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Scotsman
13 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Four Star Comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe 2025: 17 acclaimed shows you can still get tickets to see this weekend
It's approaching the end of the second week of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the reviews have been continuing to pour in. With the physical programme containing over 3,350 shows across 265 venues (with plenty more added after the print deadline), it can be a daunting task to work out what exactly you are going to see. At The Scotsman we review hundreds of shows every year, with the best receiving a sought-after four or five star rating. Several of those still have ticket availability for this weekend (August 15-17) so you can go and see what all the fuss is all about (bad luck if you wanted to see the likes of Cat Cohen, Josie Long, Bebe Cave, Sam Nicoresti or Helen Bauer - they are completely sold out after earning four or five star reviews from our critics ). Here are 17 four star comedy shows our team of critics would recommend you see this weekend - and that still have ticket availability at time of writing. You can book them all at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe website here. 1 . Kate Dolan: The Critic There are still tickets left for every date of Aussie comic Kate Dolan's run, until August 24 at 6.25pm each day at Assembly George Square. What we said: "With a tendency to insert a running commentary of self-mocking, quirky vocal tics and inflections into her stories, in a manner I found most reminiscent of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective of all things." | Contributed Photo Sales 2 . Zoe Coombs Marr: The Splash Zone There's good ticket availability for Zoe Coombes Marr this weekend - and until her last show on August 24 - at the Monkey Barrel at 3.35pm each day. What we said: "It's a brilliant demonstration of ADHD as a comic super-power, with the laughs supercharged by callback after callback, which ties the whole meandering narrative into a coherent whole." | Contributed Photo Sales 3 . Jonny Pelham: Is It Me? Be quick and you can still catch Jonny Pelham's four star show at the Monkey Barrel this weekend at 9pm each day at Monkey Barrel at The Hive. He's playing until August 24. What we said: "Pelham has a way of laughing at his troubles which will help you laugh at your own, or just forget them for an hour, which is what comedy can do, if it's done right." | Contributed Photo Sales 4 . Aideen McQueen: Waiting for Texto If you want more theatrical comedy this weekend there are tickets left this weekend for Aideen McQueen - at the Gilded Balloon Patter House at 2.20pm each day. There's also availability for the rest of her run until August 24. What we said: "Remarkably, this is McQueen's first full-length Fringe show and it's terrifically impressive: a warm and funny debut." | Contributed Photo Sales
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
It's been a standout year for standup at the Fringe, says Veronica Lee. This week's highlights? A man obsessed with pigeons, and a woman disguised as a potted plant...
Kate Dolan: The Critic (Assembly George Square) Verdict: Absurdly good When Kate Dolan emerges from the audience dressed as a potted shrub and declares herself an audience plant, you know we're in for a treat. It points the way to more absurdist comedy in The Critic. But the show's title refers not to pesky reviewers, but Dolan's inner monologue, which she renders through a voice modifier. That inner critic questions how the Midlander's material lands; her decision to do (excellent) audience work — and, of course, critiques her performance. It's a constant push-and-pull between joyfully daft material and ruminations on Dolan's life, her sleep problems and her mum's death. The result is a heady concoction — a gloriously daft, energetic hour with lots of big a banana. Highly recommended. Kate Dolan: The Critic is on until August 24 The Burton Brothers: 1925 (Assembly George Square) Verdict: Fraternal fun Rating: Brace yourself, because we are going back in time. Back to the Fizz Bang Radio Hour in America in 1925, a heady period when people were oblivious to the stock market crash heading their way. It's a neat conceit that allows Australian real-life brothers Tom and Josh to assume various characters, from radio presenters and traumatised former WWI soldiers to circus performers and a deluded vaudeville act convinced his dreadful ditty will make his fortune. It's a delightful mix of finely wrought gags, song-and-dance numbers, physical comedy (particularly in the clever Hall of Mirrors sketch) and precise characterisation. The performances are terrific as the brothers weave the various strands into a satisfying whole, while the strike rate for the jokes is pleasingly high. The Burton Brothers: 1925 runs until August 24 Toussaint Douglass: Accessible Pigeon Material (Pleasance Courtyard) Verdict: Distinctive debut Rating: Londoner Toussaint Douglass loves pigeons, as he tells us in Accessible Pigeon Material. They're the outsiders of the avian world and he, once a geeky kid brought up by his grandmother — or his 'flatmate' as he calls her since moving back in with her — knows all about being an outsider. It's a neat construct and Douglass swiftly moves from birds to humans as he discusses coming from an odd family, his emotionally absent father — there's some edgy audience work with a hand puppet representing his dad — and what masculinity means to him. He conjures up the important characters from his life and the joke count is high. The show doesn't go where you expect it to, and this debut hour shows a comic of real promise. Toussaint Douglass: Accessible Pigeon Material runs until August 24 Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe: DEAD!!! (Good Fun Time) (Monkey Barrel) Verdict: Hellishly good Rating: Joe Kent-Walters deservedly won last year's Edinburgh Comedy Awards best newcomer gong. His outrageous character Frankie Monroe made a pact with the Devil to save his beloved Rotherham working men's club from closure, and then went to Hell. Now, in the best 'Bobby in the shower from Dallas' tradition, Monroe has been resurrected in this equally funny follow-up. Frankie comes back to Earth when he hears his nemesis, Vegas Dave (also Kent-Walters), is taking his beloved working men's club upmarket, serving — oh the horror — IPA. Puppet Mucky Pup and the Sausage Slapper are here too, and it's another hot mess. Some jokes won't land if you didn't see the original but this is the kind of feelgood show the Fringe was invented for.
Scotsman
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews Kate Dolan The Critic Zoë Coombs Marr The Splash Zone
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Kate Dolan: The Critic ★★★★ Assembly George Square (Venue 8) until 24 August I witnessed an illustrative moment before this show began, when Kate Dolan joined her own queue and wasn't recognised by the venue's staff. Admittedly, she was sporting the cracking visual pun with which she kicks off her irrepressibly funny second Fringe hour. But the incident fed neatly into the abiding sense of paranoia the Australian-based Brit evinces, even if it perhaps undermined her premise that she is always her harshest critic. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Kate Dolan: The Critic With a tendency to insert a running commentary of self-mocking, quirky vocal tics and inflections into her stories, in a manner I found most reminiscent of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective of all things, Dolan adds to her layers of delivery with the conceit of a voice distorting gizmo. Rendered in demonic, distorted tones, expressive of her inner thoughts, the effect could be harsh and destabilising if Dolan didn't weave it so seamlessly into the flow of her narrative. Forever pacing around the stage, noting her physical resemblance to Roald Dahl's vigorously limber Miss Trunchbull, she's got a restless relentlessness that she fills with a steady stream of barbed anecdotes, invariably targeting herself. Less troubled comics might have introduced their recent marriage earlier and more positively in their set. But the insecure Dolan drops this casual aside long after musing on others' speculation about her sexuality. Besides, dogged by her own problems, she resents her husband's relative peace of mind and does anything to unsettle the mental stability of men generally, striking unlikely flails for feminism. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Revealing ever more vulnerability, including her grudgingly admitted, stereotypical female comic's adherence to mystical 'woo woo shit', Dolan ultimately opens up upon the treatment she's receiving. But it's being on stage and bedroom role-play that really allow her to get out of her own head for a bit. Jay Richardson Zoë Coombs Marr: The Splash Zone ★★★★ Monkey Barrel 4 at Monkey Barrel Comedy (Venue 515) until 24 August Zoe Coombs Marr planned to make a pure stand-up show, following the distractions thrown up by her fertile, playful and over-active mind. But she got distracted. First it was the idea of making a T shirt gun, then it was the presence of a couple of unexpected Trump fans in her audience at an invite only gig. She wants to be a comic whose material is accessible to anyone, and she is. But did she really want these people, who are not her people, to be at her gig? Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The question led Coombs Marr to think about audience interaction, and how crowd work changes the sense of connection between a comic and the audience. Don't worry, there isn't really a lot of audience interaction in the show, although if you sit on the front row there is a chance to win a prize. Winding through the show is the story of the teenage Coombs Marr on a solo railway journey across Australia. Will teenage Zoe make it home? Will she talk to any strangers on the way? You'll have to watch the show to find out. Into her wonderfully potent and very funny storytelling mix, she also throws in a conversation with her grandad, some facts about leprechauns and some encounters with conspiracy theorists, whose views threaten to shake her sense of reality. It's a brilliant demonstration of ADHD as a comic super-power, with the laughs supercharged by callback after callback, which ties the whole meandering narrative into a coherent whole. Claire Smith Jonny Pelham: Is It Me? ★★★★ Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Hive 2 at Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive) (Venue 313) until 25 August Jonny Pelham was one of the first male comics to talk about being a survivor or child sexual abuse on stage in his ground breaking 2019 show Off Limits. He references the show, and the story, but he isn't letting it define him any more. Pelham has an easy confidence on stage, even though his material contains plenty of things he might be miserable about. Newly single, Pelham talks about his mental health, his bodily imperfections, his erectile dysfunction and his financial insecurity. It's a lot. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad But Pelham subverts the narrative with some excellently written jokes which bring an unexpected jollity to the parade of utter miserabilism. He has a way of giving ordinary everyday struggles a subversively surreal twist which lightens the subject matter and provokes big laughs. This is no pity party. We are laughing at him and with him. I've recently become allergic to the use of the word 'paedo' as a punchline. But given his history, Pelham is uniquely entitled to use it. And he does, sparingly, in a way which is hilarious and entirely appropriate. Pelham has a way of laughing at his troubles which will help you laugh at your own, or just forget them for an hour, which is what comedy can do, if it's done right. We're all in this together, and touring up and down the country as a comic Pelham has found a surprising reason to be cheerful about the perilous state of the world. As he closes his show he moves unexpectedly from the personal to the political. He has a theory about why the current crop of comics are struggling with mental health which is intelligent, insightful and throws the whole thing on its head. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In a flashback to a psychotherapy session Jonny suddenly comes up with the answer to it all, which is funny, ridiculous but also makes a whole lot of sense. Claire Smith Aideen McQueen: Waiting for Texto ★★★★ Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24) until 25 August Impressively wine-stained and already pleasantly half-cut by early afternoon, Aideen McQueen immediately makes for a friendly hostess as she welcomes the audience to her flat (I.e. show). The Irish comedian immediately strikes up an immediate rapport with her guests as she appears to have almost finished a bottle of red and her inhibitions are dropping, emotions coming closer to the surface. It's an act of course — this show could easily slip into the theatre section of the Fringe programme. It's got the shape of a play but McQueen is an experienced comedian whose crowd work makes for an essential part of her appeal. It's a very clever strategy, McQueen's convincing wine-warmed voice — with the merest hint of a slur — relaxes the audience's guard too. This is a winning hour; comfortably familiar territory about the challenges of single life, the hell of dating apps and the unreasonably long time men take to return text messages but it's seen anew with a sharp eye and easy wit. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad McQueen takes the audience into her confidence, treating them as old friends and before you know it we're complicit in her bad decisions — which is apt because we've all made them ourselves. Her mam is on the phone, should she answer? An almost universal 'yes!' Now it's that guy she slept with who never texted her back: 'No…yes…wait, hang on a minute!' This isn't an audience participation show, but McQueen is so natural that when she asks for advice it seems rude not to answer. This is frequently very funny but it's really distinguished by its willingness to confront the realities of loneliness and regret that underpin all the laughs — and the drinking. Remarkably, this is McQueen's first full-length Fringe show and it's terrifically impressive: a warm and funny debut. Rory Ford Benji Waterhouse: Maddening ★★★ Pleasance Courtyard (venue 33) until 25 August Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad If Benji Waterhouse ever gets sick of being compared to medical colleague, writer and comedian Adam Kay, he hides it well – 'the Adam Kay of mental healthcare' is emblazoned on the front of his best-selling book You Don't Have to Be Mad to Work Here. The consultant psychiatrist seems to be following Kay's career path with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel, offering a similarly cutting indictment of Britain's health system lightened by 'stranger than fiction' stories of life on the wards. A television series is surely on the cards. His show is an odd hybrid of stand-up and promotional tour, with comedy routines alternating with readings of memorable case studies from his book, and finishing with audience questions. You have to remind yourself that you're at the Pleasance and not up the road at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Any initial unease at him turning real patients' mental illnesses into entertaining anecdotes is swiftly dispelled by his clear passion for the job and his battles with an underfunded and understaffed NHS. He quips that the Q&A is the audience's best chance to speak to a psychiatrist. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In the end though it's hard to escape the feeling that, despite his polished delivery and fine bedside manner, you'd maybe rather just read the book. Luckily signed copies are available afterwards. David Hepburn
Gizmodo
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
James Wan Knows You're Dying for Details About That R-Rated ‘M3GAN' Sexbot Spin-Off
Everyone's favorite kill-crazy toy not named Chucky is back in theaters June 27, and if M3GAN 2.0 captures audiences like the 2023 original did, a third film seems all but guaranteed. But before a trilogy might happen, another film in M3GAN's universe will arrive: SOULM8TE, the previously announced R-rated spin-off that will examine the dangers of AI from a more grown-up perspective. In new interviews, producer James Wan and M3GAN star Allison Williams (an executive producer on SOULM8TE) spilled a few beans on what to expect. Both Wan and Williams told Entertainment Weekly that SOULM8TE came from the inevitable questions raised by a world with the means to create an eerily lifelike AI doll. 'We will give you a different person and a different story and an R-rated world to do this in. Let M3GAN be M3GAN, and leave her out of this completely,' Williams said. 'It felt irresistible to then say, if a M3GAN existed in our world, someone would take that tech and put it in the form of a female-bodied person whose sole purpose on the planet is to pleasure a person. We extrapolate from there.' Wan said SOULM8TE is 'basically set in the same AI world but seen through a more grown-up perspective, one that embraces all the great erotic thrillers from the '90s. It's like Fatal Attraction but with robots.' There will be humor baked in, but not on the level of 'sassiness' as what the M3GAN films bring to the table. Look for SOULM8TE—directed by Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother) and starring Evil Dead Rise's Lily Sullivan as the terrifying AI companion—to spice up theaters January 2, 2026. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Perth Now
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Restaurant transforms to breathe life into vacant shopfronts
A temporary gallery is opening up next door to Subiaco's Regal Theatre with an exhibition from local artists as part of a new city initiative to transform vacant spaces into vibrant hubs. Launching this Thursday, Subiaco has partnered with urban-renewal organisation SPACEMRKT to transform a former Sicilian restaurant into a temporary gallery space Dubbed Hayside Gallery, the venue's inaugural exhibition, titled Tension, will display a range of work across different forms of media that explore themes of form, pressure and contrast. Your local paper, whenever you want it. Curated by Shaye Preston and Kate Dolan, from Side Project, creatives include photographer Ivan Shaw, painter Emma Benichou, industrial artists Kartika Laili Ahmad and Benjamin Kontoullas, mixed-media creators Stephen Brameld and Jay Staples, sculptor Fernando Sala of FDO Studio, visual artist and signwriter Sam Bloor, as well as Dolan. Running until July 19, the space will also hold a series of art workshops, community events and artist-in-residence programs. Pictured is Shaye Preston and Joel Benichou from SPACEMRKT and Artist and Exhibition Co Curator Kate Dolan. Credit: Riley Churchman / The West Australian Also in the works is a community painting project, which will invite locals to contribute to a collaborative, evolving mural. Previously The Corner Italian, the site, located at 484 Hay Street, was temporarily offered to SPACEMRKT by local developer Westbridge Funds ahead of a major redevelopment next door to the heritage-listed 1930s Regal Theatre. The $78 million development, which was approved last September, comprises a nine-storey building with five commercial tenancies, a small bar and more than 70 apartments. Alongside the demolition of the former restaurant, part of the neighbouring Regal Theatre will also be knocked down to make way for accessibility upgrades, additional toilets and new bar facilities to the heritage space. Marking Subiaco's second venture with SPACEMARKT, Subiaco mayor David McMullen said the collaboration was a perfect example of realising the potential of vacant spaces for community benefit. The proposed Westbridge mixed use development next to the Regal Theatre in Subiaco Credit: Supplied / Supplied 'The partnership between the city and SPACEMRKT supports the transformation of vacant shopfronts that would otherwise continue to sit empty,' he said. 'The result is pop-up style community hubs, which encourage vibrancy, creativity and artistry. We look forward to seeing the Hay Street gallery evolve in coming months.' Director of SPACEMRKT Joel Benichou echoed Cr McMullen's sentiment. 'Creative energy can thrive anywhere, especially in the spaces most people overlook,' Benichou said. 'These two projects show what's possible when artists are given room to experiment and connect with their surroundings.' Hayside Gallery is open Thursday to Sunday. Visit for workshop bookings and more information.
