Soho Theatre

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...

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.