Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews: Bebe Cave: CHRISTBRIDE | Siblings: Dreamweavers | Lorna Rose Treen: 24 Hour Diner People | Andrew Doherty: Sad Gay Aids Play

Bebe Cave: CHRISTBRIDE ★★★★★

Pleasance Dome (23) until 24 August

Siblings: Dreamweavers ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (33) until 24 August

Lorna Rose Treen: 24 Hour Diner People ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (33) until 24 August

Andrew Doherty: Sad Gay Aids Play ★★★★

Pleasance Dome (23) Until 24 August

Batilda is not like other maidens. Her sozzled mother is determined to marry her off but this wild-at-heart mediaeval teenager longs to be free. In the dementedly funny and fast-paced Christbride, Bebe Cave inhabits a dozen or so screwball characters to tell this young girl’s story.

Peppered with knowingly anachronistic references (including a gaspingly funny chastity belt line), the feverish hour flies by as Batilda learns about her unappealing suitors, their tapestries substituting for screens in the dating process. Encountering too many “crimson banners”, and worried she’ll be forced to wed her dead sister’s husband, she becomes enchanted by a charismatic nun who seems to be able to live on her own terms.

After joining the abbey, Batilda meets the other nuns, all of whom experience Christ in their own individual ways – free from the impositions and desires of men (apart from, you know, that one). She does such an incredible job of creating and performing these characters that it’s easy to forget at times she’s the only person on stage.

Cave is a captivating and charismatic comic actor, never missing a chance to deliver a laugh before speeding along to the next bit, armed with fun props and costume changes. She sends up the ancient (and post-truth) concept that “feeling is believing”, playing with the idea that religions – for all their value as refuges – have always attracted nutters. And those who run those religions are rather grateful for the distraction the eccentrics provide.

There are some gleefully dark references, particularly in the way Christ appears to Batilda, as well as the inevitability of scapegoating, all of which add irresistible texture to this thrilling show.

READ MORE: The Best Edinburgh Fringe Comedy 2025: Every show with a four or five star review from The Scotsman so far

The deliberately ridiculous plotline of Siblings: Dreamweavers gives Maddy and Marina Bye an excuse to muck around in the way they do so well: with an instinctive goofiness that’s impossible not to enjoy.

They play a couple of scientists who read the dreams of a handful of audience members by placing a dream helmet (a colander with fairy lights on it) on their heads. “It might get spooky, it might get sexy. Whatever happens, it’s not us, it’s you,” they warn.

What follows is an hour of frenetic physical comedy in which we get silly, made-up glimpses into a few unconscious minds, with characters including Republican country club evangelists with infectious catch phrases, a boy band member with a misguided foreplay technique and a mishmash of augmented-faced reality television people.

It’s the kind of show in which, for every 50 people wet-faced with laughter, you’ll spot one punter who looks utterly baffled, possibly wishing they weren’t privy to erotic dreams involving one’s own grandparent.

We talk a lot about the need for authenticity in performance, and, despite the barrage of outlandishness and absurdity in Dreamweavers, it’s here in spades with these sisters, who have clearly spent a lifetime making each other laugh, and who work hard to spread that joy.

Lorna Rose Treen is someone else who’s fantastic at silliness. She kicks off 24 Hour Diner People by reminding us that, after she won Dave’s Funniest Joke of the Fringe two years ago, a tabloid accused her of killing comedy. This time, she quips, she’s going to have a go at murdering theatre.

READ MORE: Dr Benji Waterhouse on finding the funny in psychiatry: 'The NHS runs on gallows humour'

The prop-heavy hour that puts its freakishly long arms around the comedy of strangeness is set in an American diner, where a wistful waitress, dreaming of a better future, encounters a handful of characters.

By far the most successful are those that allow Treen to demonstrate her remarkable gift for absurdism. The woman who puts her youthful good looks down to the retention of her umbilical is gorgeously original and silly, and I could easily spend a full day in the company of the poetic, metal-mouthed young girl who’s aggressively ravenous for her first kiss.

Deliberately hammy, and deploying loads of knowingly bad puns, Treen’s other characters include a comically indiscreet undercover private investigator and a Bonnie and Clydesque couple with plans to rob the joint. We join in with a running joke, there’s some comical violence and we even get to discover what “women in Stem” really stands for.

Anyone who’s ever wrangled with an arts funding body will squeal with delight at Andrew Doherty’s glorious comedy satire, Sad Gay Aids Play. It’s a wonderfully funny show about how a performer’s creative intention becomes compromised beyond all recognition, thanks to the shadowy, powerful figures paying for it.

With his impish, fame-hungry character setting out to present a one-man performance masterclass (the subject of which seems rather without merit), he begins a series of Zoom meetings with people from Arts Council England, whose faces we never get to see at first.

Thanks to their escalating interventions, he ends up having to make a laboured, derivative drama reminiscent of The League of Gentlemen’s naff Legs Akimbo issues-based theatre group.

The result is Aids Actually, a 1981-set play about poor Harry, whose mother doesn’t accept his sexuality. His dad wants him to be a dog strangler and he finds solace in the gay clubs of London. From the hilariously dark misconceptions about the spread of the disease (not quotable in a family paper) to the arts council’s insistence that he depict northerners as being “poorer, stupider and sadder”, it’s full of funny-cos-it’s-true moments.

Doherty’s an energetic and engaging writer and performer with an infectious sense of character mischief, and this show’s a delight.

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