The Edinburgh Fringe Festival: Attitude’s five star round-up review

If one fact in life were absolute, it would be that gay men love a festival. As the summer season draws to a close and regional Prides begin to wrap, Edinburgh Fringe Festival – the world’s largest art and culture showcase – may sound like something different. However – there are many immediate parallels: bustling crowds of cultural enthusiasts; music and performances festooned in every available space; a sense of excitement and anticipation of artistic prowess. The difference? This isn’t just a few acres of festival. This is an entire city transformed into a hub of the best and brightest talent from around the world. 

This year, I spent four days exploring Edinburgh. To say it is overwhelming is an understatement. The city offers over 4,000 shows – where to begin? Luckily, the Fringe App is an excellent start-point for any visitor, offering reviews, recommendations, and live updates as to what is going on nearby. It didn’t take me long to make a list of all of the queer excellent I want to imbibe.

James Barr’s Sorry I Hurt Your Son (Said My Ex To My Mum)

The Fringe offers comedy in all forms; live improvisation, traditional stand-up, clowning and all things in between. James Barr’s one man show, Sorry I Hurt Your Son (Said My Ex To My Mum) is a must-see. Stacking up award nominations, the radio presenter and social media personality also proves to be an expert hand at comedy, finding it in the most unexpected of places: the subject of domestic abuse – or as he playfully refers to it, ‘dommy-buse’.

The show demonstrates Barr’s skillful ability to find the lightness in the darkness as he quickly shifts between the heartbreaking and hilarious. How does the man who has seemingly achieved his happy ending – the boyfriend, the house, the car and the dog – end up single at a German piss party? A cruel comment about penis size at a dinner from a boyfriend, it seems, that swiftly escalates into a full-blown torrent of psychological and physical violence. The journey is deftly handled, with Barr bravely sharing his story whilst always laughing at himself. The humanity here is bold: ‘I’m annoying!’ quips Barr, not defending his ex-partner’s behaviour but highlighting that people are complex and relationships are complicated: this could happen to any of us. This makes what is a very specific story entirely relatable and you root for him to the very end, Clapham-gayisms and all. Barr concludes his show with the hope that his story will help others – and undoubtably, it will.

Sam Williams’ Touch Me Not

On a very different note entirely, Sam Williams’ show Touch Me Not takes the sermonic and makes it very funny indeed. The show – which explores Williams’ relationship with bisexuality and religion – is at once poignant and punk. “I wear a crucifix in my ear,” he jokes, “for both Jesus and for George Michael.”  There is something striking about someone speaking so graphically about sexuality and sex whilst also grappling with his spirituality.

Starting out with an RE teacher informing his students that homosexuality is a sin, Williams grapples with teenage crushes, family issues and societal labelling to chart his voyage to self-acceptance. Will he end up living as a strict monk in southern France or pegged by an Olympian athlete? One thing is for sure – he will end up on all fours for a very funny comedy climax.

Desiree Burch’s The Golden Wrath

Edinburgh isn’t just a place for highlighting new comedy faces – it also platforms some of the biggest names in the biz. Desiree Burch is an absolute standout in her show The Golden Wrath. Taskmaster treasure and television regular, Burch’s confidence and charisma alone can hold an audience enraptured. This time, she’s talking about the perimenopause – not an area that immediately shouts comedy. Indeed, the show is deeply educational, exploring the challenges the body faces as a 40-something woman. What’s incredible is the way Burch turns her story into something both madly entertaining and powerful. ‘Are you prepared for the filth that is going to fly from my face?’ she asks the audience from the get go with gravitas and assurance that immediately puts us under her spell. She may already be a star but the carefully crafted monologue is delivered with fire, energy, and authenticity, the intensity of every emotional beat performed at a ten. And that’s the joy of Edinburgh in a word – throwing yourself into a show on the unknown and seeing what happens. Here, I both learned and laughed. A lot.

Fountain Lakes In Lockdown

Of course, it wouldn’t be an LGBT+ best of without reference to drag. With the mainstreaming of Drag Race, there is myriad queenery on offer here – and a special shout out must go to Ceecee Blooms, Edinburgh’s finest queer venue. My personal drag highlight was a parody of much-loved alternate Australian TV show, Kath and Kim, performed by none other than Australian legend Art Symone and her company. Entitled Fountain Lakes In Lockdown, the play sees foxy-boomer Kath Day-Knight and her exasperated (awful?) daughter, Kim, face the horrors of Covid-19. As someone who has watched many a drag parody, this was without one of the best – with precise characterisations, punchy jokes and all of the catchphrases any fanatic would wish for – ‘Look at moy, Kimmy! Look at moyyyyy!’ Combined with the rich field of comedy offered by the terrible living memory of the global pandemic, seeing mother and daughter struggle through a lockdown together leads to high jinx and a hysterical mix up involving a box of Anne Summers sex toys. With dance, song, video comedy and audience interaction – a visitation from middle class Sydney bores Prue and Trude had me in stitches – this is the show for any fan who wishes there was just one more season about everyone’s favourite Aussie duo. 

Jonny Woo’s Suburbia

Of course, the Fringe isn’t just about comedy. Scene legend Jonny Woo has taken the summer away from his usual East London haunts to perform a memoir-style show – part performance art, part theatre, part drag extravaganza. Titled Suburbia, the show explores Woo’s upbringing out in the ‘burbs, recalling how he came into his first box of women’s clothes that have become so fundamental to his queer identity today. Inherited from a mysterious local cross-dresser in the 1980s, the box of babydoll dresses becomes representative of the repressed femininity that men were forced to hide behind the net curtains and away from nosey neighbours. He wonders what became of that stranger whose dresses he now dons, juxtaposed against his own vibrant queer life as a club kid in both Shoreditch and New York. The contrast is striking: the world of the repressed smalltown queers of the ’70s and before who are forced to keep their identities hidden; versus the challenges of navigating the drugs and AIDS crisis of the gay scene. The show is touched with moments of tenderness and warmth, before being  exuberantly danced off with lip-syncs, songs, a rave, and a very-naked, very Jonny Woo, finale that I don’t want to spoil! 

Jordan Gray’s Is That A C*ck In My Pocket Or Are You Just Here To Kill Me?

If Edinburgh seems too far, you may well want to check out the preview shows across cities in the UK – or equally, the post-Fringe tour. I was lucky enough to catch Jordan Gray’s Is That A C*ck In My Pocket Or Are You Just Here To Kill Me? at the Soho Theatre. Poised as the difficult follow-up show, Gray asks how do you top a spontaneous denuding on live television that takes you into the public eye and catapults you into fame for both better and for worse? The cowgirl theming draws attention to the Wild West Gray now inhabits; where shots are fired daily by trolls on social media and the people – specifically trans – are no longer safe. Gray tackles the difficult big questions of trans existence whilst also charting the day-to-day challenges of ordinary life – but doing all with such silly joy and with such quick wit and frenetic energy that it is hard no to laugh along despite it feeling like the world is on fire. And then her singing begins with such ferocity and thought that it inevitably blows you away.

Other highlights

If you do go to the Fringe, however, I would urge you to stray from the path and check out the ‘Free Fringe. Offering new performers a launching platform, these cheaper shows may be in venues a little more rough-and-ready but the quality is phenomenal. There was nothing quite like an intimate comedy gig in a karaoke booth with the brilliant Kate Sharp, whose charm and swagger led to an experience that felt like comic group therapy rather than a show. When you are shoulder to shoulder with a small group of strangers, there is an unusual closeness felt, and Sharp confidently drew us together as though in a game of comic Cluedo, playing and flirting and teasing the crowd in what was a highly memorable and unique set. Similarly, a last minute ticket to show ‘Bald’ led to my favourite joke by any comedian this season: Mark Moloney riffing on the lyrics of ‘The Vengabus Is Coming’ with dead-pan, desert-dry pointedness, was a delight and left me with tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. And of course, as always, the Queer Comedy Club offered an array of shows for a quick and easy LGBT+ lol-fix.

The Fringe runs until 25 August and I can truly say, there is no other experience like it. I returned home with an overtired body, but a mind a little bigger and a heart a little more full of laughter. If you can make it for a day or two before the summer is out, you must. And if not, perhaps it’s time to start planning your city break for next summer. Now, on with the show!