family

Oh My Heart Oh My Home, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

by an anonymous guest critic

Casey Jay Andrews is a regular fixture at the Fringe. She is a purveyor of small, touching stories and beautifully constructed set designs. For this piece, she tells the story of Freddie, born during a meteor storm, who returns to her family home in the woods now inhabited only by her grandad and his Scottie dog. The meteor storm has returned 33 years on, and she and her grandad go out to watch the shooting stars. Meanwhile, her grandad has a secret he has not shared with her. 

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Lightening Ridge, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

by an anonymous guest critic

Lightning Ridge is a playfully-told family show about a rural Australian mining community. The trouble starts when Kelly-Ann’s two imaginary friends go missing, and the whole village has to come together to find them.

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Gunter, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

by an anonymous guest critic

This show is the very modern telling of a witch trial that you’ve likely never heard of. In 1605, in a small town in Oxfordshire after an altercation at a football match, Brian Gunter tries to get his neighbour Elizabeth Gregory hung as a witch, blaming his daughter Annie’s mysterious illness on her. Without wanting to spoil the story, it doesn’t quite work out as he planned.

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Nan, Me, and Barbara Previ, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

by an anonymous guest critic

Hannah Maxwell is back at the Fringe with her second show after 2019’s charming I, AmDram. This one is similar. It’s about what happened next for Hannah – moving back to Luton to care for her recently bereaved grandma. A show about 30-something angst, obsession and stalking should not be charming, but Maxwell manages to make it so. 

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Paines Plough Roundabout, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

by Laura Kressly

After several hard years, Paines Plough’s popup theatre’s programme seems to know that our fractured, individualistic society needs some love and care. Six of this year’s shows reflect this: characters feeling lost, adrift or unfulfilled are desperately searching for someone or something to cling onto and give them purpose, or to help them feel less alone.

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Tones: a hip-hop opera, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

by Laura Kressly

Immensely intelligent Jerome has always struggled to find his place in the world. He was too poor to go to private school like his best friend Henry, but at secondary school he got bullied for sounding white and talking posh. This coming-of-age monologue navigates growing up when you don’t quite fit in on the estate in Harlesden, at the shop where you work, or at the competitive uni out of town.

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JM Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

by Laura Kressly

The South African companies Handspring Puppet Company and the Baxter Theatre have a world-renown reputation for puppetry and theatre, respectively. In this adaptation of the JM Coetzee novel, the puppetry is as good as anticipated, but the two hour-long, rambling story pushes the limits of audience patience and dulls the effect of the show’s message.

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James Rowland: Piece of Work, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

by Laura Kressly

Known for masterful storytelling of gentle comedy and devastating tragedy purportedly from his own life, James Rowland opens his newest play with a line from Hamlet. This foreshadows less humour and more melancholy, but both come in spades in this monologue on father-son relationships and mental health.

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OommoO, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

by Laura Kressly

Lula Mebrahtu inhabits multiple worlds: the UK, Eritrea, the present and her ancestors’ past. To construct this show she draws on traditional dance, contemporary British club culture, and Afro-futurism to create a unique dramaturgy that seeks to capture the experience of living across multiple cultures.

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Baklâ, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

by Laura Kressly

The Spanish arrived in the Philippines in 1521. This was the start of centuries of violent colonial rule that still resonates today. Max Percy, a gay, mixed race Filipino man, carries this legacy in his body. It seems that no matter what he does, from visiting his Filipino grandfather, to flirting and fucking his way through London’s gay clubs, he is fetishised and othered. Percy’s complex solo show samples the racism and homophobia he encounters, shares Filipino creation stories, and uses movement to capture the tension between the different cultures he inhabits.

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