Pierre-Anthon realizes one day that nothing matters and therefore nothing is worth doing. To prove him wrong, his classmates begin piling things of meaning. And the more painful the sacrifice is, the more meaning it has... right?
An ensemble performance that travels back through seventy years of Sri Lankan history; through the recollections of those born in the 1930s, who lived through independence, insurrection, modernization and war.
Set as a fictional documentary in 2045, the character of Youness Atbane observes the dynamics of contemporary art in Morocco. In view of this, Atbane creates an archive about Moroccan art production from 2000 to now.
Jihan is an ordinary child who woke up one day to discover she lost her smile. The sun set, the moon disappeared, everything lost its colour, cold spread throughout the town. Jihan needs to find her smile again.
Daily life in the Syrian war. The disappointed illusion that change is around the corner. It's about those who remain silent, who don’t take a stance but are then eaten up by inner conflicts.
Taha Muhammad Ali is the beautiful picture of the Palestinian people – of all of us. In his verses, Taha documents survival after 50 years of loss – of his home, his lover, his friends and his shop.
In 1896, Rosa Vaile's husband lost his job on the docks and then they lost everything else. Now their great-great-great-granddaughter would like to talk to you about class, work, mental illness, and how far we’ve come since.
The alternative future for Guantanamo Bay: deckchairs, cocktails, and your feet in the sand. Performed in a secret enclave in the Summerhall basement, Last Resort takes you through the tropical haze on a unique multi-sensory package holiday.
What if your food started talking back? Meet Lionel the lion. He’s just eaten a human called Mamoru for lunch. Eaten invites children and grown-ups to the fascinating world of the food web. Eaten asks, what should we eat? And who should eat us?!
Funny. Tender. Moving. Looking down the barrel of her final fertile years, an Irish woman goes on a comical quest to uncover the hows and whys of reproducing her genes.
Thirty participants are invited into an intriguing theatrical game exploring security, profiling, freedom of expression and privacy in the age of cybersurveillance. Mobile throughout the performance, the participants collaborate, debate and spy on each other. Farsi, Arabic, English.
Internationally renowned theatre director Anthony Nicholl has travelled the globe on a life-long quest to discover the true essence of theatre. Today he is giving a masterclass, working with a hand-picked actor to demonstrate his unique methods.
Following the success of EUROHOUSE, Bert & Nasi return with Palmyra, an exploration of revenge, the politics of destruction and what we consider to be barbarian. Palmyra steps back from the news to look at what lies beneath—and beyond—civilization.
Funny, poignant, powerful political theatre from award-winning playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak, using comedy to bravely tackle problems facing the Arab and Muslim communities across the world.
This is a show composed entirely of crowd-sourced lists, from all kinds of people in all kinds of places – including from you the audience as you queue up to take your seats. In Lists…, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the profound and the ridiculous sit playfully side by side.
A Young Vic Taking Part Production. It’s small versus big. It’s pressures of the future. It’s everything being stacked against you and all options feeling equally terrible. One step away from disaster, there’s only one instruction: start swimming.
Magic and reality collide as one British Arab navigates the voyages of Sindbad and tries to make sense of his own family's relationship to their migration from Iraq to the UK.
Join performance alchemists Binge Culture on an immersive audio experience to discover the city's hidden gems and meet authentic locals. 'One of the country’s most exciting, direct and original theatre companies' (NZ Herald).
Humour and pathos collide in a mix of drama, music and physical theatre as five strangers on a plane find their flight rekindles fragments of forgotten memories.
A storytelling show about words and love and the word love. Set in the same universe as Team Viking.
Frank’s having trouble looking after himself. He’s not getting out much, not since his wife passed away, so he’s gone into a retirement home. Deeply intimate portrait of love, loss and the joys of amateur gardening.
An actress on stage with her iPhone’s personal assistant, Siri, as her only partner. In a precise game of question and answer, their exchanges expose the bizarre metaphysical dimension of the machine and blur the limitations between them.
Join Amy on a videogame adventure like no other in a quest for sparks of joy in the darkness. A powerful, moving and humorous show for anyone that has ever battled their own demons.
A dark new myth about England, the bad things that happen to us, and the stories we make up in response. Highly physical storytelling and animation from the writer of sell-out hit 64 Squares.
A reclusive children's writer becomes wildly successful. Her books are treasured across the country. But when a troubling narrative starts to unfold, we find ourselves asking: what matters more, the storyteller or the story?
‘All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun’ (Jean-Luc Godard). Witty, fun and unflinchingly provocative look at women and violence in the media, starring Orwin and an unprepared male performer.
Few could have anticipated the events of 2016 and where they'd lead. Mark and his audience gamble on their predictions for a hilarious, fantastical and sometimes accurate vision of the world.
What happens to romance when there's a machine who cooks and cleans for you, never forgets your birthday or how you like your tea, tells you you're beautiful, holds you when you're crying, and still makes you come?
Part performance lecture, part karaoke party, deconstructing gendered linguistic histories and ripping apart contemporary language to find a new articulation of pleasure, anger and femaleness. From Julia Croft (If There’s Not Dancing at the Revolution, I’m Not Coming).
Thus Spoke… is an electrifying piece of existential pop from two of Montreal’s most celebrated artists. Playfully challenging the status quo, writer, Étienne Lepage and choreographer, Frédérick Gravel defy convention in this irresistible antidote to apathy.
One woman attempts to articulate her experience of pain. Physical pain with no apparent cause. Also, she’s met someone and they want to make this work. A new show from this Fringe First Award-winning team.
They meet in Istanbul: she a Syrian refugee, he a privileged westerner. Identity and power, choice and its absence, beauty and brutality collide in this poetic response to the Syrian tragedy by Matthew Zajac.
A sparkling comedy about first dates, followed by supersonic speed-dating to find that soulmate/casual partner/festival pal or bunch of unforeseen encounters (delete where applicable). All genders and ages (18+) welcome!
Live report with the Egyptian protest singer Ramy Essam. He was an iconic figure of the revolution during the Arab Spring and now tells the story of his life and his fight for a better world.
This is a show about work. Some people work to make money. Some people work to feel fulfilled. Some people don't work at all. Workshy is a powerful and honest portrayal of the relationship between class, labour and aspiration.
A show with lipstick on its teeth and Wotsits on its face. A rousing ode to friendship, kindness and belonging, set against the backdrop of a massive night out. Coming soon to BBC television!
Oh look, 2016 Fringe First winners Sh!t Theatre again. What is it this time? Is it unemployment? Is there a crisis? Did the government do something wrong again? No, it’s a show about Dolly Parton. We f*cking love her.
Roddy Bottum (Faith No More, Imperial Teen) presents the world premiere of a tragic and dark love story based on the folklore of Sasquatch, the elusive man-beast who silently stalks the forest.
Stagger me sideways! It's King Ubu's party and you're all invited. Using video mapping, puppetry, object manipulation, live sound collage… etc, etc. Ludens Ensemble transform Alfred Jarry's anarchic comedy into an absurd carnival for our times.
Two performers express the inner conflict within a modern woman’s head: push and pull, past and present, progress and regression. Interweaving acappella harmony, text and physicality, Mouthpiece is a harrowing, humorous and heart-wrenching journey into the female psyche.
What drives young people to join violent organizations? A show exploring the effects that constant propaganda has on young lives, focusing on war propaganda in particular. We follow eight youths through 10 difficult years, seeing how they change.
Old boyfriend photos, texts, poetry: struggling with her love life, Julie Cafmeyer experiences orgasms, despair, rejection and heaven. It's a coming of age story showing what theatre can be, and you're invited.
Artist and gardener Sarah Louise Marshall is creating an urban oasis in the front garden of Summerhall. A mini Eden, a slice of paradise, not lost but made entirely out of found materials. Curiosities and plants saved in order to see the real gold that can be found in what would otherwise be thrown away. The garden will host a variety of activities and games through community engagement.
An ensemble work, striving to recreate the original story of Medea. With intimacy and immediacy, visually translating the tale through physical illustrations and a playful, profound relationship between two performers who remain present throughout.
The average person says 123,205,750 words in a lifetime. But what if there were a limit? Oliver and Bernadette are about to find out. A play about what we say and how we say it.
Cockamamy comes to Edinburgh after a sell-out run at last year's London Camden Fringe. A heartbreaking, hilarious story about the companionship between Alice and her granddaughter Rosie. This compelling new play explores the reality of living with dementia.
Lorna and Grace are best friends forever. But when Lorna gets into university and Grace gets pregnant, they find themselves in starkly different worlds. A tale of friendship, love and rivalry spanning 30 years from Elinor Cook.
In 2013, Suzanne won a Belgian theatre prize, spending the entire prize money on buying an actual ice skating rink. Why she did that will be revealed in her funny, absurd, moving show.
Award-winning Nilaja Sun (No Child...) breathes life into a vibrant mix of Lower East Side neighbours as they prepare for a hurricane racing towards NYC.
Can art save the world? Belgian theatre-maker Enkidu Khaled's award-winning show analyses and simplifies the complex process of making theatre. Using the experience of war, he empowers the audience, utilising their imagination and artistic expression.
Gentle, poetic, cruel or comical; Mireille & Mathieu unpack their paraphernalia at a flea-market. Objects turn out to be bursting with stories where in this happy delirium of exploration and absurd experiments, nothing’s taken seriously.
Moving, truthful and darkly comic, Box Clever by nabokov’s associate-playwright Monsay Whitney, with music performed by Avi Simmons, is a new play about one woman’s experience of a refuge and a mother’s commitment to do the best for her daughter.
Being a small-time drug dealer is tough. Especially when your old man owes £6,000 to a loan shark who’s got a tattoo of Beyoncé on his neck. Comedy from acclaimed writer Alan Harris (Paines Plough, National Theatre Wales).
Get under the skin of the well-to-do, the 1%, super rich, the ones who pull the strings, the faces we never get to see. For one night, you can take their chairs. You call the shots.
BlackCatfishMusketeer isn’t about how the internet looks, it’s about how it feels. It’s about trust, doubt, closeness at a distance, worrying about your nudes being leaked and fearing that you'll die alone and your cats will eat you.
A funny, frank, and occasionally explicit insight into heterosexual female desire, read out loud by a male comedian. MANWATCHING is a show about what one woman thinks about when she thinks about sex with men.
Following Doubting Thomas, Jeremy Weller (winner of six Fringe First awards) and Grassmarket Projects return with part two of the real-life trilogy with Thomas McCrudden: a former gangland enforcer struggling to change.
Leah and Chris were raised on Harry Potter, New Labour and a belief they would be special. Gig theatre about when dreams don’t become reality, from the team behind the award-winning Weekend Rockstars.
A cabaret with the best performance the Arab World and Scotland have to offer! Expect words, music, comedy and otherness from new and established artists, including David Greig, Julia Taudevin and Karl Sharro.
Tighten your laces, and don't let your knees hit the ground. There's live music and wall-to-wall dancing in this sweat-soaked marathon with Northern Soul. No Miracles Here is an anthem to feeling alive and keeping the faith.
A show about tech savvy extremists, our collapsing world, digital fantasy and nightmare, and a generation of resentful, directionless, violent young men.
Rebecca and Paul are running away. Away from memories and mistakes. They’re trying to save their relationship. They need time and space. An isolated house in the country is the perfect place to work things out. But you can’t run forever. Especially when you’re being followed.
A journey to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. In February 2016, two artists got on a cargo ship to retrace one of the routes of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle – from the UK to Ghana to Jamaica and back.
A twelve-year-old girl sneaks across the border into her own country. Her parents watch her on a computer screen. The works of a half-forgotten performance artist seem to hold the key to bringing down a brutal system operating on our behalf and under our noses.
A witty and touching new play about class, friendship and absence, set in the forgotten town of Skelmersdale by award-winning writer and comedian Jackie Hagan.
Presented by Trans Creative and Contact. When there’s no rule book, you have to write your own… Through song, dance, humour and hard-won wisdom, Kate shares the ins, outs, ups and downs of transitioning, asking: have you changed?
A darkly humourous musical tale about refugees and how to love when you're broken, starring Klezmer folk sensation Ben Caplan. This is a true story from luminary Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch.
Morale is High will predict what could happen between now and the next general election in 2020, exploring the effects of popular culture, political policy and inane day-to-day actions on who we choose to vote for.
Is the world out of joint? Who is torturing whom? How does it feel to be poor? Why is the water calling out? Where are you now, Woyzeck? Brand new from award-winning Finnish playwright/director Jari Juutinen.
An interdisciplinary work from Turtle Island that takes shape around peoples and the land. Indigenous artists of Canada invite reputed artists of othered communities to collaborate in artful protest and celebrate the right to do so.
There’s no easy way to do this... An entire relationship lovingly created and destroyed over five hours. Come and go as you please and revel in the desperation, negotiation, devastation and emotional blackmail.
2 performers, a mini trampoline and a 1000 piece puzzle. The award-winning Antler return to the fringe with a playful, intimate dissection of a relationship teetering on the edge of collapse.
Fast moving, raw and eye-opening, Mia explores the truths and myths about learning disabilities and parenthood in today’s society. Think pop culture with popcorn, science with silliness, stories with statistics and challenges often taken for granted.
Séance (Glen Neath and David Rosenberg) is an intense sonic performance for twenty people at a time inside a completely dark shipping container. It lasts for fifteen terrifying minutes
The last Durham Light Infantryman, a veteran of Ypres and Somme. What does it mean to survive, to be a hero, when all he wanted was to work with horses? ‘A truly superb play’ (WalesArtsReview.com).
Come play with The Mayers Ensemble. Theatre and dance blend to explore boundaries, personal histories, gender, skin colour and how slavery helped found modern gynecological practice.
The brutally authentic story of four police officers struggling to remain in control as the community they serve disintegrates. Written by a former police officer, this immersive production shows the modern day police service laid bare.
FK Alexander returns with her 2016 multi award-winning sell-out show. Channeling Judy Garland’s final performance in an intimate one-to-one, with repeated live singing and relentless noise music.
Made in Adelaide brings the southern hemisphere’s biggest festival city to Edinburgh with a selection of South Australian theatre, music, cabaret, comedy, visual arts, literature, film and fun.
Adelaide Fringe says "Happy 70th Birthday to Edinburgh Fringe"
Ex-soldier Zach has withdrawn into a cardboard box. When his friend Ieuan offers recovery in a capsule of MDMA, there follows a mind-warping exchange that will tickle, move and appal you in equal measure.
Award-winning theatre maker Rachel Mars and four belting female singers bring you a gleeful, hilarious, murky show about the hidden workings of envy, with a raucous chorus of music by Louise Mothersole.
A 60-minute theatre performance: Hanan Al-Haj, a woman in her 50s and a Lebanese citizen, follows her daily routine of jogging to keep herself safe from obesity, bone diseases and anxiety.
After Edward Snowden’s revelations, from what might be a news desk, a bunker under a mountain or a theatre, two people speak up, speak out and blow the whistle on the insidious machine of surveillance.
Three strangers meet on a train, not knowing that in one hour, the train will crash and they will die. Their attempts to connect lead to misunderstandings as they race towards their final destination.
Unique and radical reworking of Witold Gombrowicz's (the Shakespeare of Poland) classic play. Fusing language, physicality and comedy, one of Belgium's most exciting young companies creates a thrilling contemporary retelling of a lost masterpiece.
This is a show about belonging. About tribes and families. About the place you belong because you were born there and the places you change yourself to try and belong in. It’s about class mobility. And regional identity. And being a Thatcher’s child. It’s about education and 'making good' for yourself.
A contemporary triple-bill of adapted Greek mythology and new writing, written and devised by the company, exploring theatre performance through the physical, musical and poetic.
Herself as "other". An exploration of blackness, gender, sexuality, religion and Jamaican nationalism, seen through the lens of individuals from different backgrounds confronted with the gaze of their own realities. A one-woman show.
The Vagina Dialogues is a series of episodic monologues, duologues and movement pieces set to live music. The work is innately feminist, humorous, grotesque and, let’s face it, a little nude in approach.
Trumpet, electronics, text. One man’s love letters from the front line. Dennis Marshall wrote to his fiancée towards the close of WW2. Dennis's grandson, trumpeter Tom Poulson, explores his letters in an extraordinary, immersive musical performance. madeinscotlandshowcase.com
50% Jamaican, 50% British, 100% reppin’ Shepherd’s Bush. Nathan Bryon is many things. Part story, part stand-up, a fusion of Afro-Caribbean flair and British awkwardness in a searing, searching, very funny exploration of what being mixed race means.
The Edinburgh Comedy Award winning show that “defined comedy in 2016” (Guardian) and earned a Total Theatre Award nomination for Innovation returns. Come and see the “hot ticket” (Evening Standard) of last year’s festival before it finishes its international tour here at the Edinburgh Fringe.
A village, Millers Hollow, is haunted by werewolves. Night falls and the innocent villagers are murdered in their sleep. By day, the villagers try to pick off the werewolves. Who will survive? A game of accusation, bluffing and assassination.
Following a critically acclaimed run at the beginning of this year’s Festival, Bert & Nasi play 3 extra performances of PALMYRA in the Upper Church @ Summerhall.
For those who don’t feel like they’re in the right life, online is a place to be yourself. Out in the real world though, things can be very different. A story of first love through the eyes of a gender-curious teen, Scorch examines how the human story often gets lost amidst the headlines.
The worldwide smash-hit is back. A play about depression and the lengths we go to for loved ones. 'Heart-wrenching, hilarious... possibly one of the funniest plays you will ever see' Guardian. 'Captivating' New York Times.
We want to talk about masculinity and patriarchy, but the words that exist aren’t good enough. So there’s music and dance too. RashDash return with their Fringe First winning show about gender and language.
Slap Talk is an epic tour de force, a verbal sparring match that is both funny and entertaining but also dark, complex and deeply unsettling.
Kieran Hurley's 2016 Fringe First award-winning, total sell-out show returns for a limited run. A city. Just like this. Right now. A teenage girl boils up in rage in a toilet cubicle. A finance worker preaches doom in a busy train station. An absurd coke-addled celebrity races through town on a mission.
We all have a nationality. For some, it's like eye-colour. For others it's a straitjacket. For some, it fits the borders of a state. Others want to draw new borders so they fit (...)
Following last year's Fringe success and UK tour, Bertrand & Nasi's darkly comic look at the EU’s founding ideals returns for 4 performances. Total Theatre Award nominees in 2016,“constantly pits idealism against self-interest and pragmatism.” (****) The Guardian
'They said I'd be good at it.' The story of a young female soldier's journey through post-traumatic stress by award-winning playwright Lesley Wilson, developed in collaboration with the British Army. Originally developed with support from Tron Theatre Creative.
Daniel Kitson does a very clunky, warm up run through of a pre existing stand up show but with some new bits and bobs swapped in for other bits and bobs.
It'll be about 2 hours long and obviously, its late. so. Bear that in mind.