il n'y a plus d'après — Colin J Smith's video backdrop is artfully woven together. Sticklers for facts will query whether memories of Gréco really did inspire the writing of Blue in Green, a piece which, as the script acknowledges, many now attribute to Davis's great pianist Bill Evans. But Akintuyosi's imperious glances are enough to warn you against getting into an argument with him. TechCube 0, to Aug 25, edfringe.comClive Davis
• Edinburgh Festival 2025: the best shows to see this year
★★★★☆Almost certainly the best-dressed orchestra at the Edinburgh International Festival, the American ensemble known simply as NYO2 flooded the stage of the Usher Hall with a hundred teenagers wearing dazzling red trousers, black T-shirts and natty matching trainers. For those of us still numbed by the eight hours of John Tavener's mystic ruminations in this venue the day before, the sight of these exuberant youths, clearly having a whale of a time on their European debut, was a tonic.
And their playing, galvanised with characteristic energy by the Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, was just as exciting. It's strange to recall that America had no national youth orchestra until Carnegie Hall organised one in 2012 (modelling it on Britain's National Youth Orchestra). NYO2 came four years later, founded for younger players (14 to 17) from diverse backgrounds.
But any worries that this band might be too callow to deal with a testing programme were swiftly dispelled. After a slightly tentative start to Jimmy Lopez's Peru Negro, that rumbustiously orchestrated fantasy on Peruvian folk songs was delivered with terrific verve, its pounding dance rhythms matched later by Arturo Marquez's La Conga del Fuego Nuevo, which was played as an encore.
Between these two Latin American fiestas came two much darker Russian works. It was the hair-raising fast movements of Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony that really impressed, with just the right feeling of runaway mania. But all else paled next to Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto, given a wonderful performance — by turns poignant, angry or sardonic — with Alisa Weilerstein the soloist.
One scarcely dared breathe during her unaccompanied cadenza, which seemed drawn from some deep well of profound sadness. Payare (Mr Weilerstein) didn't always manage a perfect rapport with his wife but what a masterclass she provided for the young players around her. Richard Morrison
★★★☆☆Sex always sells. This chamber piece about amateur porn is just the sort of venture that gives the Fringe a taboo-busting frisson. Ushers at Summerhall were handing out stickers to place over our phone cameras to make sure no one tried to sneak a photo and I can report that, at the performance I saw, a few people did quietly walk out.
For all that, the debut drama by David Jonsson, the Bafta rising star-winning actor who made such an impression in Rye Lane and Industry, isn't exactly Last Tango in Edinburgh. True, the dialogue is peppered with references to the more arcane end of the fetish market, yet at heart the play, driven by intense, glancing dialogue, is as much a study of the grey area between love, lust and friendship as a guided tour to the online industry.
• Rye Lane's David Jonsson: why I've written a play about amateur porn
Jonsson has concocted whiplash conversations between his two protagonists, Megan and Kevin — brilliantly played by Tash Cowley and Michael Workeye — who spend much of the time in various states of undress. (Unless I blinked too much, there isn't actually any nudity.) Zi Alikhan directs at a breathless tempo; some of the lines flicked past so quickly that I couldn't catch them from my corner seat.
Nor is it easy to accept the premise that these two pals so abruptly decide to embark on a career as home video sex performers, marketing themselves to folk who are willing to pay good money to watch homemade romps. While Kevin, who fancies himself as an auteur, fusses over camera angles, Megan throws herself into her new role as internet vamp.
There's a memorably awkward interlude when a pair of foreign swingers — portrayed by Lewis Peek and Daniela Manuwuike — show up to take part in a foursome. A close-up of Megan's uneasy expression stares out from the projector screen behind the cheap sofa. Later, a hint of racial and class tension in the central relationship is left dangling in the air like a hastily discarded bra. Still, even if the drama needs more time and space to unfurl, Cowley and Workeye make a compelling pair of adventurers. TechCube 0, to Aug 25, edfringe.comClive Davis
★★★☆☆Our news cycle lurches along at such a frantic pace that it's easy to forget it's not so long ago that the world's banking system was on the edge of meltdown. Kudos, then, to that ultra-prolific playwright James Graham for zooming in on the crisis that brought the Royal Bank of Scotland crashing down in 2008. The drama that Graham has brought to the Edinburgh International Festival, featuring a jovial cameo by Brian Cox as the ghost of Adam Smith — yes, he of the invisible hand of the market — has some of the knockabout qualities of the dramatist's football pageant, Dear England. Festival Theatre, to Aug 9, eif.co.ukClive DavisRead the full review