In The Shadow Of The Volcano: Blurt Edinburgh Fringe Picks 2018

Gripping to the worn slopes of an ancient volcano like a dog to a radiator long-since switched off, drained of its fluid and put into a skip, Edinburgh squats, thighs tired, fingernails soiled. Edinburgh: "The Hot Bin City", 'The City That Has A Train Station That You Think Is A River", "The One Not In England". The gigantic hand of time twists the coils, readies the spring, twists, readies, clenches and unclenches, readies and readies. Edinburgh is poised, back to us, hands against the bedstead, ready to receive.

Comedy

Ah, comedy. The art form that is to theatre what some rice in an old tin is to the roof of the Sistine Chapel. A medium with one, sole purpose: to extract laughs from an audience member through enforced, designed fun. The onstage equivalent of artificial insemination. The farmers whose poised fingers, dappled with the preserved seed of powerful bullocks, I most heartily recommend to you this year, Scotland-bound, include Hearty Miles, whose show 'Are These My Children?" chronicles his own genuine adventures to adopt previously parented children by the end of the Fringe (Pleasance Attic, 2.15pm, 2-15th August), and Wendy Went, a musical comedian playing the walls of St Actuary's Cathedral whilst wailing about hunger (Assembly Roxy, 6.47pm, 3-21st August). Last year, acclaimed white male double-act Brendon shocked pretty much some of us by winning the acclaimed Succulence Award, for Juicy Jokes as a result of their exclusively braille-based set, and it looks as though they're set to follow it up this year with the promising Sketches From The Perspective of the Paper. Intriguing, with the smell of success already rancid in my pestilent nostrils (Gilded Balloon Roof, 12am, 2-26th August). Finally, Margaret Fornicant is offering up her first new stand-up set in almost twenty-seven years. Entitled Out Of Prison and Out of Money, Fornicant will be aiming to salvage her '80s reputation as the 'Damsel of Distress', the 'Agonising Aunt', the 'Fucked-Up Bitch', shake off those recent allegations and get back to what she does best: making people physically ill with laughter (PBH at The Shed, 10am, 2-5th August). For further fans of "sketch" "comedy", two more glinting diamonds burrowed fist deep in the murky soils catch the eye: LoveHard, a handsome double-act presenting 50 characters caught in the middle of a 1980s small-town American sci-fi in Tales From The Elsewhere (Laughing Horse @ Espionage, 8.45pm, 2-19th August) and Dirty White Boys, a double handsome-act bringing high-energy nonsense to a variety of news topics, with shouting, quizzes, and maybe even a musical finale, in Manners (Just The Fancy Room at Just The Tonic, 10.10pm, 2-26th August).

Theatre

For those aiming to assure themselves that the wearying trudge north through plague, pennilessness and Derby was worthwhile, the Edinburgh Festival of Fringe also has much to offer in the way of theatre. Brand new venue The Bin (an exclusively immersive-theatre-based festering tin can of ungodly hire costs) is programmed by Burton Ceriboam, the creative behind 2016's gob-altering Nerds On Acid and Bread, and the writer of 2017's Fuck Off Moses. His reinvention of the space that, according to a recent Guardian interview, used to be "just a bin behind the University, which no one was using except for putting rubbish in", has been astonishing. The Bin will be hosting Jerkoff Theatre's Guns In My Tum (a deep-space epic presented through the medium of heavy weaponry), A Theatre In The Hand's revival of their smash hit Ugly Mark Does Someone In (an ugly man gets tired of being ugly and physically assaults an audience member) and the particularly effluent Romeo vs. Juliet, by theatrenow, "a new radical re-imagining of Shakespeare's romantic comedy in which Romeo likes punching and Juliet likes kicking. And they're both footballers. On acid." Roll over Shakespeare, and keep rolling, in your grave.

Cabaret and Circus

Sadly, both sections have been cancelled this year because the new Fringe director Licah Mace "just doesn't really like them that much."

Children's Shows

Children at the Edinburgh Fringe always feel a bit like a badger at a zoo: difficult to please. Needless to say, though I will say it anyway, the Artistic Director of Children's, Angela Frenzy, really has pulled out all the stops on the organ of this year's infant amusements. Popular children's comedy double-act Molly and Handel (fresh from their third series on Daveling, the kids' branch of Dave) are bringing not one, not two, but fifteen shows up to Edinburgh this year. Highlights include Molly and Handel Go Skiing and Molly and Handel Fail to Blend In (Pleasance Lake, 11am & 12pm, 1-27th August). Zany Productions will be shamelessly kavorting the kiddy krowd with their famous Kid-speare (C Toilets, 12.30pm, 12-19th August), with new shows including Hamlette ("Hamlette's dad refuses to make his mum dinner, so she stays cross at him for a whole evening and Hamlette isn't allowed to play his Xbox") and Tot-us Andron-kid-us ("A playground brawl turns ugly when one of the teachers at St. Rome's Primary kills and eats three tots.")

Whilst Edinburgh slumbers uneasily for these final, precious, short though still 24-hour, days, and their normally-priced pints quiver with the rumble of approaching egos, beneath all, the magma of the hitherto thought-extinct volcano under Edinburgh Castle begins to churn once more. Fissures and fault lines will shimmer through the cobbled streets. The Edinburgh Festival of Fringe looks in, blinks, shudders, then finishes the remains of its £8.50 single vodka & Red Bull. The show must go on. See you there.