Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It ★★★★★ A riot of theatrical invention with a surprisingly dark political heart. I am a bona fide Xhloe and Natasha fan, so I arrived at Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It with unusually high expectations and, frankly, I couldn’t wait to see what they had made. The show follows two women in an Appalachian community whose lives are upended by a devastating flood and the mysterious appearance of Bigfoot. As the community searches for answers, conspiracy, grief and competing versions of the truth begin to collide. It sounds gloriously ridiculous (and it is) but beneath the absurdity lies a surprisingly serious examination of community, disaster, belief and who gets to decide what is true. The obvious pleasure of the show is its extraordinary theatricality. Xhloe and Natasha are astonishing performers, moving at breakneck speed between characters, physical comedy, puppetry and acrobatics with a precision that makes the whole thing look deceptively easy. The giant Bigfoot is a terrific piece of stagecraft. It is beautifully controlled and enormous fun. But that is only the beginning of what makes this work exceptional. The creature becomes less a monster than a story - something around which a community can gather when the official version of events no longer seems sufficient. When the structures that are supposed to protect people fail, other explanations rush into the vacuum. Enter Bigfoot. We are accustomed to looking at conspiracy thinking from the outside and laughing at its irrationality. Bigfoot is more generous and more troubling: what happens when distrust is not entirely irrational because the institutions being distrusted have actually failed you? The politics aren't delivered with a highlighter. This is not a simplistic show, and it rewards concentration. At first, it is easy to surrender to the virtuosity, the transformations, the physical comedy, the increasingly wild narrative. But sit with it and the Bigfoot story starts to look like a way of talking about power, neglect, misinformation and who gets to control the story of a disaster. And there is something else here that makes this production particularly special. It sits within a lineage of exceptional work by artists who have never lost their sense of play, their theatrical innocence or their capacity for wonder but whose work deepens as they themselves and their work matures. The childish pleasure of making a giant monster, transforming into a whole community and telling an outrageous story remains completely intact. What has changed is what they are able to see through that play. The result is work that can be both exuberant and politically unsettling; technically dazzling and emotionally generous. The theatrical machinery doesn't merely dazzle us. It becomes a way of showing how stories are constructed, shared and believed. Five stars, then, not simply because Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It is brilliantly made - it is - but because it demonstrates something I value enormously in theatre: the ability to grow up without growing old. The innocence remains. The questions have become deeper. Review by Kate Gaul Image by Jennifer Forward Hayter

Roleplay A polished, provocative production that knows its territory but ultimately doesn't take us anywhere particularly new. Hannah Reilly is an engaging performer. There is real confidence and theatrical intelligence in the way she inhabits Roleplay, a show that takes aim at feminism, sexual performance, influencer culture and the increasingly slippery line between self-expression and self-commodification. Its premise is promising. Danni, a broke feminist podcaster, decides that earnest feminism isn't getting her anywhere and reinvents herself as a provocative “slutfluencer”, turning sex, sexuality and her own identity into content. What follows is a journey through the contradictions of empowerment, exploitation, attention and the commercialisation of the self. It's fertile territory. The problem is that it feels increasingly well worn. Paige Rattray directs a polished, assured production that knows exactly how to pace its reveals and keep the audience engaged. David Fleischer's set and costume design gives the piece a strong visual identity, while Prema Mehta's lighting and Lucy Baker-Swinburn's sound create a slick, highly controlled theatrical world. Betty Grumble's choreography adds another layer to a show deeply interested in the performance and commodification of the body.And the producing muscle is considerable. Francesca Moody Productions and Global Creatures have assembled a formidable creative team, and the professionalism of the production is never in doubt. Which makes my reservations about the material rather than the execution itself. Roleplay is very well made. Reilly has an engaging voice and a strong stage presence, and the production knows how to use humour, provocation and sexual spectacle to generate an immediate theatrical charge. But ultimately, I kept asking: do I care? Not because the questions aren't important. They are. But because the show doesn't quite take them far enough. We already know that social media turns identity into a commodity. We know that sexual empowerment can be simultaneously liberating and commercially exploitative. We know that feminism itself can be packaged, branded and sold. Roleplay articulates these contradictions clearly but rarely makes us see them differently. There is also an uncomfortable irony in the audience itself. A sizeable contingent appeared to be older men, and one can't help wondering how much the promise of partial nudity and a woman in very brief underwear forms part of the appeal. That isn't necessarily the show's fault but it creates precisely the contradiction the work is interested in. Is the audience consuming a critique of sexual commodification, or simply consuming the commodity? And that may be the most interesting question Roleplay accidentally raises about itself. But for all its apparent disruption, the material ultimately feels more like a highly accomplished repackaging of a familiar argument. The territory is provocative. The performance is engaging. The production is polished. But by the end, I wasn't convinced we'd discovered anything new. Review by Kate Gaul Image by Mihaela Bodlovic

Dracula: Lucy’s Dream ★★★★ This is what puppetry can do that naturalistic theatre cannot: make psychological violence physically visible. It is hard to believe that only five performers are responsible for the extraordinary theatrical world created in Dracula: Lucy’s Dream. Plexus Polaire’s wordless reimagining of Bram Stoker’s gothic classic places Lucy Westenra at its centre, using life-sized puppets, movement, cinematic video, original music and sliding panels to fracture reality and take us deep inside the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of this twisted world. And what a world it is. Puppets appear to breathe, bodies transform, shadows become creatures and human, and puppet seem to merge and separate before our eyes. The manipulation is so accomplished that the five performers seem to be everywhere at once, working in and out of the shadows with an almost impossible precision. It is the kind of theatrical illusion that makes you look twice at the stage machinery - and then wonder how on earth they did it. The material itself left me rather cold. The psychological exploration of Lucy’s desire, fear, trauma and emancipation is intriguing, but I found the narrative and thematic content less compelling than the astonishing theatrical language in which it is delivered. At times the imagery feels like it is carrying more weight than the story. But I could not deny the sublime artistry of the piece. This is genuine festival fare: ambitious, international, visually audacious theatre that takes you somewhere you simply cannot get through conventional realism. There is something enormously pleasurable about encountering artists at the very top of their form, making the seemingly impossible look effortless. I am very glad I saw it. Even when the story didn't quite reach me, the theatre absolutely did. I may return to check it out a second time! Review by Kate Gaul

Toast Summerhall ★★★★ With a captivating performer, edgy writing, a fresh concept and an impressive economy of means, Toast turns very little into powerful theatre and lands a significant gut punch. Toast is a 60-minute dark comedy about artistic precarity: one skint actor versus Universal Credit, insecure work and the escalating cost of trying to remain an artist. Its premise is deliberately blunt: what happens when an artist is literally starving for their art? It is an especially pertinent subject for this Fringe, where the economics of being an artist, the proliferation of insecure freelance work and the escalating cost of living raise a fundamental question: who gets to make art when simply surviving has become increasingly difficult? But the potentially strongest thing about Toast is that it isn't simply a play about poor artists. Its real subject is the collision between artistic aspiration and systems designed around employability, productivity and individual responsibility. The benefits system becomes almost a dramatic antagonist - an enormous, impersonal machine that the performer must negotiate through increasingly absurd acts of self-presentation. There is a delicious contradiction at its heart: the thing that makes the artist economically vulnerable is also the thing they are being asked to prove has value. And theatrically, Toast makes a compelling case for the power of simplicity. One person, ostensibly alone on stage, a script in hand, no set, no bells and whistles and yet an entire world of bureaucracy, precarity, humiliation and absurdity are created. That this modest form can generate such a provocative drama is one of the show's highlights. The concept feels genuinely novel a breath of fresh air in a Fringe overflowing with theatrical machinery and elaborate concepts. Jude Green, who also wrote the piece, is completely captivating. Theirs is a genuinely authentic voice, letting the comedy sit alongside the horror without either undercutting the other. Toast is certainly funny, but it is also unsettling: the laughs often catch in the throat because the circumstances are so recognisable. A particular delight is the revelation of Jack Wakely, initially simply the person on the other end of the phone. What begins as an anonymous bureaucratic voice gradually acquires a presence and humanity of its own. Wakely's performance is beautifully judged, adding another layer to a system that might otherwise be easy to reduce to a faceless villain. There is something particularly apt about seeing Toast in Edinburgh. Here, thousands of artists are simultaneously trying to sell themselves, make work and survive the economics of the Fringe. The question of who gets to participate and who can afford to isn't theoretical. Toast is angry, funny and politically engaged, but never loses sight of the theatrical pleasure of telling its story. It makes a lot of theatre out of very little and leaves you thinking about the uncomfortable relationship between making art, proving your worth and being able to afford to live. With a captivating performer, edgy writing, a fresh concept and an impressive economy of means, Toast turns very little into powerful theatre and lands a significant gut punch. Review by Kate Gaul

Badgers Traverse 2 ★★★ An eerie new work that asks a very contemporary question: who owns a story once it has been told? There is something deliciously unsettling about Badgers, Malaika Kegode’s new work now playing at Traverse Two. A recluse has disappeared, a mysterious folk song is circulating, and Meles, a podcaster with a stalled career and a dying mother, finds herself drawn into a story that becomes increasingly difficult to explain. Rumour, folklore and true crime begin to blur as the question emerges: not simply what happened, but who owns the story? It is a particularly contemporary question. In an age of podcasts, documentary storytelling and our endless appetite for other people’s trauma, who has the right to tell a story and what happens when the storyteller becomes part of it? The central performance (Malaika Kegode, yes, she is also the writer) has a welcome clarity, allowing the writing to land even as the world around them becomes increasingly eerie and strange. Live music (performed by Beth Roberts and Joe Williams) is beautifully incorporated, giving the piece an almost ritualistic quality and contributing significantly to its unsettling atmosphere. There is a pleasing sense of theatrical discovery in watching a new work find its form, somewhere between folk tale, gig theatre and ghost story. The ideas, however, are stronger than some of the writing. At times the text reaches for a familiar phrase or spells out a thought that the audience has already understood. Do we really need to be told that an ending can also be a beginning? These moments diminish some of the ambiguity and intelligence of the work. Nevertheless, Badgers is an intriguing new piece with a strong theatrical identity. Its live music, eerie atmosphere and committed central performance create a compelling world, while its central question, who gets to own and tell a story?, feels both urgent and very much of its time. Review by Kate Gaul

Endgame ★★★★ The radical pleasure of simply hearing Beckett’s extraordinary text. There is something unexpectedly thrilling about simply hearing Endgame. In Flabbergast Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s canonical work, the four performers inhabit the strange, exhausted world of Hamm, Clov, Nell and Nagg with such conviction that the production feels less like a staging of a classic than a temporary entry into another universe. The performances are extraordinary: physically precise, emotionally inhabited and, above all, vocally assured. Beckett’s writing has a musicality that can be flattened by familiarity. Here, the vocal chops of the performers bring that music to the surface. The rhythms, repetitions, pauses and abrupt shifts in register are not merely delivered with deliberation; they are played. It is more than a masterclass in vocal delivery. It is a reminder of how extraordinary it is to actually hear Beckett’s text. And that, without being perjorative, is one of the great pleasures of this production. The language is allowed to do the work. There is no need to decorate it or over-explain it. The performers trust the words, and the words land. The production itself is comparatively modest. The setting is deliberately ordinary, and the physical world does not attempt to compete with Beckett’s bleak, stripped-back universe. That restraint serves the performers well. There is nowhere to hide, and nowhere for the audience's attention to go except to those in front of us. The circumstances of the performance are less helpful. The venue is frankly awful. Endgame requires concentration, and the physical conditions make that concentration harder than it needs to be. But the opportunity remains a rare one: to encounter a canonical work performed with this degree of aplomb. Flabbergast brings considerable physical and vocal intelligence to Beckett without smothering the text beneath theatrical cleverness. For all the talk of innovation and disruption around canonical theatre, sometimes the most radical thing is simply to hear a great text spoken extraordinarily well. Review by Kate Gaul

Brit Barron: CHURCH ★★★★ Barron knows how to run a church - she just isn’t preaching the same gospel anymore. Brit Barron is a gorgeously engaging performer. She has the rare ability to make a room feel smaller, warmer and more intimate within minutes of stepping onstage. In CHURCH, she takes us inside the world she grew up in — evangelical Christianity, megachurch culture, faith, sexuality and the complicated business of leaving a belief system that has shaped your entire understanding of the world. The story may be extraordinary in its detail, but much of it is not entirely unfamiliar. For anyone who has grown up around evangelical Christianity, there are plenty of recognisable moments: the certainty, the rituals, the language, the songs, the rules, the intensity of belonging to a community that believes it has the answers. Barron knows this world from the inside and tells her story with warmth, wit and a generous lack of bitterness. And she is a spellbinding storyteller. There is something wonderfully bright about the way Barron tells CHURCH. She doesn't wallow in the trauma of her past or turn her experience into a simple story of good versus evil. Instead, she is interested in the contradictions — what faith gave her, what it took away, what she still misses and what she absolutely does not. The result is a show that is funny and heartfelt without becoming sentimental. The central conceit is delicious: Barron effectively gives us a church service, using the language, rituals and theatricality of evangelical worship to tell her own story. She knows exactly how to work a congregation because she used to do it professionally. There is something deliciously subversive about watching those skills being repurposed for comedy. And then there is the music. Live music! What a Fringe bonus. The terrific live musicianship adds enormously to the atmosphere and gives the show a warmth and energy that recorded music simply couldn't replicate. Music is a powerful theatrical tool because it can make a room feel communal almost instantly. Here it also becomes part of the story, a reminder that the things we leave behind aren't necessarily things we stop loving. Barron's exploration of queerness is central, but CHURCH is not a show that requires you to share her experience to enjoy it. You don't have to be queer, religious, ex-religious or particularly interested in evangelical Christianity to get something from this show. At its heart it is about belonging: the desire to find your people, the pain of discovering that the community you belong to may not have room for all of you, and the possibility of creating something new when you walk away. There is also a generosity to Barron's performance that I really liked. She is not standing onstage asking us to pity her or demanding that we agree with every conclusion she has reached. She invites us in. She makes us laugh, tells us what happened and allows us to sit with the messier questions. CHURCH deserves a large audience. It has a great performer, a fascinating story, terrific live music and a theatrical conceit that genuinely works. And no, you absolutely do not have to be a lesbian to enjoy this one. Come for the comedy, stay for the gospel, and leave with a little more understanding of what happens when faith, identity and belonging collide. Review by Kate Gaul

The Galloping Cure ★★★★ A powerful musical fable about addiction that asks an intriguing question: when does music theatre become opera? The opioid crisis is a devastatingly rich subject for opera. Addiction, pain, pharmaceutical greed, desperation and the promise of an easy cure all lend themselves to the heightened world of music theatre. In The Galloping Cure, composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, working from Karen Russell's original story and directed by Tom Morris, turn the crisis into a darkly comic contemporary fable. The setting is a fading American town where local doctor Theresa Hart works tirelessly to care for a community that is already hurting. Then Lucky Mack arrives — a charismatic showman with a brightly coloured carousel that promises to cure every ache. The first ride is free. Of course, there is a catch. Theresa's daughter Noy is captivated, and soon the whole town is swept up in the euphoric promise of Lucky's cure. What begins as pleasure and relief becomes dependence, and the cost of getting off the ride becomes increasingly horrific. The allegory is not subtle — nor does it need to be. The carousel is addiction, pharmaceutical exploitation and the seductive promise that pain can simply be made to disappear. Mazzoli's music is the star for me. There are memorable musical ideas that stay with you, alongside an atmosphere that moves between beauty, unease, repetition and something increasingly sinister. The score has the capacity to create the dreamlike, slightly nightmarish world that the story demands. But despite being billed as an opera, I found myself thinking that The Galloping Cure is perhaps more successful as a play set to music. There are four principal roles and an ensemble, but this is not opera in the grand, multi-voiced sense one might expect from the form. There are no great sprawling set pieces or extended passages of voices colliding and intertwining. Instead, the music frequently sits underneath and around the dramatic action, propelling the story and shaping its emotional atmosphere. That isn't necessarily a criticism. It is a contemporary form of music theatre, and there is much to admire in its accessibility. But I did find myself wanting the music and voices to take over more completely — to allow the opera to become something that only opera could be. The production is visually ambitious. Tom Morris and designer Rebecca Ringst create a strange, decaying world in which the carousel becomes both object and metaphor, with lighting, projection and movement contributing to the increasingly surreal atmosphere. But here I had another question. The production's most intriguing visual conceit is also its most literal: the plastic hobby horses. They are the carousel, but they are also the people being carried along by it — the object and the metaphor occupying the same space. And I wasn't always convinced that the hobby horses work best in the hands of the performers. There is something awkward about the actors manipulating them while simultaneously inhabiting the human characters. At times the theatrical device seems to ask the performers to be actors, puppeteers and objects all at once, and I wondered whether this might actually be a compelling argument for a more explicit division of labour: puppeteers alongside actors, rather than asking the actors to do both jobs. Because the metaphor is strong. The idea of a community literally mounting the machinery of its own addiction is theatrically powerful. I just wasn't always convinced that the human performers were the best people to animate it. Nevertheless, The Galloping Cure is an ambitious and timely work, with a terrific musical score and a production willing to take the opioid crisis somewhere strange rather than simply reproducing the facts of the epidemic. It has memorable music, striking imagery and a story that lands with increasing force. For me, the question is ultimately about form. The subject deserves opera. The music is good enough for opera. But I wanted the production to trust the operatic form even more. A compelling, beautifully designed and musically memorable new work — and an intriguing contribution to the continuing argument about what contemporary opera can be. Review by Kate Gaul

BOG WITCH ★★★★★ “Funny, tender and gloriously bonkers Bryony Kimmings makes the personal political and the bog theatrical.” Bryony Kimmings is a masterful theatre-maker. A consummate performer, storyteller and troublemaker, she takes the raw ingredients of her own life and spins them into a theatrical experience so exquisite it shines. Bog Witch (at Traverse Theatre) is, on the surface, the story of a woman who has had enough. Struggling with mental health, single motherhood, a sick child, money and the relentless demands of contemporary life, Kimmings uproots herself and her son from the city and moves to a tumbledown cottage in the countryside. Her mission is simple: reconnect with nature and, in the process, find a way to become happy and sane again. Of course, nothing is ever that simple. Kimmings is an unlikely eco-convert. She likes shopping. She likes Deliveroo. She likes coffee and booze and all the small, seductive comforts of consumer capitalism. But Bog Witch asks what happens when those things stop filling the hole. What happens when the distraction disappears and we are forced to look at the world we are actually living in? The themes are big: mental health, motherhood, consumerism, climate anxiety, ecological collapse, grief, our disconnection from nature, and the possibility of changing how we live. But Kimmings never allows the ideas to become worthy or preachy. She is too funny, too self-deprecating and too theatrically inventive for that. Instead, she gives us songs, stand-up, storytelling, projections, sound, folk traditions, horror, audience participation and a generous dose of the ridiculous. There is something wonderfully primal lurking beneath the comedy. The bog, the woods, the animals and the landscape gradually become more than scenery. They become characters, memories and forces with which that Kimmings reckons. And this is where her genius as a theatre-maker really kicks in. The raw material is her own life, but she doesn't simply tell us about it. She makes theatre out of it. Her personal anxieties become theatrical images; her experiences become jokes, songs, rituals and stories. She has an extraordinary ability to take something painfully ordinary and suddenly make it strange. The production is gorgeous. Sound, music, projections and lighting create a world that can shift from cosy rural idyll to something ancient, unsettling and faintly hallucinatory. There is more than a touch of folk horror here - The Wicker Man occasionally seems to be lurking at the edge of the woods - but Kimmings is always willing to puncture the portentousness with a filthy joke or a gloriously ridiculous image. And then comes the ending. I won't spoil it, because discovering where Bog Witch eventually takes us is one of the show's great pleasures. It is unexpected, joyful and completely bonkers, with more than a touch of the church hall about it. After all the climate anxiety, existential dread and wrestling with the state of the planet, Kimmings finds a wonderfully communal, celebratory way out. It feels both absurd and absolutely right. That may be the secret of Bog Witch: it takes enormous subjects and makes them human. The climate crisis is terrifying, but so is being a parent. Capitalism is destroying us, but we still want a coffee. Nature is magnificent, but sometimes it is also muddy and inconvenient and full of dead things. Kimmings doesn't offer an easy solution. She offers something better: connection, imagination, community and the possibility that changing how we live might also change how we feel. A glorious return. Funny, filthy, tender, politically alert and theatrically magnificent. Review by Kate Gaul

FOR DOLORES ★★★★★ Two young women bound by more than circumstance. Outstanding performances, gorgeous specificity and a friendship from which it is impossible to look away. Eva O’Connor’s For Dolores (Traverse Theatre) follows Mo, the Scottish one, and Réaltín, the Irish one, who meet as students in Edinburgh and party, play and blaze their way through the student dream. A few years later they are in Glasgow, dealing with friendship, motherhood and the consequences of the choices they have made. What begins as friendship becomes something much more consuming, a rivalry, an obsession, a chosen family and a relationship bound by love, dependency and desire. It is a wonderful piece of writing: funny, raw, beautifully specific and full of Scottish and Irish detail. These women have histories, accents, politics, families, jokes and grievances; they feel completely of their places and completely themselves. At the centre are two outstanding performances. Catriona Faint’s Mo and Lara McDonnell’s Réaltín have a chemistry that makes the friendship utterly convincing. They are funny together, irritating together, affectionate and cruel. They know each other too well. There is something almost addictive about watching them circle one another. And there is a delicious queer edge to the relationship. O’Connor understands the complicated territory between friendship and desire, between loving someone and being in love with them, and the often-blurry line between intimacy, dependency and possession. These two young women are bound by far more than circumstance. The play moves between their student years and the consequences of what happens later, gradually revealing how this extraordinary friendship has been formed and how it might unravel. What initially feels like a joyful, messy friendship becomes increasingly charged. The stakes rise, and the emotional architecture of the relationship begins to show itself. Faint and McDonnell are superb at navigating those shifts. There is no simple victim or villain here. Both women are capable of generosity and selfishness, tenderness and damage. Their performances make the relationship feel lived rather than constructed. I particularly loved the specificity of the world O’Connor creates. The Scottish and Irish details are not decoration; they are fundamental to who these women are and to the tensions between them. The humour is similarly rooted in character rather than simply inserted for relief. Jim Culleton's direction gives the performers room to let the relationship breathe, while the production gradually tightens around the events that will change everything. There is a real sense of watching two people who once thought they would always belong to each other discover that love, in whatever form it takes, doesn't necessarily make a relationship safe. For Dolores is funny, messy, moving and deeply human. It is a beautifully observed portrait of female friendship pushed to its limits, and a reminder that some of the most important relationships in our lives are also the most complicated. Review by Kate Gaul

TURN YOUR FUCKING PHONES OFF Summerhall ★★★★★ “Smart, funny and deliciously subversive: Hannah Maxwell turns our obsession with phones, attention and ourselves into brilliant theatre.” Born out of the work Maxwell presented at last year's Ed Fringe, this show takes ideas, obsessions and questions and pushes them somewhere ambitious. It is funny, intellectually sharp, wry, noir-ish, sexy and complicated and it leaves you thinking about much more than your phone. We are told: “An ambitious, impactful and timely exploration of human connection in the information age. A town hall meeting at the end of the world. A karaoke booth in a nuclear bunker. A clear-the-air chat between you, me and the rest of our plane of existence mates. A thrilling and vital new work from the multi award-winning theatre maker. As voted for audiences at BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG.” Maxwell is interested in attention, technology, performance, memory and the strange ways we have come to experience ourselves through screens. But the genius of the show is that she doesn't turn any of this into a lecture. Instead, she makes theatre out of it. The audience is implicated in the argument simply by being there. There is a fine line between satire or send up and truth. This piece dexterously weaves its way across its political and personal terrain. Rachel Mars and Annie Siddons are credited as dramaturgs. What happens to our attention when everything is designed to capture it? What happens to memory when our experiences are constantly photographed, recorded and stored? What happens to performance when the audience is also a potential documentarian, commentator and content creator? Maxwell understands that the phone is not simply a device. It is an extension of the contemporary self: camera, archive, social life, workplace, distraction, reassurance and occasionally a very efficient way of avoiding being where you are. And she is very funny. A consummate theatre maker and performer. There is a delicious contradiction at the heart of the show. We are sitting in a theatre, one of the oldest technologies for collective attention, being asked to consider what has happened to our capacity to pay attention. Maxwell plays with that contradiction rather than preaching about it. The audience becomes part of the experiment. The work is also beautifully slippery. It moves between comedy and something darker; between the personal and the conceptual; between the ridiculous and the genuinely affecting. We have pastiche noir and a sensuality. And, frankly, I too would like to see the show about her Dad and the bears (you had to be there!) That possibility hangs over the work in an intriguing way. Maxwell has clearly got more stories to tell, and the personal material is never simply confessional. It is complicated, mediated and theatrically reworked. All of this makes perfect sense in the strange, funny universe she has created. There is also something wonderfully old-fashioned about being asked to simply watch. No photographing. No filming. No checking. No half-listening while mentally composing the post about what you are watching. Just an audience and a performer occupying the same space at the same time. That sounds simple. It isn't. Maxwell makes us notice how unusual it has become. This is theatre that understands that form is argument. The way the audience is asked to behave is part of what the work is saying. The theatre becomes a temporary intervention into our habitual patterns of looking, scrolling, recording and consuming. And underneath all the intellectual playfulness is a rather beautiful proposition: perhaps attention is an act of care. Turn your fucking phones off. Then watch Hannah Maxwell do something much harder: make you think. Review By Kate Gaul

FERAL ★★★★ Personal stories, comic genius and one very fabulous frock - Jess Fuchs is an absolute joy. FERAL is performed by Jess Fuchs. Jess Fuchs is funny. Properly funny. The kind of funny that comes from recognising yourself, your friends, your family and probably several people you would rather not recognise yourself in. In FERAL, Fuchs brings together a collection of personal stories, observations and wonderfully sharp comic material, weaving them into an hour that feels both extremely personal and completely relatable. There is an ease to her storytelling that makes you feel as though you have been let in on the joke and then she finds another joke underneath it. Fuchs isn't simply delivering a series of gags; she has a gift for taking the stuff of ordinary life and finding the absurdity hiding inside it. Small moments become stories, stories become beautifully constructed comic set pieces, and just when you think you know where she is going, she takes a deliciously unexpected turn. There are some genuinely memorable (and painful) personal stories here. They stay with you because they aren't simply vehicles for jokes, they have character, specificity and enough truth in them to make the comedy land harder. Fuchs has that increasingly rare ability to make an audience laugh while also thinking, oh God, yes, I know exactly what she means. And she has comic genius. Not the grandstanding, look-at-me kind, but the kind that seems to come naturally from a performer who knows precisely how to tell a story, when to hold a beat and when to go for the punchline. Her timing is excellent, and there is a lovely sense of mischief running through the whole thing. Also: the frock. I loved Jess Fuchs's frock. It deserves its own mention because it is fabulous, and because there is something wonderfully reassuring about a comedian who understands that what you wear is part of the storytelling. It suits the whole enterprise: funny, big, confident, outrageous and entirely herself. There is nothing especially complicated about the proposition here. Fuchs gets onstage and tells us stories about being a person in the world. But the simplicity is deceptive. Good stand-up requires enormous skill, and FERAL demonstrates just how much craft goes into making an audience feel that someone is simply chatting to them. This is also one of those shows where the time slot works beautifully. 6.55pm is a great Fringe time late enough to have got yourself properly into the day, early enough that you can still go out afterwards and continue the evening. And FERAL is exactly the sort of show you want in that slot: funny, warm, energetic and a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend an hour. It’s really human and the Irish holiday, Titanic and the coccyx story are gold Go see it. It is a great time slot, a great show, and Jess Fuchs is a comedian worth remembering. Review by Kate Gaul