Apollo theatre, London
Prophecies are impossibly fulfilled by the superstar who takes his cue from the legendary French seer in his show Only Human

Do we have free will – or are the words I am about to write, the four stars twinkling atop this review, pre-ordained? That’s the stuff Derren Brown conjures with in his new show Only Human, which takes its inspiration from Nostradamus’s ability to foresee the future. Nostradamus used divination techniques – and so Brown engineers a stunt in which his audience, en masse, dowse a waterway in the building next door. Nostradamus had a near-death experience – and so, in one remarkable sequence, Brown orchestrates something similar for a hypnotised member of his crowd.

This of course is territory Brown has always made his own: strip away the free will rhetoric and Nostradamus folderol, and artful dodger Derren stands revealed, doing the same mentalism and mesmerism tricks as ever. By the interval (and acknowledging that we’ve been spoiled by his jaw-dropping back catalogue), this current collection of stunts doesn’t feel all that high-powered. Predicting an audience member’s yes/no answers to a series of questions is amazing, yes, but low stakes. And that water divination set-piece misfires: only one of his three selected dowsers is up to the task, and the venue’s seating is too cramped for the mass mobility the routine requires.

Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London
Richly wrought lyrical wit and sumptuous harmonies enhance the duo’s clever new show – along with plenty of backchat

The last time Flo & Joan played Shepherd’s Bush Empire, they found a setlist on stage left by beloved indie-rock band the Feeling on the previous night. It made the sisters contemplate their own relationship to the music industry. Are Flo & Joan a proper band or doomed for ever to remain “musical comedy”? The problem with which, they deadpan here, is that “no one takes it seriously”. Cue this new show, its structure inspired by that chance discovery. Tonight, the duo play a suite of new songs that, title by title, matches the setlist of the band who preceded them four years ago.

And so goes the first half of With Feeling, which by turns delivers on and subverts that challenge – and proves handsomely entertaining either way. In the sisters’ hands, Fill My Little World becomes a neurotic number about the surfeit of stuff (cheap food, fast fashion, AI slop). Never Be Lonely returns to a favoured topic, Flo & Joan’s toxic co-dependency – with an added sight gag involving Joan (AKA Rosie Dempsey)’s questionable trumpet skills. Further numbers address the risks of poor punctuation and the need, in a society giddy on unfiltered self-expression, to “bring back shame”.

On tour until 12 December

While facing grief, illness and a very public breakup, the comic reached for his diaries – and found a happy kid who spiralled into despair. Inspired by a Nobel laureate, he wrote a frank, funny book about that boy and what he grew into

It begins on Christmas Day, 1996: “It’s been a lovely day … I realised how much I love my family.” It ends three years later: “I’m lying on the floor in floods of tears and all I want to do is die.” Say what you like about adolescence but it is nothing if not an emotional tumult. “If I’d known as a teenager,” says the comedian Jon Richardson ruefully, “that I’d one day write a book about them, I couldn’t have bookended my teenage diaries with better quotes to show what a storm of shit those years can be.”

The book is The Teenage Diaries of a Stand-Up Comedian, and it has been two years in the making. Two years that, if not quite the hormonal rollercoaster the book itself records, have been quite the ride. The project is borne of a crossroads moment in the Lancashire man’s midlife, after he experienced bereavement, serious illness among family and friends, and the breakdown of his marriage to fellow comic Lucy Beaumont. The last was an inevitably very public ending, splayed across the tabloids, to a relationship which itself played out in public, courtesy of the couple’s acclaimed mockumentary about their domestic arrangements, Meet the Richardsons.

The comedy smash is back – and now the standups aren’t allowed to laugh or shriek! Lou Sanders, Tom Allen, Phil Wang and more reveal what made them crack – and what happened when they went too far

What could be more disorientating for a comedian than not being able to laugh – for nine hours! – nor elicit laughter from anyone else in the room? I’ll tell you. Try all of the above on a sunny summer weekend while pretending it’s Halloween. Then force the comics to return to the scene of what one of their number, Phil Wang, calls “a cross between a gameshow and a psychological experiment”, and relive the whole ordeal for a man from the Guardian. Is it any wonder Wang, Lou Sanders, Tom Allen and others come across as a little punch-drunk 24 hours after emerging from televised captivity on the smash comedy hit Last One Laughing?

It’s the day after filming, at Elstree Studios, the show’s Halloween special which sees a unique tweak to its winning formula: contestants must not only refrain from laughter but from screaming. “Which I thought might be a non-event,” says Wang, “but it’s actually harder. I didn’t know I was a screamer. Turns out I am.” The participating comics – including paranormal obsessive Daisy May Cooper and that maestro of comedy-horror, Reece Shearsmith – seek not only to amuse each other but spook them too. Which makes sense, says host Jimmy Carr. “Laughs and screams come from the same place. There’s surprise in a joke, and there’s surprise in a jump scare. Comedy and horror mess around in the same area. It’s the same bit of your brain.”

Perth Concert Hall
Faux truculent and palpably adorable, the standup is in her element exposing her supposed flaws and the unseen idiocies of her TV career

Tall Tales is Susan Calman’s first new standup set for 10 years, designed to show us the real Susan behind the cuddly personality we see on TV. Given that was the premise of her 2016 touring show too, it’s clear that a decade away has done little to develop – but also nothing to diminish – the Glaswegian’s onstage shtick. This is a compelling return, stuffed with experiences and insights gleaned from that standup downtime, and which undergirds familiar tales of cat fancying, being small and entering menopause with a heartfelt reckoning with recent bereavement and rocky mental health.

That last material feels raw, as she tells us she only returned to standup (the thing she feared the most, she says) to shock herself out of a bad depression. That would be hard to credit based on her show alone, which finds Calman in her element: faux truculent but palpably adorable, fulminating at the indignities of short, lesbian, middle-aged womanhood, revealing to us the unseen idiocies of her gilded TV career. Her supposed flaws are arrayed for our pleasure: her catastrophising (cue a fun anecdote about being trapped on a hotel balcony), her addictive personality, and – in the peachy set-piece that closes act one – her hormonal lust for righteous revenge.

Touring until 20 November

The ex-marketing manager’s win, for his spoof Sycamore Gap-inspired whodunnit Rewilding, arrives just as he’s gearing up for a new season of hit sketch show SNL UK – which he calls ‘the hardest job of my life’

For the last month, Chris Cantrill has been performing his fringe show Rewilding daily in a lunchtime slot. And yet, when we plan to speak about his victory in the Edinburgh comedy awards, the interview is arranged – on the festival’s penultimate day – for lunchtime. Can he really have won the fringe’s major prize, and – hell of a mic drop, this – immediately sacked off his last two shows? “I couldn’t be happier not to be at the festival today,” he says, on video call from his Northumberland home. But the cancellation, it transpires, is long-standing, because work starts immediately post-fringe on the new series of SNL UK, for which he writes.

“But I’m absolutely over the moon not to be doing my show right now,” he admits. “I’ve got a lot of adrenaline in my body slowly seeping out, and I feel like I’ve been hit by a train.” The Edinburgh comedy award (it used to be the Perrier, and was won in the past by Steve Coogan, The League of Gentlemen and Frank Skinner) has been a long time coming for Bradford-born Cantrill. This year’s was his fourth nomination, twice as a solo act, and twice as part of his duo The Delightful Sausage, alongside 2024 winner Amy Gledhill. He is, as I tease him when we speak, a comparatively senior winner, the oldest since Bridget Christie, also 42, 13 years ago. “Finally, a victory for the middle-aged white man!,” he retorts, then bursts into laughter. “Common sense at last!”

Swinton takes a dead man’s identity, Glasgow’s heir to Billy Connolly heads on tour and Gillian Anderson, Keira Knightley and Natalia Osipova all hit the stage
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh
Cantrill shares his struggles descending into middle age and his awkward interactions with fellow villagers in a fun show

Now a four-time nominee for the Edinburgh comedy award, Chris Cantrill is bearing down on James Acaster’s always-the-bridesmaid record – unless 2026 proves to be his year. Would it be merited? Well, there are few comedians in whose company it is more reliably fun to spend time. And that’s resoundingly the case with Rewilding, the follow-up to 2024’s Easily Swayed, in which Cantrill gave an uproarious account of turning 40, moving to the countryside and having (the male, northern, emotionally stunted equivalent of) a breakdown.

The sequel is scarcely less entertaining, but it’s not as well constructed, and its story is less resonant. It begins with this ebullient Bradford native explaining how bad he is at introducing himself, with reference to “drinks and nibs” his wife has coerced him to attend in their Northumbrian village. Cantrill is chronic at small talk, he tells us, yet adept at code-switching – as demonstrated in the company of the “gen Z girls and gays” who love him, rural workers whose opinions he meekly opposes in the pub, and the private-school boys who (as per one gloriously indiscreet section) call the shots where Cantrill works, on Saturday Night Live UK.

At Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, until 30 August

All our Edinburgh festival reviews

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
From Jacob Rees-Mogg as a child to Frank Sinatra’s ego in space, this is a wild collage of clowning and performance art

There are plenty of works-in-progress on the fringe. Frankie Thompson insists (or has the voice of Peppa Pig do so) that her show is a work-in-regress, an expunging of Horrible Things from the deepest recesses of her, and our, recollection. Thompson, whose brand of clowning-meets-performance art more or less guarantees something interesting will happen on stage, parades these Things as lip-synced audio and audience-terrorising stunts, all marshalled by our brisk and wild-eyed host, brooking no nonsense in a polka-dot dress.

Women in the crowd can relax: Thompson’s Horrible Things are usually male, her victims in the crowd likewise. The first sketch sound clips an interview with 12-year-old Jacob Rees-Mogg, and if you ever doubted lip-sync as an art form, I offer you Thompson’s performance here as the very junior minister. As his every word damns the way this country’s ruling classes are raised, her hyper-expressive face and nanosecond-precise timing pass sharper commentary than a thousand satirical words ever could.

At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August. Then at Soho theatre, London, 9-21 November.

All our Edinburgh festival reviews

Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh
The frenetic Mancunian turns to quartz in search of inner peace – but his standup remains as crude and self-loathing as ever

I’ve seen two prominent comedians on this year’s fringe argue that your belief system is something you choose. Sign of the strange times, or just a way to justify some far-out comedy? Dan Tiernan’s show is certainly an extreme experience, as he discusses his interest – his faith, supposedly – in healing crystals. Rose quartz for calm, black tourmaline for grounding. Hard not to remark that neither seems to be doing its job well. Tiernan is the least calm and grounded comedian imaginable.

You have to strap in for the ride at the Mancunian’s shows, and Quartz and All is no less so than its predecessors. It opens with Tiernan seething with his usual self-loathing, and cracking a fantastic gag about getting glasses. Now 30, he’s still ambivalent, bordering on hostile, about his sexuality and appearance: the healing crystals are a last resort, he argues, because only magic can redeem a man as freakish and unlovable as he. Such arguments are his prerogative, and he brings his woebegone plight (so lonely, he’s “getting on boats just so someone will wave at me”) to often hilarious, blood-vessel-busting life. But in the shadow of Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, that brand of internalised-bully comedy can be uneasy viewing.

From Taiwanese steampunk dance to Australian climate comedy, here are 13 quick-fire fringe reviews

• All our Edinburgh festival reviews

For new perspective on the strange ways we behave, we all know the thought experiment “if a visitor from space arrived on Earth, what would they think?” In Born Sexy Yesterday, Anna Leong Brophy plays a supreme being implanted into a grown woman’s body to experience life for the first time. Presenting like some sci-fi sex robot with the soul of a naive child, Brophy duly marries a man on the front row and settles down to a life of domestic drudgery. Until she discovers she has other settings, other brands of femininity available for her to try out … Thus begins a potent hour, not always hilarious but undeniably persuasive, protesting against the strictly circumscribed roles that women are allowed to play – particularly in the movies, as Brophy sardonically demonstrates. The supreme-being conceit dilutes a bit – but our host’s righteous indignation and strong performing chops make this a compelling hour. BL
• At Pleasance Courtyard until 30 August

Whether Elf Lyons’ high-concept Hollywood throwback, Kate Dehnert’s disorientating rave or Ele McKenzie’s Bob Dylan fantasy, heartbreak fuels fine humour at the festival

Breakups. We’ve all been through them. Sometimes they’re mutual, sometimes not. Sometimes agony, sometimes relief. And sometimes, they’re world-shattering bereavements that seem to end, or at least upend, everything. That’s the experience two comedy shows seek to express on this year’s fringe – an experience that can’t be captured by the usual conventions of the medium. Wry wisecracks into a microphone just won’t cut it. A whole new form is required.

Perhaps formal innovation isn’t such a shock when Elf Lyons is the innovator, as almost all of this dedicated nonconformist’s work has been entirely bespoke. But even for her, The Woman on the Edge is something different: shards of a disintegrating sense of self, grafted together to suggest the journey Lyons has been on since her relationship ended, shortly before her wedding day, early last year. The conceit is that the show is being performed by a Norma Desmond-alike alter ego. A brittle and wise-cracking refugee from vintage Hollywood, smoke plumes from her décolletage as she fills in for absent Elf while keeping at bay her husband, the clown Pagliacci, on the end of the phone.

Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh
Performer cleared of death of her roommate in Italy uses new motherhood as framework for her defiant comedy show

‘Welcome to the most controversial show on the fringe!” Some audiences will diagnose self-regard in that intro by rookie standup Amanda Knox. For others, as for Knox herself, it merely acknowledges the continuing efforts to silence her. But then, Knox is “the human version of the blue/gold dress”, a canvas on to which we all project guilty, innocent – or weird. Her innocence now proved, it’s the last of these charges she takes on in this fringe outing, retelling her oft-told tale through the lens of new motherhood.

Is it a disgrace that she’s telling it at all – and profiting from it, some would say (although they’ve presumably never taken a show to the Edinburgh fringe)? Classifying Cartwheel as comedy may be a misstep; it risks looking insensitive and inaccurately describes the show. But, judging by the evidence, Knox would be damned whatever she did. Now at least she can tell her story in her own way, articulating a growing anger at her treatment and a determination to raise her daughter, not to be silenced and scared but “to be the exact girl I was punished for being”.

At Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh, until 17 August

All our Edinburgh festival reviews

Brian Logan offered advice for young comedians, discussed being spotted at a show, demystified star ratings, and considered whether the fringe is really ‘Edinburgh’

Achhca asks: Hi Brian! Reviews at the fringe seem to have extra weight to them, especially the exact star rating - four stars can go on the poster, three stars may as well be zero. What are your criteria for stars, and is it informed by the knowledge that a 4+ will end up stapled on posters across the city?

And brion asks: Why have you offered so few five star reviews? What is your rubric for a five star score?

Brian: I try to think about star ratings as little as possible. My job, as I see it, is to write something insightful, respectful and hopefully entertaining about a show; and to express all I have to say about that show in words. At a stretch, I recognise the usefulness, to some, of then appending a star rating to that review. But I wish we didn’t have to. It’s reductive and dumb. My own kids ask me after I’ve seen a show ‘what did you give it?’ rather than ‘what did you think of it?’ That makes me sad.

But: let’s not take ourselves too seriously! There was once, reputedly, a critic who never gave three-star reviews because he knew no one would read them. But most shows are three-star shows – i.e. good, enjoyable, competent if unexceptional. I’ll try to err on the side of enthusiasm whenever I can. God knows my own work has received enough two- (and lower) star reviews over the years. I know how depressing that is.

Matter to whom? They matter to me. My experience of art (books, movies, TV, whatever) is so massively enriched and improved by cross-referring it with the experience of reviewers. As soon as I close the last page of a book, I jump online and read what other people have said about it. I love to read what cleverer or better informed or just different minds to my own think about the shows and paintings and songs that I’ve experienced too. I find it weird that anyone might think otherwise.

Whether reviews matter in terms of an artwork’s success or failure (and who gets to define that?!) is less clear. Depends on the show. Depends on the circumstances. At any rate, reviewers are part of an ecology that responds to the art and entertainment that gets put out into the world, and one of the many factors that may influence how those artworks are received, understood and savoured. And the world would be more drab and undistinguished without them. (But then, I would say that…)

Forget cheesy acts, these days cruise ships boast the cutting edge tech to stage hip West End productions and Olivier award-winning musicals – and young people are loving it

The phrase “cruise ship entertainment” conjures vivid images, even to those who have never set foot on an oceangoing vessel. Starry backcloths, sequined frocks, tunes and croons from yesteryear, the lite-ent values of the 1970s preserved in aspic. Perhaps those stereotypes held water way back when the singer Jane McDonald ruled the reality TV waves. But – lazy thinking ahoy! – do they still?

Look at the shows currently a-sail on the high seas, from the Olivier award-winning 9/11 musical Come from Away, to hip theatre-maker Emma Rice’s acclaimed Brief Encounter. And look at the onboard production values, which “way surpass what you see in London theatres”, says Susannah Daley of Peel Entertainment, which provides shows for the Ambassador cruise line. “These ships are now being built with theatre in mind, to a really high spec, to hold between 600 and 1,000 people. What can be produced in them is pretty phenomenal.” Producer David Pugh, a veteran of the West End who has collaborated with Cunard cruises, says: “These are probably the most technical theatres, in terms of lighting and sound, that you’ve ever seen outside of the best theatres in the world.”

Soho theatre, London
The co-host of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update delivers an expertly constructed set of jokes about her quest to live a more embodied life

After serving an eye-catching apprenticeship in live comedy, Ania Magliano’s profile has now surged as co-host of SNL UK’s Weekend Update, a spoof news bulletin recalling to viewers of my vintage the work of the great Two Ronnies. Would Messrs Corbett and Barker have capitalised on TV success with a standup show about learning to love their sex organs? They would not – but times have changed. Magliano’s new set about living a more embodied life has all the qualities – great jokes; open and endearing personality; and very expert construction – to woo to her stage work the new fans she’s secured by cracking wise on the small screen.

The issue for the 28-year-old is alienation from her own body and its experiences. In Peach Fuzz, she looks longingly at other cultures, so much more corporeal than our own. But then, living in the UK, are there any bodily sensations worth savouring? There’s one obvious answer – but Magliano is already in therapy for her ambivalence about that, which is suggested here by a marvellously British and uncomprehending routine about an online sex influencer claiming to have experienced 27 consecutive orgasms. A later scene finds Magliano prompted by her counsellor to commune with her own genitals via an artfully held hand-mirror – as I dare say Descartes did when first theorising the mind-body problem all those years ago.

At Soho theatre, London, until 4 July. At Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, 7-22 August and touring until 7 May

Elf Lyons mixes humour and heartbreak, Frank Skinner works the crowd, Kristen Schaal returns with a secret – and one man sings the same song over and over again

No fringe festival has been complete in recent years without some oddball clown confection – usually animal-based – from the idiosyncratic Lyons. But this year’s offering promises something unusually personal, a reflection on a breakup she experienced while touring her last show.
Pleasance Courtyard, 5-31 August

The unsettling performance artist, who has made some electrifying stage shows in his time, is taking a leap into literature with an eye-opening book, In Pursuit of a Wonderful Nothing. A hard sell, he thinks

There are commercial strategies to promote your first book, and then there’s what Kim Noble planned. “I asked the publishers if I could hire a digger, then go to a roundabout, dig a massive hole and bury the books under the roundabout,” he tells me, deadpan over coffee. “They didn’t think it was a good idea.” You don’t say, Kim. This is a book that has been decades in the making, Noble reports – while his conversation makes clear why previous efforts came to naught. “Someone once approached me to write a book about a show I’d made. I started to do drawings for it. But I didn’t give them to the publisher, I left them around London in public toilets, so the publisher had to go out and search for them.

“And then,” he adds dolefully, “they decided to do another book instead.”

Glee Club, Glasgow
The masc lesbian comic from New York delivers a superb set with big laughs and twisty logic

Old-school standup celebrating the traditional masculine virtues? It’s fallen a little out of fashion. But it’s a different story when a masc lesbian comic delivers that material – a story of gleeful iconoclasm, big laughs and twisty gender logic. Ashley Gavin was a jobbing standup who blew up online during the pandemic, and whose output – including viral “crowd work” clips and the podcast We’re Having Gay Sex – has secured an ardent, largely queer fanbase. She’s like their best pal or big sis tonight, recounting how a woman who dresses like a teenaged wannabe car mechanic (and who – tongue firmly in cheek – considers more feminine women to be “a bunch of pussy-ass bitches”) came to be freezing her eggs.

The pleasure is in how Gavin lays siege to gender convention, with one routine after another scrambling the signifiers of what we expect men, women, or indeed masculine lesbians, to do and be. The opener finds “lesbian with a Brazilian” Gavin submitting herself to a waxing treatment. Elsewhere, the New Yorker ventures the argument – while savouring the discomfort it generates – that the clitoris is essentially a “tiny dick”. Later, she muses on penetration (might it not equally be seen as “envelopment”?) and contends that two “boy lesbians” hooking up with one another is “against God”.

The taboo-busting, Tony-award-winning show has returned. But how will its 00s attitudes land today? Will they still sing Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist and If You Were Gay?

There are certain problems you might expect when rehearsing a West End musical. Then there are the problems arising today, regarding the flaccidity of a prominent performer. “This one’s too floppy,” protests actor Noah Harrison, who is struggling with the choreography because his dance partner lacks backbone. No offence is taken, mind you: the culprit is made of felt. It’s time to swap out this cloth character for a sturdier one, and there are plenty to choose from. Row upon row of Sesame Street-alike puppets flank the room, each awaiting its moment in the spotlight.

This is Avenue Q, the Broadway-to-London hit, with songs by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, and book by Jeff Whitty, now revived to celebrate 20 years since its West End premiere. When it first launched, its mixture of multicoloured kids TV puppets, real-world problems (sex, racism, the housing crisis, existential drift) and outrageous songs felt truly out of the blue, and secured it Tony awards for best musical, best book and best score. But the young people to whom its story was addressed are now all grown up, and a new generation could benefit from the tale it has to tell.