Edinburgh Playhouse | 15 September 2026 The sun may come out tomorrow, but on opening night at the Edinburgh Playhouse, Annie didn't quite shine as brightly as I had hoped. The much-loved musical returned to Edinburgh this week, bringing with it all the familiar ingredients: the red-haired orphan, the formidable Miss Hannigan, billionaire Daddy Warbucks, an adorable dog and, of course, those songs that most of us could probably sing whether we've ever actually seen Annie or n

Edinburgh Playhouse | 8 September 2026 Champagne, glamour, gorgeous gowns and enough Cole Porter classics to keep you humming all the way home — High Society certainly knows how to throw a party. The much-loved musical arrived at the Edinburgh Playhouse this week promising audiences an evening of old-school Hollywood glamour, and visually, it absolutely delivers. But opening night came with an unexpected bit of drama before the curtain had even gone up. The production's two a

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 | Assembly George Square Gardens After days of running around Edinburgh squeezing as many shows as humanly possible into a Fringe schedule, sometimes you just need someone to hand you some crayons and tell you everything is going to be okay. Enter The Bob Ross Effect. Written and performed by Sarah-Louise Young, this wonderfully warm show takes inspiration from Bob Ross — the softly spoken, spectacularly permed artist who convinced millions of p

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 | Assembly George Square Studios Medieval Bavaria. Witches. Sin. Sexual temptation. Roller-skating monks. Welcome to Nuns! Dog Complex Theatre's gloriously ridiculous comedy follows Sister Gertrude, a nun determined to be the holiest of the holy despite being slightly distracted by thoughts about what might be hiding underneath Monk Bertram's robes. When rumours of witches reach the convent, Gertrude teams up with mysterious witch-hunter Yarrow

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 | Assembly George Square Gardens What happens when you take six West End performers, dress them as fishermen and turn some of the biggest pop, rock and musical theatre songs into sea shanties? Apparently, you get one of the most ridiculously feel-good hours at the Fringe. Welcome to Shantify. The premise is brilliantly simple: take songs everybody knows and give them a nautical makeover. Dolly Parton's 9 to 5, The Proclaimers' I'm Gonna Be (500

Royal Highland Centre, Edinburgh | 21 August 2026 I'm going to start this review with a confession that may get me thrown out of Scotland. I'm not really a Biffy Clyro fan. There. I've said it. So heading along to Edinburgh Summer Sessions at the Royal Highland Centre to see one of Scotland's biggest rock bands playing what was effectively a huge homecoming show was going to be an interesting one. Would seeing Biffy live finally convert me? Well... not quite. But did they put

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 | Pleasance Courtyard Most Fringe shows involve squeezing three performers, a chair and some questionable homemade scenery into a tiny room. Bliss apparently didn't get that memo. With a cast of 17 West End performers, a live band, dazzling costumes and enough production value to make you wonder whether you've accidentally wandered into the West End, this new musical arrives at the Pleasance Grand with some serious ambition. The story follows fo

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 | Pleasance Courtyard There are Fringe shows where you leave thinking, “That was clever.” Then there's Colin Cloud, where you leave wondering whether you should immediately change every password you've ever had. In Hoax, the Scottish mentalist returns to Edinburgh fresh from Las Vegas with an hour exploring truth, memory, belief and just how easily our minds can be manipulated. Before the show even begins, Cloud is sitting beneath a spotlight pl

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 | Assembly George Square Gardens Putting a magician in the middle of a room, surrounding him with an audience and mirrors, and essentially giving him nowhere to hide feels slightly unfair. Unless that magician is Ben Hart. In Labyrinth, the Britain's Got Talent finalist combines sleight of hand, mentalism, storytelling and some wonderfully strange visual moments in an hour built around the choices we make and the paths they ultimately take us do

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2026 If waking up after a heavy night with a raging headache wasn't bad enough, imagine waking up in a trashed hotel room with absolutely no idea who you are, a dead body in the bath and people apparently trying to kill you. And you thought your Monday mornings were bad. Bad Day at the Office had its World Premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, opening the festival's wonderfully bonkers Midnight Madness strand — and "Midni

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 | Assembly Rooms Seven acrobats. Thirty metres of rope. Two pulleys. That's essentially all One Fell Swoop Circus need to create one of the most impressive physical performances at this year's Fringe. By a Thread takes an incredibly simple setup and spends an hour finding increasingly ridiculous things to do with it. The performers climb, swing, tumble and hang several metres above the stage, relying not on elaborate machinery but on the weight,

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 | Summerhall Let's get one thing out of the way. Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It wins my award for best show title at this year's Fringe. Thankfully, the show itself is every bit as bonkers. Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland play two teenagers in a struggling Appalachian town who crash their truck into a stop sign and decide upon the only sensible explanation: Bigfoot did it. One fake sighting leads to another, the lie spreads through the tow

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 | Pleasance Courtyard Comedy horror is a difficult thing to get right. Make it too funny and there's nothing remotely scary about it. Make it too creepy and suddenly everyone has forgotten they're supposed to be watching a comedy. Crybabies somehow manage both. Michael Clarke, James Gault and Ed Jones return to the Fringe with The Scaring, an hour-long horror comedy following former priest Arthur Holland, whose previous career in exorcism ended

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 | Underbelly Cowgate Only at the Edinburgh Fringe could you walk into a room to watch a romantic musical about a half-man, half-moth cryptid and emerge thinking: “You know what? That actually worked.” Mothman: A Romance Musical is exactly the sort of gloriously stupid, completely committed nonsense that makes the Fringe so much fun. Written by Alex Franklin and Nikola McMurtrie, who perform alongside Alex Prescot and Hudson Hughes, the story beg

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2026 | Monkey Barrel Comedy Cabaret Voltaire Sometimes at the Fringe you don't need an elaborate set, costumes, projections or someone dangling upside down from the ceiling. Sometimes you just need a very funny Scottish bloke with a microphone. Fresh from winning the Sir Billy Connolly Spirit of Glasgow Award in 2025, Rosco McClelland returned to Edinburgh with The Bones, an hour covering everything from married life and his first brushes with fame t

Conifox Adventure Park | October 2025 Pumpkin picking, fairground rides and family-friendly Halloween fun by day. Fireworks lighting up the sky as evening arrives. Then darkness, creepy clowns and people deliberately trying to scare the living daylights out of you by night. Halloween at Conifox has two VERY different personalities. I was invited along to Conifox Adventure Park near Kirkliston to experience both sides of its Halloween offering — the family-friendly Halloween F

Cocktail Village, Festival Square | 2 October 2025 There are worse ways to spend a Thursday evening than working your way around 24 cocktail bars in the middle of Edinburgh. Purely for research purposes, obviously. Edinburgh Cocktail Week was back — and once again, I was very happy to help with the research. Ahead of the festival officially opening its doors, I was invited along to the 2025 Launch Party at the Cocktail Village in Festival Square for a first look at what was w

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