Edinburgh Fringe highlights: Euronews Culture’s five alt show picks

We’ve been at the Edinburgh Fringe trawling through the shows so you don’t have to. Here are Euronews Culture’s five highlights from the dance, circus, and other experiences on offer this year.

Beyond the theatre and comedy, the Edinburgh Fringe provides space for plenty of other kinds of shows. We’ve already highlighted our top five theatre shows and comedy shows. Now, we’re focusing on the best alternative shows we’ve seen at this year’s festival.
Included in the list is an immersive experience, a dance show, a circus show, a dining/theatre experience, and a spoken word-comedy show.
For anyone looking for a recommendation of something a little different, these are our highlights.
Another Fringe, another outstanding show from immersive theatre experience company Darkfield. Their latest shipping container show recreates the TRON aesthetic for a video game arcade. For all the work on the cool neon lights as you walk in, it’s wiped from the memory as you are plunged into darkness with only the immaculately designed soundscape for your guide. This is probably Darkfield’s most interactive show yet, as the arcade machine in front of you provides you with a button and a coin slot to help you engage directly with the world you encounter through all senses, besides sight. You are immediately immersed in a confusing post-apocalyptic vision of a world. Think of something between Children of Men, ‘The Last of Us’, and ‘Fallout’. Without sight, your imagination fills in the gaps of the topsy turvy amoral world. Whether it’s a desolate wasteland or a crowded slum, your body conjures imagery to go with the vividly created sound. Pushed to and fro by nefarious actors you are often ushered into making reprehensible decisions at the lightest touch of a button. Speaking to Lucas, one of the technicians after the show, and he explains that there are over 30 endings and multiple ways to reach them. Without spoiling too much, in the version I experienced, I murdered multiple people while the person to my side was killed multiple times. Either way, neither of us got much of a happy ending. Darkfield have reliably brought their brilliant shows to the Fringe for a while now, but this is a new level for the company.
This gets my nomination for the most Fringe thing I saw at the Fringe this year. Only in Edinburgh would it be normal for a dancer to strip off to her birthday suit at the beginning of a show before prancing around the room, detailing her individual organs and limbs as a musical accountant pronounces the individual market worth of each body part. Despite the total value of New Zealand dancer Sacha Copland’s body coming to just shy of £7 million, according to her accountant Mr Carter, it’s not enough to offset the lifetime costs she’ll incur against herself. With her clothes back on, through her expressive dancing, touching narrative and Tristan Carter’s evocative live music, Copland’s show transforms from a confronting expression of the female body to an insight into how a woman’s worth is valued in society. Copland leaves no stone unturned in her life to build one of the most touching shows of this year’s festival about her personal journey to self acceptance, as the dancer reclaims her body for herself against a history of violence.
What happens when you combine a one-woman show with a live cooking demonstration? ‘My English Persian Kitchen’ is the Traverse Theatre’s most surprising and unique show this year, featuring a fully functioning kitchen as the centrepiece of the stage. Actor Isabella Nefar spends just over an hour cooking a massive pot of ash-e-reshteh, a Persian noodle stew that’s bursting with herbs, mint oil, and precious saffron water. All the while, Nefar tells the story of Atoosa Sepehr, the nutritional therapist and writer who escaped an abusive marriage in Iran to live in the UK, leaving her family and culture behind. Sepehr’s story is masterfully adapted by writer Hannah Khalil and brought to the stage ingeniously by director Chris White as it segues between the past and the present as Sepehr prepares the dish as a means of connecting with her new London neighbours. Although this is the story of escape, ‘My English Persian Kitchen’ never stops celebrating Persian culture, whether it’s through asserting the hard working intellectualism of Iranian women or the restorative Proustian powers of a traditional dish. Finally, after spending an hour salivating over the redolent delights stewing away, the entire audience is invited to try some of the ash-e-reshteh. It’s a final moment that brings the audience into Sepehr’s love of Persian culture like no other show on this year.
There were many great circus and cabaret shows at this year’s edition. Highlights included the Shrek-themed drag cabaret show ‘Swamplesque’ and Yamoussa Bangoura’s African circus celebration ‘Afrique en Cirque’. The pick for my favourite show in this category goes to ‘Corazón’ from the Colombian circus troupe Circolombia. The entire show is a festival of Latin American traditions. There’s a strong man in a lucha libre mask, dramatic interludes between stunts that resemble the high camp romance of telenovelas, and a compere decked out in sequins cavorting and singing her way through the entire thing. ‘Corazón’ is a funny and sexy show that never forgets the most crucial quality in a circus event: raising the cholesterol with death-defying stunts. These include a woman spinning around the big top suspended by a rope held between her teeth; a man climbing to perilous heights and free-falling off a pole he’s barely attached to; and no lack of balancing, chucking and catching people mid-air. The Colombian music is always booming and this is the only circus show I’ve seen where the audience is actively encouraged to stand up and dance. In a discipline that can sometimes take itself too seriously, this is pure fun.
Sitting somewhere between a spoken word poet and traditional comedian, Rob Auton has become a stalwart of the Fringe. After a decade of bringing themed shows up to Edinburgh, his 2023 show ‘The Rob Auton Show’ turned the lens back on himself and added new levels of depth to the whimsy, wordplay and positivity. For this year’s show, Auton’s 11th, he’s seemingly back to his old style of themes (e.g. Sleep, Hair, Faces, Yellow) with ‘The Eyes Open and Shut Show’. Perception, how you view your life and the things in it, is then taken apart in typical Auton fashion. He asks the audience to simulate a strobe light by blinking quickly as a dance track plays, he litigates the nuances of linguistic contraction (Bowie saying “let us dance” vs a priest saying “let’s pray”) and continues to lightly poke fun at his own brand of comedy: “I’m too young for my own material”. Auton’s lost-in-the-headlights approach to stage presence belies his tightly comic script, often held in his hand throughout the performance. As Auton shifts a gear away from pure humour to his spoken word poetry about everything from nostalgia to his wife, his unabashed sensitivity turns this into more than just a comedy routine. This show isn’t a massive departure from his previous work, but there’s an increased refinement to Auton’s balancing act of quippy comedy and earnest poetry.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival takes place until 26 August.