Edinburgh Fringe and International Festival Reviews 2025

This simultaneously cuddly and filthy musical two hander from London-based Latin American-centric Alpaqua Theatre Collective concerns Jesús, a sexually confused young man from Peru. Over the course of Jeezus! he acts as our guide to both the Latin American country’s extremely repressive police and social values, and also his own, very specific awakening. 

This rousing monologue from actor Jade Franks has been a stonking hit this Fringe, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s an enthusiastically told fish-out-of-water story based on working-class Liverpudlian Franks’s - dare I say it - Legally Blonde-esque experience of going to study at Cambridge. You sense she’s probably taken a few liberties with a narrative that isn’t entirely watertight. But it is, nonetheless, a thoroughly winning hour.

I very much enjoyed this berserk late-night hour from Alice Cockayne, a selection of inscrutable but hilarious character sketches that might offer a sort of anxiety dream interrogation of contemporary femininity, or might just be a load of random shit that exists purely for the lolz…

We all loved US cabaret comic Cat Cohen’s debut Fringe show The Twist..? She’s Gorgeous, which eventually went on to Netflix special glory: but there was something particularly magical about its original Edinburgh Fringe run. Playing late at night in the 100-seat Pleasance Beneath, a massive part of its magic was how the young, unknown Cohen brought Streisand-scale diva-isms to the dinky venue. It was an act, of course, but her apparently colossal self-absorption registered as hilarious deluded in front of the small crowd…

On the face of it the question ‘was Kurt Cobain trans?’ is the very definition of ‘no, next one please’. But Emma Frankland’s new show No Apologies addresses the query with a mix of impish cheekiness and impassioned justification…

Priyanka Shetty’s one-woman docu-theatre play is subtitled ‘the show that Trump does not want you to see’ and on the one hand this is probably broadly accurate: the notional leader of the free world is so brittle I’m sure he’d ban anyone, anywhere, from seeing anything even mildly critical of him given half the chance. On the other hand, I suspect he’s not specifically aware that there’s a solo show about the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia playing at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. 

A lot of things about Mr Chonkers remain unclear to me.For starters, the words ‘Mr Chonkers’ are never at any point uttered in this show from weirdy American clown John Norris, who solely introduces himself by his actual name. Is Mr Chonkers an abandoned pseudonym? The umbrella name for all of Norris’s shows, which aren’t in any way identified as being different from each other?

Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak is the new show from Victoria Melody, whose whole thing is like being a madder, lower budget Louis Theroux, who embeds herself in unusual hobbies and professions for years on end, eventually making shows about them.

One of the buzziest and frankly most bewildering hits of this year’s fringe is Club NVRLND, a work of (I guess) immersive club theatre that attracted a very large, very enthusiastic crowd on the Tuesday night I saw it.

Pantomime in August? Oh no it isn’t! It isn’t, actually. True, She’s Behind You is a self-penned celebration of the daming career of Edinburgh panto legend Johnny McKnight, that’s performed by him in full Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz-themed outfit. And he does throw sweets to the audience.But he also swears a lot and eschews a fairytale plot in favour of an autobiographical night in which he shares stories from his career in panto, something that has taken up much of his adulthood.

I’m basically a theatre critic who occasionally inflicts himself on comedy shows, and I have to say what really impressed me about Nish Kumar’s new show was his diction…

Joe Kent-Waters’s second show is exactly what I wanted it to be, which is to say that it’s basically a bigger budget remake of his first show…

At the beginning of their new show Philosophy of the World, the three members of In Bed with My Brother – that’s Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory – shuffle on sheepishly to announce that they’re now so skint that they’ve been forced to write a commercial show with a linear narrative that will feature absolutely no nudity. This is all a lie (apart from probably the being skint part)…

The omens were always good for Ohio, which is produced by Fleabag and Baby Reindeer hitmaker Francesca Moody and had a transfer to the Young Vic nailed on months before the Fringe started…

I think we can all agree at that this stage in human history, no genre – or subgenre, whatever – has been more comprehensively done to death than the dinner party reunion play…

Andrew Doherty’s idiosyncratic folk horror comedy Gay Witch Sex Cult was one of the most arresting stand up debuts at last year’s Fringe. And its follow up Sad Gay AIDS Play is a lot of fun. But it also sails into tropier waters than its predecessor, and though hardly a run of the mill stand up show, it does feel like it’s treading on some pretty well worn ground.

I promise I won’t go on about this too much, but I think I may have been responsible for The Sun’s bizarre 2023 attack on Lorna Rose Treen, in which the tabloid accused the rising sketch star of killing comedy with ‘wokery’…

The curiously terse title Relay seems calibrated to deflect from the fact that this is the second solo Fringe show from Welsh comic Leila Navabi, whose 2023 debut Composition was billed in the more traditional way of having her name next to it in the title. Not that she’s hiding her involvement, more that she seems to be determinedly pushing the ‘theatre’ side of a somewhat generically ambiguous storytelling show that’s co-produced by Sherman Theatre…

This enjoyable if extremely lightweight musical is based around a substantially made-up version of the complicated relationship that existed between tech titans Steve Jobs and Bill Gates…

Ultra-nerdy standup Kieran Hodgson – a man who once did an entire hour about the 1975 European referendum – recently had a cameo role in notorious superhero flop The Flash. In fact he spoke the first line in the movie. This is so prodigiously improbable that it’s no wonder it’s the jumping off point for his new show, Voice of America… 

This is a nice way to start the Traverse’s Fringe programme: performer Gary McNair’s monologue ‘ A Gambler’s Guide to Dying’ is a tribute to his grandfather that blends a nostalgic warmth and a few good chuckles with some smart stuff about the nature of storytelling…