‘Wonderfully weird’: 7 of the best Edinburgh Fringe shows to book now

Morning Wire’s theatre writers have been catching the very best of the shows at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. We’re only reviewing productions with London transfers in the autumn, so if you can’t make it to Edinburgh this August, everything you read here is coming to the capital at a later date.

From Fleabag to Flight of the Concords and The Mighty Boosh, some of the most famous shows originated at the Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s biggest arts festival and a hotbed for new creative ideas.

Here are the best shows our team has seen so far at this year’s event.

THE FIT PRINCE

★★★★★

A thousand other Edinburgh Fringe performers attempt to put on shows like Linus Karp and Joseph Martin’s, but few pull them off. His shows are essentially excellent lessons in the very trendy topic of adult play – how more of us should channel our childhood playfulness more often, you know, to protect our mental health and stuff – involving lots of incredibly silly puppetry, roleplay and audience participation. It could be so average, but it’s just so good. In his latest, The Fit Prince, Karp plays a young queer prince from Swedonia, a made-up country with loads in common with Sweden. He must find a husband within two weeks or face losing his ascendancy to the crown. 

There are some absolutely bonkers ideas here, including a monstrous orphanage founder who presents as some terrifying vulgar monster but who has a hilariously soft side; it’s the sort of characterisation that shows off Karp’ and Martin’s killer eye for surrealist dark humour. Their bone dry script is one 70-minute-long gag reel, all self-knowing references that sew together this tall tale of unlikely love across social and cultural divides. If you can’t quite picture how ridiculous this is yet, fairly famous singer Tove Lo and fairly famous actor Sebastian Croft from Heartstopper both have cameos; she as the Prime Minster of Swedonia and he as a love prospect.

The Fit Prince distils everything you’d hope for from a Fringe show: it’s an absolute riot, with a sweet and heart-felt message threaded through that never bangs you around the head with worthiness. I can’t wait to see his other productions, something silly and no doubt heartfelt about Princess Diana and another show about Gwyneth Paltrow’s skiing accident. You get the idea.

4.40pm, Pleasance Courtyard Beyond; from 2 December at the King’s Head Theatre in Angel

ROB AUTON: CAN (AN HOUR-LONG STORY)

★★★★

It’s commendably brave to write a comedy show that is expressly about hope – we feel less comfortable laughing at that than misery: where are the parameters? Should we laugh, perhaps nervously, at the idea of a better future, or just find it inspiring rather than funny? In any case, it’s easier to moan. Auton, an Edinburgh Fringe veteran who has earned this near sellout audience, stirs the hope in all of us in this show about putting down our phones, acknowledging one another on the bus and being all in it together. 

Confronting dark themes non-judgmentally and finding sweet metaphors about the joys in life that we’re programmed to overlook, Auton is gentle but commanding, rarely moving from his mic but occasionally raising his arms like the messiah to bring us all in. You believe that this show is simply a collection of gratitudes Auton thinks, practices and believes. He has a wonderfully addictive, uplifting honesty about him, and against occasional backing tracks of inspirational music, he delivers monologues about such things as the miracle of us being born on liveable planet Earth rather than all the thousands of barren planets we could have ended up on. Amid the trauma monologues, the Edinburgh Fringe needs more of Auton’s refreshing optimism.

1.25pm, Assembly Roxy, Upstairs; from Monday 19 Jan 2026 at the Soho Theatre

BROWN GIRLS DO IT TOO: MAMA TOLD ME NOT TO COME

★★★★

Female body hair, the promiscuity that follows divorce as a late-thirty-something and masturbation are some of the stigma-breaking topics tackled in Brown Girls Do It Too, the live stage version of the podcast of the same name. Just don’t expect worthiness for the sake of it: everything in this female two-hander is mostly solid gold lols, incorporating the girls’ own personal stories alongside imagined fictitious scenarios in which the pair act out instances from their past, often with one of them playing a maternal Asian mother figure.

Poppy Jay and Rubina Pabani, two brown women brought up by socially conservative Asian families, naturally skit between the performance styles, veering convincingly into the dramatic elements; there’s a neat balance between the conversational parts and the skits, which typically build on the unscripted topics. No spoilers here, but in the final moments, the duo deliver the most emotional moment I had at the Edinburgh Fringe 2025. Raw and incredibly funny, the women rightfully point out that only 300 out of 4,000 shows programmed this year are fronted by black and brown people: of course, more of their stories are needed – Jay and Pabani’s radical openness will stick with you.

4pm, Underbelly, Bristo Square, Cowbarn; from Tuesday 9 September at the Soho Theatre Walthamstow

More from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe

THE UNSTOPPABLE RISE OF BEN MANAGER

★★★★

While many may use a few days at the Edinburgh Fringe to escape the office, the audience at the Pleasance Courtyard were paying to revisit work drama on their own time. The Unstoppable Rise of Ben Manager fuses physical theatre, puppetry and powerpoints into a brilliant but bonkers satirical comedy asking what happens when AI takes our jobs. We follow Ben who, after witnessing a mysterious death on the way to an interview, swipes the deceased’s lanyard and is swept up the corporate ladder at Monolith: a company where nothing is quite as it seems. Who was Ben Manager? Why is he endlessly asked to create slides? Like a jolt of espresso, the frantic energy of this production ricochets from cast to audience. Jack Parris’ manic performance is just a few genes short of Jim Carrey. Two MCs perched on desks punctuate the madness with sound and sly asides. At times the frenzy risked overpowering the story and cliches about office culture, while knowingly laboured, risked overuse. But then it only takes one morning back at the office to confirm: nope, still painfully accurate.

Pleasance Theatre, 7 & 8 November

OLIVIA RAINE ATWOOD: FAKING IT

★★★★

Not the Olivia Attwood out of Love Island, we’re reminded early on – but something far better. This Olivia Atwood only has one ‘t’ in her surname, and is from America, but does a good bit about how shocking it can be when her Google Alerts send her updates about the Love Island Attwood “canoodling” mystery men behind bins. 

Being able to poke fun at herself has always been this Atwood’s strength, which is the theme of this show, which celebrates hustle culture. Across Faking It, she hilariously and brilliantly extrapolates one real-life story about how she was hired by US hospitals to act as fake patients, likening her unlikely rise to a story from her childhood about how a hamster survived being fed to her pet snake (stick with it). The hamster kicked its hind legs and fought off being snake lunch, and Atwood has bucked the out-of-work actor trope to be playing to nearly full houses this Edinburgh Fringe. Yes, it’s a bit bonkers, but Atwood, who is a wildly energetic storyteller, carries it off. Funny in her delivery, you’ll leave feeling exhausted, but in the best possible way. Her final gambit? She has another show on 25 minutes after this one finishes. Do the double if you find highly energetic people rub off on you. 

London dates to follow this autumn

NERDS

★★★

Nerds was slated for a Broadway run in 2016 but a $6 million lawsuit earned the show the nickname of the “Fyre festival of Broadway.” Nine years later, a slightly lower-key premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s easy to see why producers saw dollar signs: Nerds has a decent playlist of new music, tight choreography and a juicy story about the well-documented rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as their Microsoft and Apple empires formed in the 1970s.

It is all good fun if not totally commanding: a fairly conventional musical that could do well to take inspiration from its subjects and break the formula a little more. Only one song, Down And Out in Seattle, became an ear worm, and the plot feels paint-by-numbers in a way that makes it hard to get truly invested. Still, the actors are great, particularly Dan Buckley’s gloriously zany, mildly unhinged Bill Gates. Kane Oliver Parry’s oily Steve Jobs is also immensely watchable. This is a full throttle production, including Jobs x Gates rap battles.

London dates to follow this autumn

KANPUR 1857

★★★★

Set in colonial India, Kanpur 1857 opens with a young rebel, strapped to a cannon, answering to a British intelligence officer pacing feverishly between stage and audience. Over the next 60 minutes, we try to pry his story, anxiously awaiting his fate.

Written and performed by Scottish-Indian writer Niall Moorjani and co-director Jonathan Oldfield, Kanpur 1857 is a tense and poetic examination of morality and power in war. “Everything is a story we tell,” Moorjani warns. “And yet you are the one who decides how it ends.” The dialogue illuminates the horrors and irony of war, in particular the rebellion of thousands who brutally lost their lives. Sodhi, a Sikh musician, adds depth to the simple staging by playing the tabla drum. It lacks a little energy, but not all productions exist purely to entertain. Some exist to educate, and in the case of Kanpur 1857, that is enough.

Pleasance Theatre, 6 & 7 November

JESS ROBINSON: YOUR SONG

★★★★

Here’s an idea: Jess Robinson sings different Elton John songs (who doesn’t love that?) but she impersonates a different female icon for every tune. So you might hear Billie Eilish sing Tiny Dancer or Britney Spears break out Crocodile Rock or Christina Aquilera belt Rocket Man.

Robinson has incredible vocal dexterity, summed up the best during one hilarious segment where she puts up images of 16 female celebrities on a blackboard and impersonates all of them (from Sharon Osbourne to Tess Daly) during Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. It takes a lot to pitch 16 different vocals in three minutes while holding court on stage alone, but Robinson’s cheery confidence makes it look like a doddle. The show is threaded with her own personal homage to the legend, too. Singing along compulsory.

6.05pm, Piccolo Tent at Assembly George Square Gardens; Underbelly Boulevard in Soho on 20 September

LORNA ROSE TREEN: 24 HOUR DINER PEOPLE

★★★

Rose Treen won Dave’s funniest joke of the Fringe in 2023 with her one liner: “I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.” Her 2025 effort, 24 Hour Diner People, is surely one of the most surprising and oddball shows at the Edinburgh Fringe this year. Set in a classic American diner, Rose Treen introduces a cavalcade of different guests, impersonating truck drivers with long arms and a teenager getting prepared for prom, and plenty more in-between.

The sheer frenetic nature of the skits induces comedy in itself, as she runs from one character to the next without taking a breath: it’s amazing simply watching her running around and somehow pulling all this off, sometimes behind a hastily-made diner kiosk and at other points breaking the fourth wall in front of it. She’s made all the props and the set too. The characters move a little too quickly from one to the next for the narrative lines to feel as conclusive as I’d have liked, but the sheer energy and one-liners are a hugely worthy entertainment forms in themselves. It’s all wonderfully weird.

6.20pm, Beneath at Pleasance Courtyard; at Soho Theatre from Monday 8 September

Travel to London from Edinburgh return from £70.10 if booked in advance with The Trainline

Read more: ‘Utter madness!’: 7 of the best Edinburgh Fringe shows to book now