Theatre, Cabaret & Spoken Word

Three signature projects are set to share in a £10 million boost for Edinburgh’s cultural infrastructure.

You’ll recognise the type. He’s the guy who looks as if he’s got all the answers. Charismatic in his laidback way, he fancies himself as a bit of a guru – although he’s too full of false modesty to say so. He’s here to lead a theatre workshop and he likes to give the impression it’s all about you, the participants, and not about him. But, of course, it’s all about him.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Women are firmly centre-stage in these three short plays about female experience by Loquitur, a theatre company specialising in new writing.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: White men rapping are a fairly unremarkable species ever since Eminem arrived two decades ago, but Canadian artist Dirk “Baba” Brinkman Jr takes the “unlikely musician” factor up a notch.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: The classic tale of teenage sexuality is given a Fifty Shades-style revamp by young company, Mixtape, who struggle to find a clear enough angle to justify transporting it into the 21st century.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: For the past six years Charlotte Blackburn has been writing to Edgar, a man on death row in the US.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Following the huge success of his latest show Letters To Morrissey, there must have been more than a few Gary McNair fans queueing on Monday for the only two performances of his other 2017 show, Locker Room Talk; but if so, they would have found themselves facing an experience very different from McNair’s recent genial poetic monologues.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Spanning 30 years, this pocket epic tracks the intertwined stories of two female best friends growing up in the north of England, the chaotically confident Grace and the more balanced, cautious Lorna.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Work about the relentless, pervasive ubiquity of attention-grabbing celebrities have been almost as popular as the procession of low-rent icons who have emerged from Big Brother onwards.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Iris and Rosa have lived all their lives in the commune of Ela. Rural and entirely insular, it’s an idyllic place to be a child, but as the girls grow into adolescents, they become aware of another side to the story: long hours of manual labour; rules, curfews and inspections.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: The story of Princess Ivona is a very strange tale indeed, based on the mock-Shakespearean 1938 drama of the same name by the great Polish absurdist Wiltold Gombrowicz; and it forms the basis for what is, in its quiet way, one of the most unexpected shows on this year’s fringe.

THEATRE

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Rebecca Atkinson-Lord is in action before the audience have even taken their places.