Edinburgh fringe theatre 2024 week one roundup: comfort food, wassailing and reasons to carry on

My biggest mistake of the Edinburgh fringe wasn’t mixing up its many venues, or underestimating the time to hotfoot between them. It was arriving at My English Persian Kitchen (Traverse, ★★★★) on an empty stomach. I regretted it as soon as I saw Isabella Nefar chopping and perfuming the air with onion, garlic and heady herbs.

Food transports you. Not always to places you want to go. As a woman prepares her beloved Iranian dish ash reshteh , she is ambushed by memories of the home she left to flee an abusive relationship. Recipe instructions such as “focus” and “timing is everything” become an escape plan, as she races to get out of the country before her partner cancels her passport.

Hannah Khalil’s script skims over the detail of this real woman’s story, and some of Nefar’s reactions are slightly overcooked, including a hallucinatory sequence involving one of the kitchen knives. But her performance is gripping and dynamic. She rises on a stool like the steam out of the pan in front of her. And her scampering around the audience to offer whiffs of spices suggests a history of being on the run. “May your soul be replenished,” she wishes us, before serving up the soup.

There’s a different kind of prep on display in Rob Madge’s musical My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?) (Underbelly, ★★★). Much of the work was done decades ago; the show is structured on home video footage of performances Madge made as a child: a parade of Disney characters, gradually recreated here. It’s a strength and weakness. There’s a heartbreaking poignancy watching Madge find a way as a child to express the sexuality they struggle to understand, and their family’s dawning realisation of how to help. But Madge’s songs on stage in between rely on Disney-esque bromides: “Anything is possible if you just believe.”

Hints about Madge’s dependence on performance abound. They’re in the living room set, where stage bulbs are wrapped around a floor lamp; in their marching about the stage with commands such as “Drumroll, please” that echo their younger self; and in their stance: feet together, face forward, back straight, looking out – just as they stood in front of their family – with hope that they’ve brought us joy and that we’ll love and accept them for doing it.

Musicals skewer Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski trial, Come Dine with Me and Silence of the Lambs

As fringe production, travel and accommodation costs increase, so seemingly does the percentage of solo storytellers. The latest from YESYESNONO ’s Sam Ward arrives on a wave of anticipation after past hits including We Were Promised Honey! and Five Encounters on a Site Called Craigslist – shows that enlisted the audience as co-creators. Throughout most of Nation (Roundabout @ Summerhall, ★★★), Ward stands on the edge of the in-the-round stage, holding his hand over it like a sorcerer. The spell he casts is fitfully mesmerising, asking us to imagine ourselves as a community that’s discovered a dead body on their street. Suspicions intensify around a local woman hosting a mysterious stranger.

Haze lighting, distorted, eerie music and Ward’s aloofness make this show highly atmospheric. But too much is spelled out. Despite praising the power of our imagination, Ward’s narration floods us with leading details. The show attempts a late tricksy move, only to set up a blunt speech about how we’re socially straitjacketed and can’t speak freely about what’s going on in our country. Suggestions that communities are disenfranchised – “it’s nice to have a role” – feel vague. By the end, that title remains as ambiguous as at the start.

Nation is one of the festival’s few shows to lean seriously into darkness around present-day anxieties. Like most, Cyrano (Traverse, ★★★) seeks to dispel them with joy. It’s not just the nose that’s lopped in Virginia Gay’s uplifting, gender-flipped reinvention of Edmond Rostand’s classic play, but much of the sorrow. The story of an anguished wordsmith and unrequited love becomes bright and comic. But at a cost. Christian, Cyrano’s competition for the love interest, is made a foolish dullard rather than bashfully inarticulate. And Gay’s Cyrano is too conceited, evenas it showcases the rapier wit and verbal dexterity of women.

The complications of love, lust and identity also crackle in one of the festival’s early word-of-mouth hits: Julia Grogan’s stunningly accomplished new play, Playfight (Roundabout @ Summerhall, ★★★★★). Sophie Cox, Nina Cassells and Lucy Mangan are a terrific and totally convincing trio of schoolgirls on the brink of GCSE results and sexual awakenings.

Keira is keen to lose her virginity, Zainab timidly comes out as gay, and Lucy tries to balance religious values with burgeoning desire. Grogan’s script brilliantly captures head-scrambling adolescence –frank wit tussling with wistful poetry – before a final, wrenching shift. As their bodies and friendships change, an oak tree stands fixed at the centre. It’s friendships like these, Grogan seems to be saying, that help us climb up into adulthood. A knockout for the Roundabout – one of the festival’s buzziest venues.

Fringe cult legends Sh!t Theatre – Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole – open their new show, Sh!t Theatre: Or What’s Left of Us (Summerhall, ★★★★), by revealing that they’ve lost their way. Instead of their usual white face paint, smudgy, dark tear-tracks run down their cheeks. Real-life grief has knocked the duo down in the years since their last show – can they come back from it?

They discovered a folk club during that time, which inspires the format of the show – storytelling peppered with wassailing songs. Dialogue drifts through metaphors for renewal, such as the Japanese art of kintsugi , in which broken bowls are reassembled with golden glue. The pair swig from tankards while talking about the figurative deaths and rebirths in beer brewing. Any potential for twee hokeyness is foiled by their hilariously deadpan tones.

The folk music itself is dreamy and plangent, a mournful groan running through as if they’re exorcising pain. Somehow all these different pieces coalesce into an entrancing whole, just like one of those Japanese bowls.

More irreverent still are the festival’s numerous parodic musicals this year, including shows that skewer Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski trial , Come Dine with Me and, in S ilence! The Musical (Underbelly, ★★★) the Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster horror classic. A chorus of (what else?) lambs welcomes us to this show. The format nods to the camp of the film and its improbable story of the FBI agent Clarice Starling seeking the cannibal convict Hannibal Lecter’s help to apprehend a skin-wearing serial killer.

It’s appropriately operatic, with pirouetting dancers mimicking helicopter propellers, and patchwork-quilt screens resembling sheets of stitched skin. Mark Oxtoby has the crazed, bulging eyes and viperish lip-flutter of Hopkins as Lecter, his voice slowing at the end of lines as though prowling. Phoebe Panaretos exaggerates Foster’s lisp and meekness. But instead of satirising Starling’s psychology or the patriarchal FBI, Christopher Gattelli’s production is a frothy, cranked-up retread of the film’s beats. More sheep than shepherd.

One thing that should be on every fringe-goer’s list is Every Brilliant Thing (Roundabout @ Summerhall, ★★★★★). For its 10th anniversary, the play returns with its original star, Jonny Donahoe, directed by its co-writer (with Donahoe), Duncan Macmillan. Part of its wonder is that the simplest concept balloons into an extraordinarily rich hour of theatre. A boy tries to rally his mother, after her suicide attempt, by building a list of things that make life worth living. Members of the audience are primed to fire out entries on cue – from bubble wrap to making up after an argument, and everything in between. A coping mechanism for her becomes support for him, continuing the list as he reckons with his own depression.

Fairy lights decorate the Roundabout tent like a child’s den. Donahoe switches deftly between parent and child, seeming to shrink into an infant when he sits on a step. There is both buoyancy and deflation in his performance, capturing the rhythm of a childhood in which innocence is capsized by blindsiding tragedy. He carefully measures softness and delicacy, cushioning harsh truths like any parent. The boy’s list needs an addition: this brilliant, beautiful play.

More to see

D iva: Live from Hell!, Underbelly
Neither audience nor band are safe from the sassy roasts of Luke Bayer’s scathing schoolboy in his rollicking solo musical. He plays a president of the high-school drama club recalling what sent him to the underworld. Bayer’s jazzy, swinging songs are nice, but his character’s nasty streak is best.

Burnout Paradise, Summerhall
Four treadmills, four performers, four sets of challenges. The race is on for Pony Cam to complete a wild array of tasks with the audience’s help, while trying to surpass the kilometres they ran at their last performance, in this riotously entertaining knockabout show. If they fail, the audience receives a refund.

Lynn Faces, Summerhall
Laura Horton’s terrific gig-play is a scrappy antidote to the fringe’s earnest shows about serious subjects. She converts rage into a darkly comic and tender piece about surviving domestic abuse that makes us wince one moment, then marvel at women’s resilience the next.

A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson Or God: Whoever Reads This First, theSpace @ Niddry Street
With nothing but a tyre and amazing dexterity, absurdist physical theatre duo Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland become boy scouts in 1960s America. They wryly satirise the disintegration of a masculine ideal: playing soldiers as kids, brutalised by war as men. MB