Eggs Collective Get a Round, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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Eggs Collective are after the #bestnighteva with this joyful show modelled on the great British night out. Gold sequinned dresses, blue eyeshadow, and WKD by the bucketload are vital ingredients of this playful tribute to one of this country’s most venerated institutions.

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Box Clever, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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Marnie’s a 22-year-old single mum from Bermondsey and every day is a fight at the moment. Her mum’s harbouring Marnie’s abusive ex, the guy she’s in love with has a new bird who’s using the legal system to keep them apart and her daughter’s dad isn’t around. Marnie currently lives in a woman’s refuge and the shadow of social services is hanging over her.

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Brutal Cessation and Dust, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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Actor and writer Milly Thomas is an unstoppable force refusing to shy away from tough material. A First World Problem, her most recent play, lays bare the cruel adolescent world of a top girls’ private school. Her two shows at the fringe are stylistically different from each other, but both are similarly confrontational. Brutal Cessation forces the audience to examine the gender stereotypes within an abusive, cishet relationship and Dust, the significantly stronger of the two works, is a monologue on mental health and suicide.

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Bourgeois & Maurice, Soho Theatre

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by guest critic Maeve Campbell

Landing onstage in glitzy hazmat suits, Soho Theatre veterans Gourgeois Bourgeois (George Heyworth) and Maurice Maurice (Liv Morris) struggle to start their set. Thank goodness that global warming is just a myth and skins are shed to reveal ridiculous nude allusion onesies. This opening visual gag is a good sign of things to come as Bourgeois and Maurice, reflecting on their impressive ten-year enterprise, are a hoot from start to finish in this seventy-five- minute show.

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Changelings, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Mowgli, a ferocious boy-child raised by wolves in the jungle, has been kicked out of the pack. He’s trying to figure out what to do next when he meets a mysterious creature from another world – or rather, another story. Puck has been watching Mowgli with unusually keen interest, so the two might be able to help each other out.

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Fall Out, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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by guest critic Rebecca JS Nice

Fall Out is one of very few solely tap shows at Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Old Kent Road are a London-based company of hoofers whose vocabulary is developed out of improvisation in response to a jazz accompaniment. The results mean the dancers’ tap shoes become a percussive instrument that create a highly complex jazz melody over the top of their band. Rhythm tap is far more mathematic than the ballroom based jazz tap and musical theatre styles. These performers are musicians as well as dancers. Above all, they are super-cool.

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Mrs Orwell, Old Red Lion Theatre

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by guest critic Simona Negretto

In 1949, George Orwell lived the final months of his life in University College Hospital due to a severe case of tuberculosis. Torn between an uncertain faith in a recovery and the consciousness of the approaching end, hoping to write again, he decided to marry Sonia Brownell, a young and beautiful magazine editor. The marriage, as the play keeps reminding us, was a sort of pragmatic contra-deal conceived more out of interests than of love.

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Girl From the North Country, Old Vic

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In Duluth, Minnesota, ships, trains and buses come and go under a sweeping midwestern sky heavy with snow. It’s 1934, the height of the Great Depression. A desperate, drifting populace chase the shadows of their debtors and rumours of work in and out of the port city.

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