Theatre
This year’s theatre programme is mind-blowing with new musicals, historical retellings, takes on classics, Fringe favourites, storytelling, magic and so much more. An apocalyptic rom-com from the razor-sharp pen of playwright provocateur and Fringe First Winner David Finnigan, watch four hilarious actors ‘go down’ on their microphones, mangos and melons in 44 Sex Acts In One Week, a slippery and subversive take on a classic radio play. The five-star, multi sell-out Fringe phenomenon Sh!t-faced Shakespeare® is back with its hilarious combination of an entirely serious adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and an absolutely sh!t-faced actor!
Fresh from the runway of RuPaul's Drag Race UK, Join comedian, crash mat and winner of Season 5 Ginger Johnson as she swaps her stilettos for safety goggles and takes a death-defying leap from the runway to the real world in Ginger Johnson Blows Off! Fan Favourite comedy crossdresser Kate Butch’s jukebox musical brings us stand-up comedy, live vocals and lipsync extravaganzas in Wuthering Shites. Award winning Drag King Bi-Curious George presents Queer Planet; a raucous romp through the animal kingdom which aims to shatter the heteronormative binaries through which we view the natural world.
The stage is an important and pressing place for true stories and autobiography. Performed at the U.S. Capitol Center, Sell Me: I Am From North Korea is a powerful and gripping solo piece inspired by the true stories of incredibly courageous North Korean women defectors. The Shroud Maker is a compelling black comedy inspired by a real-life character, weaving a harrowing story of courage, love, escape and disappointment with comic fantasy and true stories to create a vivid portrait of life in Palestine before recent events. Based on the true story of Lani's upbringing as a young carer, The Room Upstairs features immersive audio, original compositions and one frustrated daughter.
Autobiography continues with Chatterbox, from Lubna Kerr, a humorous and touching one-woman show looking at the impact of the labels we are given as children and how they persist into adulthood. Twenty years, sixteen postcodes, one city; in 16 Postcodes, Jessica Regan (BBC, Channel 4, The Guilty Feminist) shares lessons lived and learned from a life in no particular order as the audience help her move North, South, East and West. Sisyphean Quick Fix is a heartfelt, true-to-life comedy drama about love, family and the complex realities of addiction. Multi-award-winning writer-performer Katie Arnstein (Sexy Lamp, Sticky Door) is back with The Long Run, a joyful, captivating comedy about love, cancer and running for a really long time.
The world today doesn’t leave artists short of inspiration. Multi award winners Ugly Bucket (Untapped 2022) present Stuffed - a roaring rally cry, a blazing inferno of physicality, clown, original music, and transformative personal testimony about Food Banks. Fringe First winner Joe Sellman- Leava and Dylan Howells embark on a quest to uncover how the economy wins elections and why the force that dominates our lives is so bloody complicated in their bold new show It's The Economy, Stupid!
Tit Swingers is a new Queer Punk Gig Musical about Anne Bonney and Mary Read - polyamorous queer pirates that got the title of Hellcats of the Seven Seas for their various vicious and notorious crimes! Featuring puppetry, shadow play, unforgettable music, and surreal meta-humour, Kafka's Metamorphosis: The Musical! With Puppets! has delighted swarms of audiences from New York to Montréal and now skitters into Scotland for its Fringe debut. Inspired by real events, The Emu War musical tells the story of how ex-military men worked the farmlands of Australia after WW1 - get your tail feathers ready for some birds, bums, and guns! Together for over 25 years, The Jive Aces are renowned worldwide for their high-energy live show; having played for Her Majesty the Queen and become the first band to reach the finals of Britain’s Got Talent, they continuously showcase why they are the UK’s No.1 Jive & Swing band!
Many shows blur the boundaries between genres incorporating music into their theatrical mastery. Boy In Da Korma is a comedy solo show - featuring live music, hip-hop and Irish trad - about one kid’s desperate attempt to belong as much as he wants to stand out.
Shakespeare and Mary Shelley get their ‘next’ moment at the Fringe. Fringe Legend Pip Utton is Shakespeare in At Home With Will Shakespeare, a moving and comic romp through Will's life, including some of his greatest hits, performed by the man himself. Join Hamlet’s legendary jester Yorick as he reconnects with his lost love of performance in Hamstrung, an interactive ghost story. One man, one monster, one glorious dream to singlehandedly tell the most famous horror story of all time, and absolutely no budget whatsoever; Frankenstein (On A Budget) is the comedy musical hammer horror homage that you didn’t know you needed.
You’ll recognise some of the names gracing the Pleasance’s stages this year. Join Jake Roche as he squeezes out every last drop of celeb juice, dishing the dirt and spilling the tea on the world of fame in Neporrhoids. Rita Lynn: Life Coach is a deliciously dark drama and a cautionary tale from one who knows - a one-woman show written by and starring Louise Marwood (Emmerdale). Bebe Cave’s The Screen Test is a dark comedy about delusion, desperation and dreams. OOF! sees legendary double act Fiasco Job Job, Arthur Smith and Phil Nice, reunite for one final time to celebrate their 40th anniversary in a hilarious sit-down drama about age, showbiz and the cartography of friendship. The Fringe’s favourite poet Luke Wright returns with stacks of brilliant, big-hearted poems that get to grips with mulchy middle-age in Joy!
Some shows just can’t keep away and return after their huge Fringe successes. Ben Target: LORENZO won a highly coveted Fringe First in 2023: a life-affirming story about death, conveyed through the popular media of storytelling, servitude to the audience and live carpentry. Following a sold out, award-winning run at the Fringe last year, the People's Princess is back as Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story returns to our stages with drag, multimedia, audience interaction, puppetry and queer joy. Combining epic storytelling, razor-sharp impressions and a dose of theatrical magic, Joe Sellman-Leava’s Fanboy returns offering a nostalgic, love-hate letter to pop culture. The entire 144 episodes of cult 90s TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as told through the eyes of Spike, the one character who knows it inside out; Buffy Revamped returns for one week only. After a 5* sell-out run in 2023, Burning Down the Horse is back - an immersive comedy epic that drops you into the heart of the most iconic wooden animal in history, the Trojan Horse.
It’s time to be scared! Box Tale Soup will present an astonishing adaptation of Gulliver's Travels with ingenious puppetry, stirring shanties and sharp satire. From the same company Casting the Runes takes you to the edge of your seat, on a journey to the darkest corners of the night, where Edward Dunning life becomes a waking nightmare. In Buckets Of Blood - Fairy Tales Not For Kids, storyteller Eden retells a collection of some of the darker tales from the Grimms while letting you know what popular fairy tales have left out.
Boundary breaking technology, mesmerising magic and amazing puppetry are all part of this year’s programme. Join this extraordinary journey to discover the beats and rhythms of a busy, beautiful woodland world told from the perspective of an acorn in Breathe with its stunning puppetry and groundbreaking live camera work. Andrew Frost is one of the best card magicians in the world and in Cards on the Table he recounts how he stumbled upon the world of magic in a second-hand bookshop. While magician Tom Brace has opened his very own theme park and you're invited to the grand opening; The Ride 4D is a world first ride experience using 3D technology combined with magic!
Love and relationships are often not far from our minds. Juniper & Jules is an award-winning play about two women redefining romance, an honest reflection on modern dating under the double bind of sexism and homophobia. A sharp satire on contemporary masculinity and male entitlement, Did You Mean To Fall Like That is a tender, nuanced story of fertility issues, the trauma of miscarriage, divorce and male mental health. Exploring queer friendship, platonic love, and nuclear anxiety, Seconds to Midnight asks what happens in a world with no consequences. Me For You is a play about love and saving the human race, in the face of overwhelming evidence that we’re a despicable race of selfish parasites.
We’re in Scotland and it’s time for some quintessentially Scottish stories. Returning after seven sell- out Fringe seasons is acclaimed immersive adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s classic novel, Trainspotting Live where the audience become part of the action! A play exploring religious and cultural identity, Singin’ I’m No A Billy, is a phenomenon in Scotland where it has sold out countless nationwide tours; what happens when on the day of the Old Firm Match, you lock up a Celtic and Rangers fan in a cell together?! For the first time, there will be gender alternating casts across the festival with He’s A Tim, playing on selected days.
Love’s a Beach looks at six months after your five minutes of fame! After the success of Ringer, Out To Lunch and Goons, Hughie Shepherd-Cross returns to the Fringe with Gang Bang, a surreal and madcap parody of 20th century gangster films rammed with pastiches. Never Get to Heaven in an Empty Shell is a tragically semi- autobiographical tragicomedy – will an unlikely encounter with a ghost at Angel Station persuade Claud to start living again? A show about the pain and beauty of growing older, Look After Your Knees is a visual and physical collage performed by a clown. Squidge is a one-woman show by award-winning screenwriter and actress Tiggy Bayley about those left behind by our education system and finding love in a world determined to hate. Sorry (I Broke Your Arms And Legs) is a riotous debut PowerPoint presentation combining the thrills of World Book Day with the hilarity of the Maths Olympiad. Toy Stories, or How Not To Make a Living as an Artist is a hilarious (true) storytelling performance, featuring childhood toys, Art Education, Pig-Framers, Boris, Monks, Nazis and Scalextric enthusiasts.
Finally Mervyn Stutter's Pick of the Fringe celebrates its 31st year bringing audiences live extracts from seven top shows in a packed 90-minute lunchtime extravaganza.
Talks
Award-winning LBC radio presenter and For the Many podcast host Iain Dale is back at the Fringe with All Talk, his acclaimed, incisive insight on current affairs back with in-depth interviews featuring audience questions. Guests include: former First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond; Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar; TV presenter and journalist Ben Shephard; football pundit and presenter Chris Kamara MBE; political activist and business leader Gina Miller, who successfully challenged the UK government's prorogation of the Westminster Parliament in 2019; First Minister of Scotland and Leader of the Scottish National Party, Humza Yousaf MSP; Jess Phillips, the MP for Birmingham Yardley and former Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence and Safeguarding in Keir Starmer’s Labour frontbench team; former Prime Minister Liz Truss; Rachel Reeves MP, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer; former Scottish Conservative leader, Baroness Davidson; British political scientist Sir John Curtice; broadcaster and journalist Michael Crick; journalist Brian Taylor and; Wes Streeting MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. There will also be a hustings-style debate in a pre-election special featuring four Scottish MPs - Andrew Bowie MP, Stephen Flynn MP, Christine Jardine MP and Ian Murray MP.
Tickets for all shows are available at www.pleasance.co.uk and 0131 556 6550.
