We enter the Artbox Fargani Theater at the delightful Thessaloniki Fringe. Kostas Chatzigeorgiou struts the stage, wearing a striking pink jacket and miming Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. In the words of the song, he’s “having a ball”. Sadly, this proves to be short-lived. Chatzigeorgiou is waiting for the arrival of Niki Axioti, so that their performance can begin. However, she is delayed. Chatzigeorgiou’s exuberant antics are interrupted by the venue manager, Pantelis Bakatselo

A Night of Movement and Momentum Blending soaring melodies, wiry violin lines and bursts of controlled chaos, Man/Woman/Chainsaw transformed Brighton’s Concorde 2 into a space of collective energy and release. Touring in support of debut album Cannonball, the London six-piece arrived carrying considerable momentum. Yet what quickly became clear was that, despite the growing acclaim surrounding the record, Man/Woman/Chainsaw remain a distinctly live proposition. Their music co

Between Intimacy and Noise: 234 Fest at Green Door Store, 2026. Two days, two stages and a diverse line up of bands combined to create a vivid portrait of today's independent music community as 234 Fest returned to Brighton’s Green Door Store. What made the event especially compelling was not simply the quality of the performances but the breadth of artistic approaches on display. Across the weekend, audiences were invited into worlds that ranged from the intimate to the conf

Will Oliver has the hallmarks of genuine Fringe discovery in For An Eye?. His sophomore surrealist horror returns to the Dundee Fringe following runs at Edinburgh and Dundee in 2025. Following a shopkeeper selling miscellaneous junk, the play quickly turns from an absurd examination of suffering a landlord’s wrath into a familial body horror of Oedipal proportions. This is a show with a demonic energy. There is a delicious evilness to all of Oliver's concoctions, logical step

Isaac Burnett is not far from striking gold in this wonderfully off-kilter work-in-progress, as eccentric as it is a thinker. It follows a guy called Dylan throwing a flat party. He's wearing a Kafka tee but is the portrait of a total nihilist. He's like a more cynical version of Jez from Peep Show, but he's about to go through horrors the former couldn't imagine. Namely, having Kleptoparasite seagulls steal his hangover-cure sausage roll. And afterwards, in the play's centra

Pamela Banchetti's solo show is an intriguing homage to storytelling with some wonderfully playful passages. It has clear love and care put into it on linguistic and theatrical levels. The play is a series of variations on the same story – about a grandmother who bakes a cake using eggs, flour, milk and so on pulled from orifices of her body. She bakes the cake in order to get closer to the sun. On paper it sounds grotesque. In Banchetti's hands, it is tender. Her performance

Daniel Cremin is every bit the showman is his solo show WHY MAGIC?, an autobiographical piece of theatre about the origins of his love for magic, and the steps it takes to become yourself. Cremin's act is charming and meticulous. He knows exactly what the show is and clearly relishes in its playfulness and humanity. The sleight of hand magic is head-scratching and teasing. You watch him make a ball disappear and then your eyes are on that hand and a subtle movement throws you

Friday 4 September 2026 Brighton Psych Fest returned for a third year with a strong lineup of acts across the psychedelic music spectrum and far beyond. With around 40 acts performing across seven Brighton grassroots venues, Brighton Psych Fest defies complete observation. Everyone assembles their own version of the day, shaped by chance encounters, curiosity and difficult decisions on who to see next. What follows is not a definitive account, but one route through a kaleidos

Contrast, Reinvention, Intimacy and the Art of Listening. Green Door Store, Brighton, Sunday 6 September 2026 The first Melancholy Fest presented by MelancholyMGMT offered far more than a straightforward showcase of Brighton talent. What emerged over six hours of live music was a festival defined by contrasts, reinvention and a few surprises. With artists spread across Green Door Store's main stage and bar area, the event's structure established a natural tension between inti

Cat Barrett pens and performs in this beautifully understated reflection on finding solace in the Scottish Highlands. It weaves through a pleasingly broad series of intersections, between family, self, nature and how these things are shaped and changed by the urban environments of late-stage capitalism. Following Skye, the play explores her time in the Cairngorms from early trips with her dad until a recent trip where her troubled mind clouds the area. Skye is a sympathetic c

The Yellow Wallpaper was a short story written in the nineteenth century, whose underlying themes continue to resonate 130 years later. A couple have rented a mansion for the summer, with Jane having recently given birth. Her husband John - a doctor – diagnoses her with depression and prescribes a ‘rest cure’. She takes up enforced residence in the attic room, and has various drugs administered to her. She is not permitted reading or writing materials. Stripped of her voice,

A circus tent is an interesting place to stage a clown show of such theological proportions but it does seem to completely transform into a more cryptic space for an hour of strangely subconscious shenanigans. Sam Fishman, Corey Podell and John Norris seem to have struck gold here, and it is a remarkably accessible hour of clowning. I coincidentally caught Podell's direction of a far more out there late night slot at Banshees. It was fantastic. The material here is definitely

Heavily drawing from a very Brechtian sort of clowning, Diagnostic Trouble Code's debut play is a fantastic romp through an imagined event. It is stylistically compelling, performed with some panache and despite not having the most biting of politics it focuses on interesting intersections between agriculture, speech and the climate crisis. The play deals with a fictional rural town Cropshire, the banning of vegetables there by a bureaucratic government, and how this decision

Morten Grove Frandsen is thrilling in this espresso shot of a new Opera, part of the enormously successful #DANISH showcase. Drawn from posts by young people on social media, it is a surprisingly harrowing text that moves as Frandsen moves through the strangely backroom space constructed beautifully in Louise Beck's immersive, immediate production. The audience is sat on yellow crates in a dimly lit space. Frandsen among us, his singing is immediate and moving. It's difficul

Butoh, says performer Joanna Rosenfeld, is somewhere in between dance and physical theatre. The dance it practices is a dance of darkness, a dance of death. Integral to the post-war Japanese artistic conversation, Butoh emerged from the pain of a traumatised society, yet it is far more than simply harrowing. It is a medium that can be equally sublime and grotesque, sometimes flitting between these two poles in the same sequence. Joanna Rosenfeld's Resonant VOID is a Butoh pe

The work of Scottish company Without Compromise Theatre is, simply put, essential. Their theatre is a brutal, unapologetic look into the conditions of life in Scottish working class communities. Often, and sometimes even to some aesthetic success, this section of society is presented in a stylised manner. However, what we have in Without Compromise's latest proposition Collateral Damage is a truthful presentation of a family in crisis, written with great care, and performed w

Gabi Flares is touching in this experimental one-woman show Deluge. It boasts a myriad of ideas, and there are some lovely passages in this one, but it never quite coheres for me. Flares is acrobatic, athletic and always compelling. She begins the play with her head poking through a ladder, a sort of Beckettian restriction. She is astonishing here; the ladder is almost an extension of her body as she begins to think about the end. She asks the audience to say something we w

It’s an intimate environment: a comfy chair, standard lamp, books, drinks. It feels safe. We have stepped into psychotherapist Adam’s domain. Adam tells us about his sessions with Isabel. Her issues, while important to her, should be meat and drink to a man with his training, qualifications, experience and empathy. But he’s distracted: he’s wistfully thinking about another client, Bill. Isabel is clearly nobody’s fool and calls him out on his failure to listen, especially whe

As the name might suggest, Jules Verne’s classic Around the World in 80 Days is one of the inspirations for this production. The other is the somewhat less well-known Georges Méliès. While also a magician and actor, Méliès was a pioneer of film making, being particularly renowned for science fiction and special effects. He made his first film in 1896, with a further 500 to follow. The advent of the First World War brought this prolific work to a shuddering halt, though, with

Statistics vary, but it’s believed that only 2% of actors manage to make a sustainable living from the profession. While talent will be one factor, it is not necessarily the defining one. The resilience and courage to endure humiliation, rejection and financial hardship will be required. Yet still, high hopes are in abundance. How Not To Make It In America follows a young Australian actor, Matt, who ventures to New York in the summer of 2001 in search of his big break. He’s o