How do you translate a Seventeenth Century Spanish classic, a book with more than 800 pages, into a Fringe play? According to David Cottis’ adaptation, you strip the story down to its most basic and recognizable features, assemble a funny (if not amazing) cast that gives their all, and you present it as a minimalist [...]

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It is a pleasure to see a children’s show in which the adults are laughing as hard as the children. One such show is Professor Bumm’s Story Machine, a wonderful piece of improvisation and madness from the Black Sheep’s Andrew Jones and Ciaran Murtagh.
Meet Professor Ivor Bumm (Jones) and Doctor Willy Whee (Murtagh), two eminent [...]

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When a show opens with two not so young men in red leather bondage gear singing “Music to Watch Boys By”, you know you are not going to get an hour of highbrow dirge. Instead, you are going to get Topping and Butch, two wonderfully camp and extremely funny musical performers.
Topping and Butch work extremely [...]

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We are all familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel – two children abandoned in the woods by the evil stepmother who encounter a witch in her gingerbread house. Or are we? Kipper TIE’s interesting new take on the classic fairytale adds a modern twist.
Hansel, played by Iain Dootson, is not the lovely boy [...]

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Like a shadow moving out of the darkness, the beauty and the beast that is Shakti reveals herself to her audience and embarks on a show that offers all the power and raw sexuality that she is famed for.
Through silent performance, Shakti re-writes this classic tale in such a way that it challenges the perception [...]

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Originally crafted as a work for the American stage, this engaging adaptation of a rare J.M. Barrie novella, has been pared down for the festival environment and actually works well as a two-hander, even keeping the majority of the complex Scots lingo that would often be discarded for a multicultural audience.
Set around the youthful trials [...]

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Every year the Fringe is a mish-mash of nearly everything you can think of and a lot more besides. With so much going on it is hardly surprising that it is a proving ground, where young actors cut their teeth and tentatively step out on to the stage for the first time away from the [...]

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Jeremy Lion is quite possibly the worst children’s entertainer in the world and it’s precisely this that he makes him so thoroughly entertaining.
As he shambles on stage, belching and bleary-eyed, Lion immediately conjures up long-suppressed memories of the inappropriate entertainers that we’ve all met in our tender young years – sweaty, alcohol-scented and thoroughly wrong [...]

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“Ladies and Gentlemen, I am David O’Doherty”, shouts O’Doherty as he takes the stage in a confident yet shuffling awkward way. And so begins an hour of absolute joy.
The title of the show is a signpost to his mental state in coming to this year’s festival – he is prepared to take on such heady [...]

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Staged in three parts, Oleanna centres round a student and teacher and the relationship between them. What initially seems like a very confused interchange between the student, Carol, and the professor, John, mutates over the course of the play into a fierce battle of interpretation.
The basic plot is that Carol comes to John in fear [...]

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