By Anahit Behrooz, Deborah Chu, Rory Ford

Published 10th Aug 2023, 12:47 BST

Updated 10th Aug 2023, 13:03 BST

Nan, Me and Barbara Pravi ****

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 27 August

Hannah Maxwell has been, in her own words, project-managing the f*ck out of palliative care. It’s May 2021, and she’s spent the past several months taking care of her grandmother in Luton following her grandfather’s death. She’s bored, she’s aimless, and her friends keep calling with career-making news from the bright lights of London that she’s left behind.

But when Eurovision comes round, and French singer Barbara Pravi appears on stage, Maxwell’s life changes forever. “Écoutez moi,” the beautiful Pravi breathes. “I,” Maxwell turns to her audience, deeply serious, “écoute.”

Here, against Eurovision’s backdrop of kitsch sincerity, Maxwell stages an often sweet, sometimes tragic, and always side-splittingly funny mediation on points of crisis across both life and death.

Comparisons to Fleabag are perhaps inevitable, both because of the sharpness of Maxwell’s writing and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s now infamous attendance of the show, but Nan, Me and Barbara Pravi is a slightly different animal – more chaotic, more precise, and unafraid of its own absurdity.

Maxwell’s out-of-control horniness for the blissfully insensible Pravi unfolds in moments of hilariously choreographed fantasy, but beneath the frenzy of her misplaced desire – thirsty Instagram comments projected on screens, a romantic dance with a mop stand-in – sits a longing for something, anything, that might give her life recognisable shape.

Parasocial relationships, it turns out, aren’t the only hyperfixation to which Maxwell might fall prey, and the often invisibilised indignities and monotonies of care work and illness are fertile ground for anyone to lose themselves.

It's all so delightful and clever, deploying and subverting various generic conventions – French chansons, heist films, audience participation – to consider how confessional theatre can not only develop but transcend the rigidity of the monologue form.

Maxwell tells us this is a work-in-progress; it’s hard to believe but is also somehow apt – a testament to introspection in both medium and message.

Anahit Behrooz

The Mystery of Dracula ***

PBH's Free Fringe @ Voodoo Rooms (Venue 68) until 27 August

English magician David Alnwick’s show is not - thankfully - the umpteenth retelling of Dracula but an exploration of both its roots and influences. Like Stoker’s novel though, it purports to be true and while much of it certainly is - you’re invited to Google some of the more outlandish details of Transylvanian superstitions - it’s also laced with fiction. I mean, it has to be, right?

It’s also a clever showcase for Alnwick’s magic. Dracula’s success proved a strong influence on Victorian spiritualism and occultism as the novel’s ultimate hero, Van Helsing, is an occultist himself.

Alnwick impressively conducts experiments in mind reading, psychic phenomena and even escapology while also weaving an increasingly complex spider’s web of historical research and an unlikely family connection. One trick does prove less than successful but even then, you may well suspect the subtle hand of misdirection.

Magic can get dull if it always go according to plan and this introduces a pleasing frisson of uncertainty. Alnwick cultivates a refreshingly unassuming stage persona for a magician. At times he’s reminiscent of Christian Bale’s character in The Prestige, a naturally gifted illusionist rather than a brash showman but perfectly suited to the faded Gothic ambience of his venue.

Rory Ford

Mystery House ***

Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14) until 28 August

Here's an interesting autobiographical show that looks to solve a few mysteries of its own. Like many, solo performer Wendy Weiner has an enduring fascination for the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California.

Even if you don't believe in ghosts - it's reputed to be one of the "most haunted places in the world" although there's absolutely no evidence for this - it's a unique architectural anomaly.

Built and continually added to over a period of over 20 years beginning in 1884, the gothic Victorian manse was the personal residence and passion project of Sarah Winchester, widow of the firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester, (in)famously the manufacturer of "The Gun That Won the West" - the Winchester Rifle.

The legend is that Winchester kept adding to the rambling house as accommodation for all the souls lost to her husband's firearms but there's no real evidence for this. Okay - so far, so dry - but Weiner's factual presentation dovetails with her own life as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Although not the most naturally gifted performer, she's an engaging, witty presence who brings a keen insight into why people may need to believe in ghosts and seek out the solace of mysteries as their own life becomes tinged with tragedy.

Rory Ford

One Week in Magaluf ***

theSpace @ Surgeons Hall (Venue 53) until 19 August

Just what you didn’t know you needed: an all-girl blast of mid-noughties nostalgia jukebox musical - no, wait, come back…! Even if you really thought that you never wanted to hear Ricky Martin’s She Bangs

ever again it’s well-utilised here - and it’s thematically relevant.

Amy Nic’s musical comedy really is the archetypal good time had by all. Four young friends head off to Magaluf in 2007 for a week of drinking dancing sex and some copious vomiting. Nic’s script is pacy and she impressively plays all the supporting (mostly male) parts herself but the tight ensemble playing of the four friends give this a joyous energy that’s infectious.

The inventive choreography is better than anyone might reasonably expect - particularly in such a small space - their singing voices are strong and the harmonising is top-notch. This is unusual for a nostalgia-fest as many of the songs here were originally hits when the cast were kids but it allows them to perform with uncomplicated verve.

There’s a perhaps inevitable gear-change into somewhat more serious territory towards the end - all that vomiting was bound to take its toll - but good times never last forever and this is a better time than most.

Rory Ford

Salty Irina ***

ROUNDABOUT @ Summerhall (Venue 26) until 27 August

The two leads of Eve Leigh’s Salty Irina are obsessed with each other. It’s obvious from the minute the lights go up; they can’t stop narrating each other’s behaviours and quirks (“it’s like you’re waterproof,” gushes one, impossibly starry-eyed) or the story of how they met.

Falling in love at first sight against the backdrop of a series of racially motivated murders, the softness of Anna and Eirini’s queer, anarchic love affair is bound up from the start with the fear of fascist violence in their remote Baltic town, and a desire to – as they say with almost childlike simplicity – “make it stop.”

And so the pair, with the hubris of the madly enamoured, decide to infiltrate a Nazi festival and discover the perpetrators.

Salty Irina is the rare anti-fascist tale which is more attentive to the bounds and possibilities of leftist struggle than it is in denouncing far-right ideology within an echo chamber. It’s a welcome and fresh tack, let down slightly by a somewhat awkward execution that insists on telling rather than showing the often ludicrously dramatic events that unfold.

The result is a tonally strange but earnestly meant play, that delivers a compelling fable on love and resistance, and the inherently romantic potential of community.

Anahit Behrooz

Why Am I Like This? ***

theSpace @ Surgeons Hall (Venue 53) until 19 August

When Nicole Nadler finally realised she had ADHD, it was a revelation. Upon reading a blog about a woman’s experience of being diagnosed with the disorder as an adult, Nadler felt as though she was looking into a mirror. Ever since she was a child, she had been told that she was “too much”; that she was “lazy” and an “airhead”. She knew she wasn’t, yet some things had always felt beyond her control, like time keeping, or finishing tasks. Suddenly, her whole life made sense.

In her funny, forthright one-woman show, Nadler bangs the drum on sex differences in ADHD symptoms, using her own experiences as proof of how damaging a late diagnosis can be. Meltdowns in train stations and endless pairs of misplaced spectacles are recounted with the rosy-eyed humour of retrospection, though years’ worth of pain clearly linger.

Now, however, she relishes in having proved her naysayers wrong; and while she absolutely deserves to savour in her victories, there is the sense that she could go further, and harder, on the reasons why others might find it difficult to get an ADHD diagnosis.

Gender is but one aspect of bias that hinders people from getting the care they need. Greater consideration for other systems of discrimination, such as cost, access and ethnicity, would have made for a more well-rounded monologue in an otherwise promising debut.

Deborah Chu

Edinburgh Festival Fringe theatre reviews: Nan, Me and Barbara Pravi | The Mystery of Dracula | Mystery House | One Week in Magaluf | Salty Irina | Why Am I Like This?