Tunnels Army @ The Fringe ★★★

You may have seen Desiree Burch, a Californian now living in London, on The Mash Report on BBC One.

There’s such remarkable symbiosis between material and performance in Irish dramatist Margaret Perry’s Collapsible that you wonder how the hour-long monologue will fare in any future incarnation. I don’t know how much Perry had the performer specifically in mind when she wrote the piece, nor whether they developed it together in rehearsal, but the fusion feels total.

Lou Sanders has named her latest show (which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe) Say Hello to Your New Step-Mummy. But, as she tells us in her opening comments, she's not a mother or stepmother, and hasn't yet met a father she likes, but “by the end of the year, God willing…”

The Red Pleasance Dome ★★★★

Urgent, fast-paced, seemingly never pausing for breath, How Not to Drown is a real-life boy’s own adventure, an appeal for compassion towards refugees, and an interrogation of nationality and identity. That’s quite a mix for a show of 100 minutes.

If nothing else, Arabella Weir quips, she can thank her mother for providing the material for her first Fringe show.

A fat cat who gobbles up everything in sight. A king who tests his wife’s fidelity with increasingly horrific trials. A man whose flatmate is Poverty. It’s hard to ignore the scathing contemporary resonances in theatre company 1927’s sly, witty new Roots, getting its first European performances at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Darren McGarvey AKA Loki: Scotland Today The Stand's New Town Theatre ★★★★★   

Phil Wang Pleasance Courtyard ★★★