Edinburgh Fringe Comedy reviews: Mr Tumour | The Creative Martyrs | 10,000 Digits of Pi | Still Got It!

Kate Copstick goes on the hunt for the ‘true spirit of the Fringe’ and finds it in a mind-blowing show about a mathematical constant and a hard-to-track down performance involving board games and sweeties

The Creative Martyrs. Pic: TSPL

Mr Tumour PBH's Free Fringe @ Uno Mas (Venue 219) until 25 August

★★☆☆☆

The Creative Martyrs  PBH's Free Fringe @ Fingers Piano Bar (Venue 221) until 25 August ★★★☆☆

10,000 Digits of Pi 4stars PBH's Free Fringe @ Banshee Labyrinth (Venue 156) until 25 August ★★★★☆

Still Got It!

PBH's Free Fringe @ Pilgrim (Venue 100) until 25 August ★★☆☆☆

You will rarely hear the words 'sweet' and 'cancer' in the same sentence, but if you ever wanted to understand how cancer goes from a single mutated cell to a metastasised death sentence and have the whole room feeling positively sympathetic towards the cancer by the end, Mr Tumour is for you. In a strange little show, Ondrej Lidicky is part scientist and part clown, so all the medical facts here are true, but they are presented to us as a semi-allegorical, gently child-like story in four parts. Part of the pull of the show is the wonder that anyone would make it, and could make cancer such a sympathetic creature. The audience today is entirely adult, but if a child is going to learn about cancer for any reason, this would be the way to do it

The much vaunted 'Spirit of the Fringe' in comedy has been all but paved over by comedy industrialisation. Thank goodness, then, that some performers still cleave to the odd. I have been pursuing Thom Tuck around Edinburgh for about a week. When I catch him the chase is worth it. A group of us – who increase from two to around ten – eat ourselves hyperactive on Haribo, quiz our brains into a frazzle and generally giggle our way through an hour of fun in St Patrick's Square. The show will not be there tomorrow. Thom is performing at a different time in a different place each day. You don't get much more Fringe than that. We already feel good about ourselves just making the rendezvous and the hour turns into a huge social, as well as comedic, success. The threat of Scrabble looms over us at all times but we are having such a great time playing other games that the board remains closed. Every so often we get an interstitial nugget of impressive stand-up. This is a great experience. Probably the most memorable of my Fringe so far. Even the seagulls and jaikies with whom we shared the square seemed amused. Diabetics should approach the show with caution.

Talking of the spirit of the Fringe, from a place where anyone with a passion and a plan could come and enjoy the thrill of swimming in the big boys' pool, the comedy section has become much more brutal. The theatre and cabaret sections accommodate beginners and learners, but comedy is tougher. And so it is hard to judge a show like Still Got It!, in which a triumvirate of mature amateur performers perform. There is chocolate and a quiz and three very nice, if a little nervous, people. Just not many laughs.

If you truly want to have your mind blown by a Fringe show, try 10,000 Digits of Pi. Vinay Sagar welcomes us into his Mind Palace where we spend the next hour holding our collective breath, gasping in amazement and hooting with laughter while he heads towards reciting Pi to one thousand digits. He maps every six digits to an image in his mind and on a laptop screen that we can see. This is a mesmerising show. We impose punishments every time he makes a mistake, or is timed out, and they can get … a bit weird. But not as weird as the images that map his mind. Fans of Nicholas Cage and Daniel Day Lewis are in for a shock. And you will never see Halle Berry the same way again. But with their help, Vinay gets to today's target of 300 digits and the room erupts. This is the kind of show true Fringe-goers will talk about for years to come.

Down in the New Town you will find an extraordinary show. This is how you imagine cabaret might be again. Creative Martyrs are in white face, play ukulele, cello and occasional kazoo. Jakob and Gustav offer up songs so dark that, in less talented hands, they would absorb all light around them and the show would be simply depressing. But they are maestros of the bleak lyric set to a jaunty tune as we cover hate speech, genocide, child labour and wholesale pollution of our oceans. We even sing along! This is ferociously clever stuff which pulls no punches but does not leave you feeling bullied, just genuinely thoughtful. The way we are fed distorted information, how marginalised groups are encouraged to punch down, corporate deniability, and the awful possibility that we might be at peak human are all put to us via music. It is like an 'all you can think about Doom Buffet' for our think bits. Impressive stuff.

John Otway's Verbal Diary (written with Paul Bradley) has not been performed for 40 years and this year, with added songs by Otway, it was in front of an audience for one night only at the Voodoo Rooms. Again, I would say, this is the kind of quirky collector's piece that a Fringe is here to accommodate. It is not the greatest play you will see, but it is a very sweet story, simply told, and it does draw you in. Gordon has resolved to keep a daily diary and have his new flatmates read it – aloud. It has a small, enthusiastic cast, a tremendously clever set and hugely benefits from the talents of guitarist Martin Cutmore. You can see how the central character's 'loser' persona would fit Otway like an old glove and the only real quarrel I have with this production is the frenetic performance given by Tom Johnson in that part and, to a lesser extent, by Alex J Carter as his boss/flatmate. But it is a lot of fun, in a lot of ways. And a must for Otway fans.

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