Best Edinburgh Festival Fringe shows on this evening

Street performer Able Mable during her act on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, as the main festival season officially gets under way in a landmark year in the cultural life of the city. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday August 4, 2017. See PA story ARTS Festival. Photo credit should read: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire

Rhinoceros

“Co-produced by the Edinburgh Festival and the Lyceum Theatre in association with DOT Theatre of Istanbul, and presented in a bitingly brilliant new version by Zinnie Harris with an unforgettable score of driving, waltzing Turkish dance-rhythms presented live by composer Oguz Kaplangi,

“Daltaban’s production makes brisk 110-minute work of Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 satirical masterpiece, in which a “civilised” city makes a rapid descent into complete social collapse as its residents begin, one by one, to turn into rampaging rhinoceroses.”

At the Royal Lyceum Theatre, 7.30pm

Nina: A Story about Nina Simone

“She follows Simone’s journey from civil rights activism to a much more militant sense of the need for violent struggle, as she ranges across the audience, picking out the few black people who would be saved, if she were to turn the gun of unthinking racial violence back on us.”

At the Traverse Theatre, 10pm

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Sophie Willan: Branded

“In other comic’s shows, a sex work past might form the entirety of the hour. And there are some grim details related but not a little humour too, which ­Willan shares with take-me-as-I-am charm, having unapologetically taken the stage with a twerk and some vigorous “tit shaking” at the front row.”

At Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33), 8pm

Suzi Ruffell: Keeping it Classy

“Elegantly balancing witty social commentary that ought to play well on television with the sort of subtly established personal journey the Fringe admires, this breezily entertaining hour from the ever-more accomplished Suzi Ruffell belies her insecurities about merely being a ‘mouthy cow’”.

At Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33). From 9.45 pm

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David Quirk: Cowboy Mouth

“His stand up style is simultaneously languid and slightly twitchy. But he is an assured storyteller, taking his audience with him.

The epic ­misunderstanding he had with a neighbour in a backyard is retold to gales of disbelieving laughter.

He muses on animals, babies and outer space – ­gently reminding the ­audience that we are all ­spinning around on a little rock quite close to the sun.”

At Heroes @ Bob’s Blundabus. From 8.45

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Phil Nicholl: Your Wrong

“He despairs gloriously at the lack of any hierarchy of facts now. Then, after taking us to his own family’s born-again Christian beliefs, we take a comedy scree run down through fundamentalism and fun with Anne Robinson, to his brother Andrew. And the car crash that left him in a coma. This is the first of a trio of stories through which Nichol examines ‘being wrong’ and his problem with, even occasionally, accepting that inevitable part of being human.

“The stories present breathcatching scenarios of life and death and pain and God. They are deeply personal stories that speak to universal conundrums. This is a show that makes you laugh and think while you are watching, and then wakes you up in the night for to laugh and think again.”