Handle with Care ★★½☆☆ A beautifully engineered box that ultimately asks the audience to do rather more work than it gives them reason to want to. The idea is considerably more interesting than the event itself. Belgian company Ontroerend Goed have made a career out of messing with the relationship between performer and audience. Founded in Ghent around director Alexander Devriendt, the company has become something of a Fringe institution, creating participatory works that ask audiences to vote, decide, participate and occasionally take over the machinery of the theatre. Their work has won multiple Fringe First, Herald Angel and Total Theatre Awards. Handle with Care takes that experiment to its logical extreme. There are no actors, no technicians and no director. Instead, a box arrives. Inside are objects, instructions and provocations. The audience opens it, follows the prompts, makes decisions, negotiates with one another and collectively creates the performance. It is a deliciously simple premise: what happens if the artists hand over the entire performance to the audience? And this is where the work is undeniably clever. This isn't simply a box of props accompanied by a command to "go and improvise". Ontroerend Goed have carefully designed a theatrical system - the objects, the instructions, the sequence and the rules within which we operate. There is an enormous amount of authorship in the apparent surrender of authorship. Every performance is different because every audience is different. The work is also part of Devriendt's An Hour Spent With Others trilogy, following Funeral and Thanks for Being Here, and continues the company's longstanding interest in what happens when theatre acknowledges the actual people in the room rather than asking us to suspend disbelief. All of which is fascinating. Unfortunately, this time around, I found the actual experience considerably less so. The audience is guided through a series of activities intended to create connection, collaboration and a shared theatrical experience. There is an initial thrill in the awkwardness of strangers figuring out what they're supposed to do together. But too quickly, the exercises began to feel like workshop activities rather than theatrical discoveries. And that distinction matters. Participation is not inherently theatrical. Collective awkwardness is not necessarily profound. And asking an audience to do something doesn't automatically make that something interesting. The paradox of Handle with Care is that the company has constructed an extraordinarily sophisticated machine to produce what, for me, was a surprisingly banal experience. Perhaps that is partly the point. Ontroerend Goed aren't interested in pretending the world outside the theatre doesn't exist. They want us to acknowledge the room, the strangers we're sitting with and the unpredictable social dynamics that emerge between us. But acknowledging reality isn't the same thing as transforming it. There were moments when the audience's different personalities and willingness, or unwillingness, to participate became genuinely interesting. Too often I felt I was being asked to complete an exercise designed to demonstrate the possibility of participatory theatre rather than experiencing a piece of theatre that had found something compelling to say through participation. Which leaves an intriguing question at the heart of the work: When does audience participation become theatre and when is it simply an exercise? I admire the audacity of the proposition. I admire the precision of its construction. And I admire a company prepared to keep dismantling the traditional relationship between artist and spectator. But theatre is ultimately an experience, not a proposition. For me, Handle with Care was a fascinating conceptual experiment wrapped around an unexpectedly ordinary experience - a beautifully engineered box that ultimately asked me to do rather more work than it gave me reason to want to. Review by Kate Gaul

Laughing Out Lonely ★★★★ Haunting, unsettling and utterly compelling, with a voice you simply cannot fault. This is not opera as we know it and that is precisely the point. Laughing Out Lonely is produced by Danish contemporary opera company OPE-N, with Matilde Böcher and Asger Kudahl creating the music, Louise Beck directing, and Josefine Else Larsen responsible for the striking set design. It is a distinctly collaborative production, bringing together opera, electronic music, performance and visual art to create something that feels far removed from opera as we traditionally know it. Laughing Out Lonely is a solo performance exploring loneliness, connection and identity in the digital age. Drawing on the raw language of social media, it creates a strange and fragmented world where online voices, desires and anxieties collide. At its centre, an extraordinary countertenor, Morten Grove Frandsen, inhabits a shifting cast of characters, moving between vulnerability, absurdity, darkness and humour. Through live electronic sound, imaginative design and a unique physical performance, the work asks what it means to seek connection when we are more digitally connected, and perhaps more isolated, than ever. A well-worn path perhaps but I found the approach here refreshing, especially using opera. Otherworldly, unsettling and at times surprisingly funny, this inventive solo work plunges us into the strange, fractured landscape of digital loneliness. Rather than imposing traditional operatic form on its subject, creators Matilde Böcher and Asger Kudahl, with director Louise Beck, respond to it with an equally fractured and imaginative theatrical language. This informs the entire experience. At the centre is Danish countertenor Morten Grove Frandsen, whose extraordinary voice is impossible to fault. Beautiful, haunting and astonishingly versatile, he moves through a shifting collection of voices, characters and online identities with remarkable physical and vocal precision. The production design is equally impressive - resonant, imaginative and at times genuinely uncanny. Sound, light, movement and space combine to create a world that feels both alien and uncomfortably familiar. We encounter a room filled with bright yellow storage boxes, individual lights surrounded by an array of speakers in an otherwise darkened space. The effect is peaceful. beautiful, strange and quietly disorienting — part archive, part warehouse, part digital landscape. The glowing boxes create a vivid visual rhythm while the speakers surround us with the fractured voices and sounds of the work. It is a deceptively simple design that becomes increasingly haunting as the performance unfolds. It is jagged, occasionally confronting and wonderfully weird, but there are moments of unexpected humour amid the darkness. Most importantly, the work feels like a welcome creative response to its subject: a form searching for an appropriate language to explore what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. I loved it. Review by Kate Gaul

Hang Time ★★★★½ Nothing is ambiguous about the politics, but everything about the staging makes us look twice. Zora Howard’s Hang Time is a disarming one-act play that’s premise initially feels almost casual: three men beneath a tree, talking, joking, bickering and passing the time. But as the lights come up, the devastating truth of the situation comes into focus. These men have been lynched. It is a confronting way to encounter history, and Howard’s sophisticated theatrical device makes the horror all the more powerful. The elegant production creates the illusion that the three men are hanging, while retaining a tantalising ambiguity. What exactly are we seeing? How is it happening? The less the production explains, the more unsettling it becomes. We are required to look, question and piece together what is happening for ourselves. It is sophisticated theatre that trusts its audience to do the work. The politics, however, are anything but ambiguous. Howard refuses to turn these men into historical abstractions. Kamal Bolden as Slim, Julian Rozzell as Bird and Bryce Foley as Blood give them distinctive personalities and an easy, often funny chemistry. Their banter and ordinary conversation continue alongside the unbearable image of their bodies, creating a dissonance that is both darkly comic and deeply disturbing. The title itself becomes another layer of the joke and the horror. The production is beautifully judged. Neal Wilkinson’s set, Dominique Fawn Hill’s costumes and Reza Behjat’s lighting create a gorgeous colour palette and an almost dreamlike visual world. Megan Culley’s sound design is unsettling in precisely the way it should be, while Charlie Oates’ movement direction contributes to the striking physical language of the piece. At the centre of it all is Howard herself, as writer, director and producer, with an impressive control of tone. She confronts the history of racialised violence in America without turning the play into a lecture. Instead, she gives us three men: funny, flawed, complicated and entirely human. Their interrupted lives become the real tragedy. Hang Time confronts a brutal history without sacrificing the humanity of the people caught within it. There is nothing ambiguous about its politics, but considerable intelligence and subtlety in how those politics are made theatrical. A rare treat to see this work in Edinburgh b-eautiful, unsettling and devastating. Review by Kate Gaul

Baby of Colour ★★★½ An IUD, immigration, Donald Trump and a cat walk into a stand-up show and sit becomes a funny, surreal and unexpectedly moving meditation on whether we should bring a child into this world. Olivia Xing’s Baby of Colour starts with a deceptively simple question: should I have a baby? In Xing’s case, the question arrives via an IUD, a gynaecology appointment and the return of Trump to the White House. From there, this surreal, energetic stand-up show spirals outward into reproductive autonomy, political anxiety, immigration, identity, womanhood, Chinese daughterhood, marriage, healthcare and the increasingly difficult question of whether bringing a child into this world is an act of hope or madness. There is a lot going on, perhaps sometimes a little too much, but Xing is an engaging and highly watchable performer, moving easily between the personal and political, the earnest and the absurd. The material is particularly strong when she finds the comedy in the collision of worlds: being Chinese-American, married to a Mexican-American, navigating green cards and immigration, speaking English and still being told she is unintelligible, while simultaneously trying to make sense of American healthcare and the politics of reproduction. Her experience as an immigrant and artist gives the show a perspective that is genuinely specific rather than simply topical. The title Baby of Colour does a lot of work too. It is funny, provocative and slightly bewildering, opening up questions about race, identity, belonging and what it means to imagine a future child when your own identity already feels complicated. There is also a lovely surreal thread involving a cat, and Xing has an appealing willingness to let the show veer sideways into the unexpected. Importantly, Baby of Colour feels like evidence of an artist developing her form. Xing first brought a show to Edinburgh in 2023 that reportedly leaned heavily into lecture as well as comedy. Here, the political and educational material is much more naturally woven into the stand-up. The result is less like being given a lesson and more like being invited into Xing’s increasingly frantic train of thought. At its best, the show is very funny, very personal and unexpectedly moving. It captures something recognisable about political depression: the exhaustion of trying to make personal decisions while the world keeps barging into them. There are moments when the sheer number of themes threatens to overwhelm the comedy, and the show could perhaps trust its strongest material a little more. But Xing is a compelling performer, and when the personal, political and ridiculous collide, Baby of Colour really lands. A smart, surreal and often very funny exploration of reproduction, race, immigration and the terrifying prospect of the future, with a cat, an IUD and Donald Trump somehow all in the same conversation. Review by Kate Gaul

Not for glory ★★★★ The artists trust their extraordinary skills enough to dismantle them and the result is alive, gutsy, sensual and a bloody good time. There is something wonderfully unpretentious about not for glory. Three extraordinary performers, Charlotte Mclean, Jack Anderson and Malin Lewis, bring to the stage skills they have been honing since they were very young: Highland dancing, Irish dancing and bagpiping. Skills acquired initially, it seems, simply because they were fun. And they are very, very good at them. What makes the show so enjoyable is the sheer pleasure of watching that level of virtuosity collide with a complete willingness to mess with it. These aren't artists approaching Highland dancing, Irish dancing and piping from the outside. These are forms they have grown up with, inhabited and mastered, traditions carrying family, community, history, identity and a whole lot of expectation. And then they gleefully pull them apart. not for glory has the courage to deconstruct the traditions that have shaped its performers and throw the pieces at the wall to see what sticks. Contemporary dance, traditional forms, music, memory, humour, technical virtuosity and a healthy dose of chaos all end up in the mix. It works. The show is alive. It is accessible. It is genuinely very funny and very good fun. There is no sense of the performers standing above their traditions and explaining them to us; instead, they invite us into the worlds they know, then play with them. There is also something very moving underneath all the exuberance. These are practices that began in childhood, learned, practised and repeated until the body knows what to do almost before the mind catches up. But alongside the pleasure are questions about competition, expectation, identity and what happens when something you once loved becomes complicated. Beneath all the formal technique, you can also feel something much more primal in these art forms, the original impulse to move, stamp, make music, gather, celebrate and express yourself through the body. That energy is present in the gutsy, sensual physicality of these three very individual performers. They don't just execute traditions; they inhabit them with enormous physical appetite. What I loved most is that the performers don't seem afraid to make a mess. They trust their extraordinary skills enough to dismantle them. There is courage in that. There is generosity too. We get to see the traditions, the histories and the astonishing physical abilities, but we also get to see three artists asking what these things mean to them now. It is highly skilled, deeply rooted and gloriously unpretentious. And, frankly, a bloody good time. Review by Kate Gaul

Good Enough? ★★★★★ Three artists. Their bodies. Their histories. The courage to say: this is what I know. This is who I am. Good Enough? is an intensely moving and emotional journey, and one of my Top Ten Fringe shows this year. Three dancers take us through their lives, showing us photographs of themselves from infants through to adulthood. We watch them grow, discover their particular skills, pursue the things they are good at, struggle, find their people and, ultimately, find connection, family and acknowledgement. It is a remarkably simple premise: make a show out of what you know. But in this case, they really, really know it. The photographs are evidence. Their bodies are evidence. Their movement, their stories, their training, their awkwardness, their humour and their vulnerability are all part of the archive they have brought onto the stage. These performers aren't trying to manufacture authenticity; they are drawing directly from their own lives and transforming that lived experience into theatre. And somehow, despite the simplicity of the proposition, it is devastatingly moving. I found myself in floods of tears and not the only one! That feels particularly apt coming from HIMHERANDIT, the Danish performance company founded by artistic director Andreas Constantinou in 2006. For more than a decade, the company's work has explored gender, sexuality, identity, grief, family and belonging, repeatedly drawing on lived experience as artistic material. Good Enough? feels like a wonderfully direct expression of that practice: three artists taking the things they know most intimately and finding a theatrical form through which we can experience them too. Perhaps that is why the work feels so relatable, particularly if you have chosen an artistic life yourself. What does it mean to discover the thing you are good at? To pursue it? To keep going when it is difficult? To find the people who understand why it matters to you? And finally, to be seen and acknowledged for who you are and what you can do? Watching these three artists put their own histories so generously on stage made me think about my own practice. This is the kind of authenticity I admire and aspire to in my own work - taking something you know intimately and finding the theatrical form that allows someone else to feel it too. There is no great trick to the premise. No elaborate set. No complicated narrative. Just three extraordinary artists, their bodies, their histories and the courage to say: this is what I know. This is who I am. And perhaps that is more than enough. Review by Kate Gaul

The Jolly Fisherman ★★★★★ “A beautifully crafted story of friendship, belonging and the fault lines that open up when the world around us starts to change.” I admire The Jolly Fisherman enormously. John Dinneen's writing is confident, economic, polished and wonderfully nuanced. It takes what could so easily become a straightforward play about race, religion, class or contemporary Britain and instead finds something much more complicated and much more human. At its heart is a friendship. Alan and Amir meet as thirteen-year-olds in Barking. One is British, white and shaped by the world of his local pub; the other is British Pakistani and Muslim. They become best friends, growing up alongside one another as the neighbourhood around them changes. Then the place that helped define Alan's sense of belonging disappears. And suddenly the question becomes: what happens when the place that taught you who you were disappears and you discover that your best friend belongs to a world you have been taught to fear? Ultimately, this is a play about belonging. About the places we call home, the people who shape us, and the stories we absorb about those who seem different from us. It is about friendship, but also about the frightening ease with which friendship can be tested by forces much larger than two people. What makes the writing so good is its refusal to make anything easy. Dinneen allows contradictions to sit beside one another. People are complicated. Communities are complicated. History is complicated. Nobody arrives conveniently labelled as hero or villain. And then there are the performances. Alex Hill and Jonny Khan are superb. Every beat lands. Every thought registers. Every shift in the relationship feels earned. They move effortlessly through more than a decade of friendship, adolescence, conflict and change, creating not only Alan and Amir but the entire world around them. Two actors create a whole East London community. That is consummate storytelling. The simplicity of the production allows the writing and acting to do the heavy lifting, and Layla Madanat's outstanding and elegant direction keeps the pace moving while giving the emotional shifts room to land. We watch these two young men grow up, but we also watch the world grow increasingly complicated around them. And that is where the two-hander becomes super powerful. The entire changing landscape of East London is essentially created through two people trying to hold onto a friendship while history moves underneath them. That small, human struggle carries the weight of the whole play. Because history rarely announces itself when it is happening. It arrives through changes to a pub, a neighbourhood, a friendship, a political conversation. Suddenly the world you thought you understood looks different. The Jolly Fisherman understands that. It doesn't preach. There are no easy answers. We sit with the discomfort of watching people we care about change and to consider how much of who we become is choice, circumstance, fear, loyalty and the need to belong. For me, this is one of my picks of the Fringe for theatre. Smart, beautifully written, beautifully acted and directed and deeply human. Consummate storytelling. Review by Kate Gaul

Border Bodies ★★★★★ “A breathtaking collision of bodies, identities and movement, Border Bodies asks what happens when difference doesn't divide us, but gives us the strength to move together.” There is something extraordinary about watching seven bodies on stage that look, move and feel so completely different from one another. That diversity is the first thing I loved about Border Bodies. Not diversity as a statement. Not diversity as something to tick off. Just bodies. Different shapes, genders, colours, backgrounds and movement languages occupying space with enormous poise and confidence. And then they begin to move. Created by Igor Gasparini and performed by T.F. Cia de Dança from São Paulo, Border Bodies is a committed, breathtaking collision of contemporary dance, street styles, breaking, waacking, krump and freestyle. The dancers bring radically different physical vocabularies into the same space and gradually discover what happens when those differences begin to work together. But what really got me was the pacing. There is an extraordinary intensity to the slowness. It is SO HARD to go slow. To hold a movement. To resist the impulse to rush towards the next thing. To maintain absolute control when every muscle in your body is capable of something explosive. Border Bodies understands that stillness and slowness can be every bit as physically demanding and dramatically charged as virtuoso movement. And then, when the release comes, it is breathtaking. A tiny twitch becomes a shoulder movement; a shoulder becomes a krump, a glide, a leap. Individual gestures accumulate until the bodies become something else: a pulsing, shifting organism. The title gives us a clue. Border Bodies. The work is searching for community but not by pretending that difference doesn't exist. Quite the opposite. It asks whether we can come together because we are different. Hierarchies are tested. Bodies meet, resist, support and carry one another. Individuals emerge and disappear back into the collective. The work keeps asking: who gets space? Who leads? Who follows? Who is seen? And then they keep going. That persistence is what stayed with me. To watch bodies encounter resistance and simply continue is deeply human. The dancers don't make survival sentimental. They make it physical. The result is a work that is political without needing to shout its politics. A search for connection in a world that keeps constructing borders, physical, social, psychological, between us. I loved discovering the story of T.F. Cia de Dança alongside the work. This is a São Paulo company with almost two decades of practice behind it, bringing together artists from very different backgrounds and movement traditions. Their work is rooted in exchange, research and the belief that art and education can contribute to social transformation. Border Bodies is their first European tour, and Edinburgh is a significant step in bringing that practice to an international audience. You can feel that history in the performance. This isn't a company that has arrived with a neat package labelled “Brazilian dance.” It feels lived in. Tested. Earned. And perhaps that's why the collision is so exciting. Seven different bodies. Seven different histories. Seven different ways of moving through the world. And somehow, they keep finding one another. That is the border worth crossing. Review by Kate Gaul

Dribble ★★★★★ We think we're coming for football. Instead, DRIBBLE asks what it takes to survive — wherever you come from, whatever life throws at you, and whatever choices you make along the way. What a brilliant show. What a brilliant company. I went into Dribble thinking I was going to see (another) show about sport. Football, Brazil, Scotland, Charles Miller: a bit of history, a bit of culture, probably a lot of football. But Dribble is far more subversive than that. Because you never quite settling into a story about sport, the ground is constantly shifting. The football becomes the doorway into something much bigger: the courage it takes to survive, to find your way, to make choices and to keep going - wherever you come from. It is profound. And wonderfully, it doesn't deliver its profundity with a heavy hand. Instead, Cênica Theatre Company gives us beer and cachaça (literally free drinks!) music, stories, movement, laughter and that unmistakable Brazilian spirit of generosity and celebration. The show begins as a street party and ends as a street party and honestly, it is SO São Paulo. The whole experience is beautifully democratic. We aren't sitting safely outside the story. We are invited into it. The performers move with us, talk to us, drink with us, play with us. A table becomes a stage, a football pitch, a bar, a place for stories. The boundaries between performer and audience are constantly being nudged aside. But beneath the warmth, the music and the cachaça is something darker. A haunting memory runs through the work: everyone trusts a boy playing football in the street. But would we trust a boy who wants to make up stories? It is a deceptively simple question, and it lingers. Because Dribble keeps asking us who gets believed, who gets trusted, who gets to tell their story and what happens when the stories we tell ourselves become the things that allow us to survive. And beneath all of that is another question: How much of our lives do we choose and how much is fate? At the heart of the story is Charles Miller, the Brazilian-born son of a Scottish father who returned from England in the 1890s with football, its rules and equipment in tow. A small act of cultural exchange that would have an extraordinary afterlife. Dribble takes the Charles Miller story and refuses to leave it as a history lesson. Instead, history becomes a starting point for a much more spiritual journey: one that travels through family, migration, grief, sexuality, belonging, friendship, chance and the strange paths that bring us to where we are. The stories are personal. This is where the title starts to reveal itself. To dribble is to take a different route. To improvise. To find your own way through a space. To refuse the straight line. And isn't that what we are all doing? We make choices. We take risks. We lose people. We find people. Sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes we don't. Sometimes fate intervenes. Sometimes we simply keep moving. The company handles all of this with enormous generosity. There is no pretence that they have the answers. Instead, they offer us their stories, their culture, their music, their cachaça and their extraordinary capacity to turn a room and then a street into a place of connection. And the ending is perfect. Back out into the street. Back to the music. Back to the party. Except we're not quite the same people who walked in. That feels very Brazilian to me: life is difficult, history is complicated, people carry enormous things and still, somehow, there is music. There is cachaça. There is dancing. There is another person beside you. There is a reason to keep going. I love these people. I love this show. Dribble is theatre with a huge heart, a wicked sense of misdirection and a profound belief in the resilience of human beings. Come for the football. Stay for the life. Review by Kate Gaul

Salty Brine: How Strange It Is (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show) ★★★★★ Complete genius. Salty Brine makes the impossible combination of Anne Frank, Neutral Milk Hotel and first love feel not only possible, but inevitable. How do you take The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, a cult 1990s album whose lyrics were themselves deeply entangled with Anne Frank, and somehow make the whole thing about first love? Salty Brine does. And somehow, gloriously, it makes perfect sense. How Strange It Is is the latest instalment of Brine’s Living Record Collection, his extraordinary practice of taking an album and treating its tracklist as the blueprint for an entirely new theatrical world. Here, the world of Jeff Mangum’s songs collides with Anne Frank’s diary, Brine’s own adolescent journals, sexual awakening, longing, memory and the dizzying intensity of first love. It is messy, hilarious, tender, occasionally bewildering and completely alive. And at the centre of it is Brine himself: a consummate storyteller with a warm, generous and utterly inviting stage presence. There is something wonderfully intimate about the way he performs. Even when the material becomes enormous - Amsterdam, adolescence, sex, death, religion, desire, history, reincarnation and Neutral Milk Hotel - he somehow makes it feel as though he is sitting across from you telling you the story of the first person he ever loved. Dates become a kind of mantra throughout the show, repeated, accumulated, obsessively precise. At first, they feel like another piece of Brine's wonderfully unruly architecture; gradually they become something more affecting, a way of pinning enormous experiences of love, sex, loss and memory to the ordinary coordinates of a human life. The staging is intimate and beautifully judged. The design creates a world that can expand and contract around Brine without ever overwhelming him, while the direction knows exactly when to let the material explode and when to bring us back to the person standing in front of us. And then there is the band. What a band. The arrangements are sensational. Nate Weida’s musical direction and arrangements, alongside the original arrangements by Richard Aufrichtig and additional arrangements by Alex Thrailkill, transform Neutral Milk Hotel’s songs into something theatrical, unexpected and gloriously alive. This is not a covers gig. The songs are taken apart, reassembled and made to serve the story. The musicians aren't simply accompanying Brine; they are building the emotional architecture of the show around him. Brine's technical skill as a performer is extraordinary. He moves from speaking to singing almost imperceptibly, allowing a spoken phrase to gather rhythm and suddenly become song, or a melody to dissolve back into conversation. There is never a sense of “now I'm singing” - the two forms seem to exist in the same breath. It is an effortless-looking skill that is anything but effortless, and it makes the transitions between storytelling and music feel completely natural. It is sprawling and I think the sprawl is part of the point. Because adolescence is sprawling. First love is sprawling. Memory is sprawling. We don't experience the past in tidy chronological order; we experience it as fragments, songs, images, embarrassments, obsessions and moments that suddenly come rushing back with extraordinary force. Brine understands that. And what could be more unlikely - or more completely right - than putting Anne Frank, Neutral Milk Hotel and the sexual confusion of adolescence in the same room? The remarkable thing is that this isn't ultimately a show about either Anne Frank or Neutral Milk Hotel. They become the raw material for something much more personal: an exploration of what it means to discover desire, to fall in love for the first time, to be overwhelmed by another person and to realise, perhaps for the first time, that your own life is going to be full of stories. There is something profoundly generous about Brine's work. He takes the strange, embarrassing, horny, heartbreaking, ridiculous fragments of being human and says: look, this is worth making theatre about. And for ninety minutes, it is. Seeing Salty Brine makes life liveable. Review by Kate Gaul

MAYFLIES ★★★★★ A gorgeous coming-of-age story that makes the journey, the warehouse and the audience’s individual perspective part of the theatre: flawed, ambitious and utterly Fringe. There are some shows where the journey to the theatre is part of the experience. Mayflies, Grid Iron’s site-specific adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s acclaimed novel, is one of them. You have to make your way out to Brown’s of Leith, into the rear warehouse of what was once the George Brown & Sons Engineering Works. It is not a casual central-Fringe drop-in. You have to commit to getting there and I think that is smart. The audience has a little skin in the game before the performance has even begun. And then the warehouse gets transformed. Adapted and directed by Ben Harrison, with dramaturgy by playwright Douglas Maxwell, Mayflies tells the story of Tully and Noodles, two friends whose lives are shaped by the music, politics and exuberance of 1980s youth. In 1986, they head to Manchester for a legendary weekend of music and hedonism. Thirty years later, their friendship is confronted with mortality when Tully is diagnosed with terminal cancer. O’Hagan’s novel is a coming-of-age story, but also a story about what happens when the young people we once were meet the adults we have become. It is about friendship, memory, music, grief and the peculiar permanence of certain moments in our lives. One line from the novel seems to hold the whole thing: “They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.” That is the great pleasure of Mayflies. It understands that youth isn't simply a period of ignorance waiting to be corrected by experience. There are things we feel with extraordinary clarity at eighteen that adulthood can obscure: the intensity of friendship, the absolute importance of music, the conviction that the world might still be changed. A warehouse becomes Manchester: the production's greatest achievement is perhaps the simplest: it makes you believe that this warehouse is exactly where Mayflies should be happening. Jen McGinley's set and costume design, Lewis den Hertog's video design, Simon Wilkinson's lighting and David Paul Jones's soundtrack work together to turn the industrial space into a memory of Manchester's music culture. The architecture isn't hidden or neutralised. It is embraced. Concrete, brick, industrial structures and the vastness of the warehouse become part of the production's visual and emotional landscape. There is a terrific physicality to the transformation. Music and projections create the exhilaration of the Manchester weekend, while the building itself carries a history of labour and industry that sits beautifully beneath the story of young people dreaming of somewhere else. And, crucially, everyone sees a different show. The audience configuration means that your sightline, proximity to the actors and relationship to the space varies according to where you are sitting. I loved this. It is one of the things that site-specific theatre can do brilliantly: there isn't necessarily one perfect, authorised image of the production. Your experience is partly constructed by where you happen to be. That feels particularly appropriate for Mayflies, a story fundamentally concerned with memory. We don't all remember the same event in the same way. Why should we see it in the same way either? The acting is terrific. Jude Bain as Younger Tully and Kieran Devine as Younger Noodles have the energy, recklessness and chemistry required to make us believe that this friendship could define two lives. Their youthful exuberance is infectious without becoming sentimental. As the older Tully and Noodles, Graham Mackay-Bruce and Matthew Pidgeon have the harder task of making thirty years of friendship feel present in the room. They are particularly good at the things that aren't said like the accumulated knowledge, irritation, affection and shorthand of people who have known one another for most of their adult lives. The ensemble: Paul McCole, Lucianne McEvoy, John McGeachie and Carmen Pieraccini, shifts between characters and worlds with real generosity and precision. There are some initial audibility issues. The combination of the warehouse acoustics, Scottish accents and amplification takes a little time for the ear to adjust to. Once it does, the problem largely recedes, but it is one of the challenges of putting a production of this scale into an industrial space. The audience is looked after. For all the ambition of the production, the audience experience is surprisingly well considered. The operational infrastructure around the show is clear and friendly, with ushers helping audiences navigate a space that could easily feel intimidating or confusing. That care matters. Site-specific theatre asks audiences to relinquish some of the comforts and conventions of a traditional theatre building; the production needs to give something back. A practical warning: get there early if you want a seat with a back! As much as I enjoyed the production (and I am sticking to 5 stars!), I agree with the critics who have found the final section less successful. The declining illness needs tightening. We know what is going to happen. The interesting question is what that knowledge does to the people involved. Once mortality is established, I wanted the production to move more decisively towards the friendship, the choices, the anger, the love and the complicated business of accompanying someone towards death. There is richer dramatic territory there than in watching the mechanics of decline. O'Hagan gives us another line that seems resonates: “Go gently with people's pain. It's the same as yours.” It is a beautiful sentiment, but it also points towards the more interesting question for the drama: how do we go gently with one another's pain? The ending simply doesn't land. After the emotional and theatrical investment of the preceding two hours, I wanted something that trusted the audience to sit with the complexity rather than bringing the story to such a sudden close. And yet, the production's central proposition remains remarkably strong. There is a third quotation from O'Hagan that hangs over the whole story: the recognition that “humanity has a 100 per cent mortality rate”. That sounds bleak. Mayflies isn't. Instead, it asks what we do with the limited time we have and why the friendships, music, places and moments of our younger lives can remain so vivid decades later. This is what makes Mayflies such a successful Edinburgh Fringe experience. It is a gorgeous coming-of-age story, beautifully performed and imaginatively translated into a theatrical environment that makes the journey, the building and the audience's individual perspective part of the work. The warehouse isn't simply a backdrop. Getting there isn't simply logistics. Where you sit isn't simply a matter of comfort. All those things contribute to the experience. I will take an ambitious, occasionally imperfect production that understands the possibilities of its place over a safe production that could happen anywhere. Grid Iron has been making site-specific work for thirty years. Mayflies feels like a particularly apt anniversary production: a story about looking backwards, remembering the people we were, and asking what remains. And sometimes the best thing a Fringe production can do is make you feel that you have travelled somewhere, even if that somewhere is only a warehouse in Leith. Review by Kate Gaul

★★★★★ A stunning, deeply theatrical triumph where the human body becomes the story. I usually steer away from theatre about sport. Sport already has most of theatre’s essential ingredients: heroes, villains, costumes, tribal loyalties, overwrought narratives and people crying in public, so I’m never entirely convinced it needs a stage as well. But the vibe around The Distance (Directed by Julia Locascio) was good, so I went in. I’m very pleased I did. Written and performed by former Team GB athlete Ben Norris, The Distance follows Chris, who is reluctantly pushed into cross-country running when a frozen football pitch leaves him with nowhere else to go. Something ignites. What follows is a coming-of-age story about the exhilaration and cost of elite sport - ambition, identity, family, the young body under pressure, and what happens when every meal, metre and moment becomes measurable. And it is really a show about coming into the body and discovering what it can do, becoming fascinated by its possibilities, pushing it beyond what seems possible and then discovering what happens when the body starts to push back. Norris performs on and around a treadmill and a kind of jungle-gym apparatus, so the body is never simply illustrating the story: the body is the story, the set, the metaphor and the theatrical machinery. Perhaps there’s something else going on here too. We are a nation rather obsessed with sport, and we clearly love watching the human body under pressure - pushed, tested, disciplined, exhausted, triumphant. It’s interesting how many theatre shows these days are finding ways to put that physical extremity at the centre of the theatrical experience. The Distance is part of that conversation. Not a criticism, just something I found myself thinking about as I watched Norris put his body through it. There’s a long history behind the piece too, drawing on Norris’s own experience as a young international runner and developing over several years before arriving at Edinburgh. That lived experience gives the writing its precision and makes the movement between memory, character and physical exertion feel completely embodied. It’s a great performance and stunning writing - funny, precise, beautifully observed and increasingly moving. And just when I thought I understood the theatrical rules of the piece, some unexpected and wonderfully touching audience interaction shifted the room completely. There’s something particularly impressive about how Norris turns endurance into theatre without ever allowing the physical feat to become a gimmick. This is not simply look at me run. It is about why we run, what we ask our bodies to give us, and what we lose when achievement becomes the measure of who we are. It’s athletic without being gimmicky, emotional without becoming sentimental, and deeply theatrical. Credit too to the producing team Global Creatures, Grace Dickson Productions and Nic Dodson Productions for getting such an ambitious, physically demanding piece onto its feet. And I’m sure The Distance will be coming to a town near you soon! A real winner. Review by Kate Gaul Image by Mihaela Bodlovic