Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Someone Has Got to Be John | Lost Paws | Mariupol + more

theSpace Triplex (Venue 38) until 23 August

Three people in smart black suits and ties take to the stage, although one of their famed number is missing. Where, and who, is John?

It’s the hot summer of 1969, at the tail end of the Swinging London decade, and history is being made – not by the Beatles themselves, although they’re currently in the midst of recording their final album Let It Be, but by the first International Symposium on Gender Identity, which is being held at the city’s Piccadilly Hotel.

Now the 56th annual International Symposium is being held in 2025, and this Beatles tribute act are here to get involved too, a ghost memory of the 1960s spirit of openness and inquiry which led to the real-life first International Symposium being conducted.

Except there were, as far as the show’s creators know, no further symposiums.

Yet in esoterically investigating the one they know existed (they call this “the first symposium on the first symposium”) they shine a light on the history of medical care for trans people, which remains a deeply controversial issue on the culture war battlefield.

Their conclusions are open-ended, but in going to the well of documentation and recordings from the original symposium, we get the sense that although early attempts to diagnose trans people were deeply transphobic – many of the academic quotes betray a blend of pity and disgust – they at least sought to understand.

Young queer and trans company Speakbeast are hugely inventive in approaching this subject, and performers Isaac Frost, Lowen Hunt and Anya Idrizi (also writer, dramaturg and director, respectively) play a work which incorporates storytelling, dialogue scenes and physical theatre with verve and real connection to one another.

As a piece of exploded social history dragged onto the stage and made ultra-theatrical, their work is reminiscent of Fringe icons the TEAM or Xhloe & Natasha, which is no small or undeserved compliment.

David Pollock

Lost Paws ★★★

theSpace @ Surgeons Hall (Venue 53) until 23 August

When love goes out of the window, it comes back through the door in Lost Paws, an adventure comedy starring two cats.

Iris is a sheltered house cat from North London, and Jeffebelle is a streetwise Tik-Tok sensation from the South. Before Iris’s disappearance, Shira, her owner, reads aloud her favourite book, Jonas Jonasson’s 2009 novel The Hundred-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, and this signposts events to come.

It seems it is the owners, Shira and Arlan, who require the freedom and independence displayed by their cats Iris and Jeffabelle, as they lead each-other astray at the cost of finding their way home. “Welcome to the streets, pussycat!” Jeffabelle says. It is London as Iris has never seen it before.

Iris’s disappearance is challenging for Shira, who has never let her out of doors. A choice that Arlan quickly judges: “Oh, man, that is cruel. You don’t deserve a cat!”

If you’re the owner of a house cat, you might feel personally attacked. But as the relationships of both the human and feline characters soften and deepen, they touch foreheads. It is a tender movement, encapsulating the overall mood of this very touching piece.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Mariupol ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

Imagine a 21st century version of Casablanca, stripped of its politics and set during the early months of the current Russia-Ukraine war, and you might have some sense of the mood of Katia Haddad’s play Mariupol, playing at the Pleasance Courtyard, and directed by high-powered brothers Guy and John Retallack.

The story begins in 1992, when Ukraine is newly independent, and Russian student Galina comes to the Ukrainian coastal city of Mariupol on holiday with a friend. She meets Steve, a Ukrainian naval officer; but their intense holiday romance is brief, and when they meet again ten years later - by chance, in a Moscow cancer ward waiting room - their reunion is even more short-lived.

Cut to the present war, when Galina’s son is held prisoner of war and hostage at the Azov steel plant in Mariupol, where Steve is a commander of Ukrainian forces; and she fights her way through the war, from Moscow, to try to save her boy.

The drama is high to the point of sensationalism, as shock follows revelation while Russian rockets thunder outside; Nathalie Barclay and Oliver Gomm do their best, in a restrained English style, to measure up to the story.

In the end, though, it just seems too soon even to begin to understand the tragedy of the continuing war in Ukraine through the medium of a well-intentioned romance; and the landscape of Mariupol just too utterly destroyed to be a modern-day Casablanca - or for that matter the Paris that Rick and Ilsa will always remember, in that greatest of wartime love stories.

Joyce McMillan

David Alnwick: The Dare Witch Project ★★★

PBH’s Free Fringe @ Voodoo Rooms (Venue 68b) until 24 August

Describing himself professionally as an ‘occult illusionist’, David Alnwick has a bunch of shows focused on his stage magic abilities on at the Fringe this year.

Yet this is something very different, a performance containing elements of both comedy and magic, but which revolves around an audio-visual tribute to the cult 1999 ‘found footage’ horror pseudo-documentary The Blair Witch Project.

Even more unusually, for what’s essentially a Free Fringe comedy show, it’s set up at the top with a tribute to the great German filmmaking eccentric Werner Herzog, and particularly his startling documentary Grizzly Man.

As a 14-year-old in Scarborough, Alnwick tells us, he made his own documentaries, and he takes influence from Herzog’s maxim “if I'm shooting a film and I get scared, I know I'm on the right track”.

Now he’s apparently bought an old video camera on the internet, and a tape has been left inside. But what could be on it?

That the tape features a woodland explorer who looks exactly like Alnwick, even though he tells us it isn’t him, takes a little of the magic out of what follows, but still he balances the fun he’s clearly having with horror movie tropes – there are jump scares and moments of the unexplained – with his need to create a show which entertains and raises laughs.

Those who share his obvious film buff tastes will get a lot out of it.

David Pollock

Delusions and Grandeur ★★★

Red Lecture Theatre at Summerhall (Venue 26) until 25 August

Karen Hall is a professional cellist navigating an existential crisis. From Carnegie Hall to Glee, her life has been a relentless symphony of performance, yet the instrument she loves and relies on for her living now feels like it might be devouring her.

Confessional monologues are a Fringe staple, but this one sidesteps self-indulgence with kooky grace. Karen’s conversational ease draws you in before anxiety ratchets to a near-boiling point.

The show fires in all directions, skewering decreased arts funding, cultural elitism, and the dusty hierarchies of the musical canon. Live performance punctuates the monologues, flashing sly humour alongside moments of genuine poignancy.

How to reconcile love for music with the brutal economics of the industry? The question lingers, unresolved, and probably unanswerable.

Earnest charm abounds here, and with further development, this could blossom into something truly heartstring tugging.

Alexander Cohen

A Sudden, Disturbing To Do List ★★

Greenside @ George Square (Venue 236) until 23 August

Written by Eleanor May Blackburn, A Sudden, Disturbing To Do List articulates a year in the life of Phoebe, a freelance writer who becomes overwhelmed with compulsive list-making.

She helter-skelters from shopping lists to listing past jobs to lists about lists, navigating the map on the floor outlining every object in her bedroom, until a giant fluffy monster appears.

It is unclear if the incidences of the listing and the monster implies a psychotic break, or if the monster character is real. The direction is also wanting, as unfortunately, much of the action occurs on the floor, sacrificing sightlines.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here.