By The Newsroom

Published 8th Aug 2023, 14:41 BST

Updated 8th Aug 2023, 15:00 BST

I’ve Got Some Things to Get Off My Chest ****Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14) until 28 August

Fancy shopping bags, the ones made of card with colourful ribbons for handles, are strewn across Eva Lily’s stage. But this is far from a show about glamorous spending sprees; most high-street lingerie stores don’t carry her bust size, and the ones that do can only offer beige monstrosities. Taking a skilfully light touch, I’ve Got Some Things to Get Off My Chest muses on misogyny in women’s healthcare and the villainous suggestion that a “professionally fitted bra” could magic away her health problems.

For her debut solo show, Lily leads us on a hero’s journey through NHS bureaucracies and body-shaming towards the holy grail of a breast reduction. The dream? Manageably sized tits – i.e. breasts a person could, in theory, jog with. Directed by Marieke Audsley (originally by Constance Eldon McCaig) she is a frank and compelling performer, holding the audience in thrall even through TED Talk-y explanations about centuries of faux-science. Her researched stats are shocking, but she shines brightest when riffing on the big boob paradox: how can a body part be sexualised, demonised and trivialised?

Despite claiming Fleabag as an influence, I’ve Got Some Things to Get Off My Chest is tender and sweet, driven by self-love rather than self-loathing. The most radical part of the show is Lily’s sheer resilience in pushing for the health care that she knows she deserves. It’s also important to her that the play is not an indictment of the NHS, rather the underfunding that has stripped services to a bare minimum.

The odd bit of clunky stage design (too many chairs!) is negated by enjoyably silly props and sillier crowd-work; a homespun game show-turned-metaphor is a total crowd-pleaser. Even despite the plague of perpetual backache, Lily’s debut introduces a playful, talented storyteller. Katie Hawthorne

The Climate Fables **

Greenside @ Nicolson Square (Venue 209) until 19 August

I've Got Some Things to Get Off My Chest at the Edinburgh Festival

Produced by New York-based company the Torch Ensemble and written and directed by Padraig Bond, the Climate Fables are a diptych of new, environmentally-concerned plays, showing on alternate days under the same title. We caught Debating Extinction, in which a young woman named Susan (Penelope Deen) and her hard-bitten mother Miranda (Kristen Hoffman) weather life in post-climate apocalypse New England, until the future father of Susan’s baby Teddy (Tibor Lazar) returns from a long pilgrimage to find a doctor among the last pockets of American humanity. The cast are confident and engaging, the set-up suitably eerie, but a late thematic shift from the dystopian to the supernatural makes the play less interesting. David Pollock

The Life Sporadic Of Jess Wildgoose ***Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 28 August

Voloz Collective is an emerging ensemble that makes inventive, cinema-inspired physical theatre. The company had a hit at last year’s festival with debut The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much, and returns this year with a remount of that show – it runs at Pleasance Courtyard, too – and a new one, The Life Sporadic Of Jess Wildgoose, immediately after.

You have to admire such energy and ambition, even if it does not quite come off. With The Life Sporadic, Voloz Collective has tried to craft a theatrical version of a high-stakes financial thriller. Think The Big Short or The Wolf Of Wall Street: surely not the easiest genre to pastiche on stage?

It follows its titular heroine as she moves to Manhattan from rural Kansas in the late 2000s, discovers a mysterious book of business secrets, and rises like a rocket through the ranks of a big investment bank – before everything comes crashing down with the financial crisis.

There are some brilliant bits – twirling around the stage, the four performers conjure up soaring skyscrapers, feverish trading floors and busy bars with ease – but the plot lacks shape, and the staging polish and pizzazz. It needs to be bigger and bolder and brasher to fulfil its patent promise. Fergus Morgan

Blood of the Lamb ***

Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) until 27 August

The 2022 overturning of the Roe V. Wade ruling which broadly protected abortion rights in the US has turned women’s healthcare into a game of legal roulette. Such is the contention of B Street Theatre’s two-hander Blood of the Lamb, which imagines the Kafkaesque consequences for a woman who miscarries on a flight which is subsequently diverted to Texas. With her baby dead in her womb, she is considered by state law to be in possession of a corpse and any attempt to acquire an abortion would be deemed desecration.

Her bag still languishes in the flight cabin – a symbol of the erasure of her personhood. Instead, it is her baby who is assigned legal representation - an outwardly assured family values mother of seven who is expected to apply laws which are shifting under her feet while her male colleagues debate behind the scenes or are sleeping soundly in their beds. There are many harassed phone calls. It can be difficult to make these one-sided conversations work dramatically but the two women in the room chew over the moral maze in a chillingly believable way. Fiona Shepherd

Slash ***

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 27 August

In their cult New York hit, Emily Allen and Leah Hennessey explore the world of fan fiction – the curious creative writing phenomenon where predominantly female fans concoct same-sex attraction encounters between favourite double acts. And for “explore” read indulge in, act out, revel in scenario after scenario involving fictional, historical and cultural figures (also Tiffany and Ivanka Trump), freewheeling from pairing to pairing.

Lennon and McCartney top and tail, Holmes and Watson find lust at Hogwarts, Othello and Iago circle each other erotically before morphing into Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. And the girls wanna have fun too – Wonder Woman and Catwoman need some relief after a hard day of saving the world, while Susan Sontag and Camille Paglia are hot for feminist debate.

Allen and Hennessey are riotous comic performers, unafraid to push into ever more outrageous and ridiculous territory, skewering Trotsky without an ice pick and rendering Stalin as a peachy keen cheerleader type. Their impressions run from pretty accurate lampoons to gleefully silly spoofs – you might not catch all the cultural references as they bounce from scene to scene but it’s best just to buckle up for this late-night lysergic cabaret. Fiona Shepherd

Aionos **Zoo Playground (Venue 186) until 27 August

Aionos is ambitious: a seven-piece cast perform simultaneously in both Scotland and Canada, meeting in a virtual reality rendering of the Ancient Egyptian afterlife. This collaboration between Toasterlab and the University of York (Toronto) explores exciting new theatrical forms, but a weak plot makes vague use of these innovations.

A convoluted premise involving human sacrifices, spaceships, and the god Anubis as a kind of Twitch streamer leaves Aionos feeling reverse-engineered: tech first, dramaturgy later. Even the enthusiastic cast can’t create any tension or intrigue. The only gamble is the play’s existence as a test-case, and this time it hasn’t paid off. Katie Hawthorne

Edinburgh Festival theatre reviews: I’ve Got Some Things to Get Off My Chest | The Climate Fables | The Life Sporadic Of Jess Wildgoose | Blood of the Lamb | Slash | Aionos