Soho Theatre

This review is from the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. As this new one-woman-show reminds us in more ways than one, success can be a double-edged sword.  Written and performed by relatively unknown Australian comic Hannah Reilly, Roleplay had sold out its Fringe run before the festival began and there’s an obvious reason why: its producer, Francesca Moody, has been responsible for a series of solo shows that have in recent years almost single handedly resurrected the festival’s reputation as the place to spot the stage and screen stars of tomorrow. Fleabag and Baby Reindeer are the biggies and 2024’s Weather Girl may well join the list when its A24-produced adaptation debuts on Netflix. So you can see why a new Moody-produced solo show staged in perpetually hip Summerhall is an easy sell, and has featured in just about every preview theatre list for the festival. Does it pile on too much pressure, though?  Roleplay does not hide its light under a bushel, beginning as it does with Reilly strutting into the room in a bra and panties, before whipping off the former and grinding away topless to thunderous strippercore beats. She’s Danni, the host of a little-listened to podcast that seems to exist to both celebrate and satirise sex positivity: ‘hey slut’, is how she greets her callers. That might have been the sum of her career, but a series of shady behind-the-scenes events leads to her being offered serious money by a big American corporation to make the show a mainstay of...

This review is from the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. A version of Hamlet called HAM in which Hamlet is vegan and sad about the death of a pig as opposed to his father is the sort of show concept that gives people cold sweats about seeing theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe. But performance art duo Hotter Project is really onto something here with a show that casually sends up cringey activist theatre, while also being brilliantly accomplished, both in terms of the deft, funny way Mary Higgins and Ell Potter make use of Shakespeare’s own words (there is a big laugh for ‘oh that this too too solid flesh would melt’) but also in the way I haven’t wanted to eat any meat since I saw it. The loose idea is that Higgins and Potter have been driven to write a preposterous show because they think they can get funding for it. They do not seem convinced by the project and spend their whole time bickering away: Higgins is the precious, uptight vegan; Potter, by her own admission, was given the nickname ‘sausage queen’ after she ate 18 in a go once.  The duo’s fractious odd-couple absurdity and the fact that they treat the entire project as if they know it’s a stupid idea – they are also naked quite a lot, FYI – is nicely offset by how accomplished it actually all is: as well as some dazzling linguistic bits, there’s great stuff like the play within the play being reimagined as an S&M session between Higgins and a hapless member of the audience. Does it preach? Well maybe kind of, a bit,...

Produced by Edinburgh Fringe hitmeister Francesca Moody, The Scaring sees sketch trio Crybabies follow up their very silly sci-fi Bagbeard and absurdist World War 2 show Danger Brigade with what you could probably have correctly guessed to be a rummage around the horror genre. The series of sketches that comprise The Scaring follow a former priest who must team up with a ghost after peril strikes at a creepy hotel.

Cult New York theatre duo Xhloe and Natasha are a rare example of a pair of obscure starving artists who actually made it big at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe under their own steam in 2022 (albeit they’re now very much produced by Soho Theatre). Their latest queer clowning-inflected shaggy dog story is ‘a Brechtian puppet show ripped in two about conspiracy, misdirection and seeing something with your own eyes’. It’s about two teenagers who amuse themselves sturring up their Appalacian town with fake Bigfoot sightings… but then things get alarmingly real when a neighbour’s dog is found ripped to pieces. 

This review is from the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Conceptual comic Joseph Morpurgo hasn’t been totally absent this last 10 years: he recently brought back his classic 2015 show Soothing Sounds for Baby. However, Highlander 70 is his first new work in nearly a decade although you’d hardly guess it if you didn’t know: he throws himself into a show with truly esoteric subject matter with the breezy energy of a man who pumps out a weirdy Fringe show a year. And although he’s not an observational stand-up type who was going to talk us through what he’s been up to, there’s just something admirably ballsy about announcing his return with this. Wearing clay-coloured face paint for whatever reason, he dives straight into the premise. He allegedly randomly happened across a 1970 high school yearbook for a US high school called Highlander Academy, in New Jersey. And from the pictures contained therein he spins an eccentric and amusing yarn about David Moon, a student who appears multiple times in the book. Of course Murpurgo has no real idea who Moon was. But he has crafted a narrative that Moon sits at the heart of, when a private diary detailing the straitlaced student’s love for the most popular girl in school goes missing on graduation day, prompting an epic quest to retrieve it.  I would assume that somehow Morpurgo did happen upon the real yearbook – it seems like too mad a thing to have entirely fabricated – but clearly the wild stories he tells of David and his...

Julia Grogan writes and stars in this comedy about a struggling performer who attemps to revuve her dashed dreams of fame via absurdly big dreams for her todder dance class. Rachel Lemon directs.

Nominated for Best Newcomer at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Awards, Freddie Meredith’s Need a Light? is a by all accounts delightful hour of sketch comedy in which Meredith plays a nerdy, wannabe hip loser who spends 60 endearing minutes trying to start conversations with randoms in the smoking area of a club.