Editor's note: This article contains sexual themes.
EDINBURGH — For nearly a month, Edinburgh has been overrun by performers, posters, packed rooms — and some very strange ideas.
The Edinburgh Fringe comes to a close Monday, wrapping up the monthlong performing arts festival that has become a proving ground for some of theater's riskiest, weirdest and most original work. Sometimes, those experiments escape the festival entirely and go on to become global cultural phenomena. (Looking at you, Fleabag and Baby Reindeer.)
This year, more than 4,200 shows descended on Edinburgh, with artists hailing from 74 countries.
NPR did its research — making its way through roughly 40 of them.
That meant testing out theater in a 200 degree Fahrenheit sauna. A musical about a Nebraska-based butt plug wearing cult. And clowns. So many clowns. A surprising (or perhaps not so surprising?) number of them naked.
Feeling the FOMO yet?
We've rounded up some of the best performances from this year's Fringe that are headed to the United States — plus a few more worth keeping on your radar.
Hole!
Where: Playwrights Horizons in New York
When: Dec. 1, 2026 to Jan. 10, 2027
Garth, a rural Nebraska-based preacher, wakes up one day with a warning from God about an impending apocalypse known as "The Great Sucking" which risks sending his congregation "ass-first" into space to burn on the face of the sun. The only way to save themselves is to wear butt plugs at all times. Next thing we know, Garth has ordered 8,000 wooden butt plugs off Amazon and — as it turns out — he was smart to do so.
Have you made it this far? Good.
Because what sounds like a preposterous premise quickly turns into an incredibly charming and surprisingly thoughtful musical, following the preacher's teenage son, Luke, and his best friend, Conor — both closeted and struggling to find their place — as they escape their small conservative town and embark on a coming of age road trip that explores friendship, belonging, and the risks we take to be ourselves.
Jake Brasch and Nadja Leonhard-Hopper, the talented writers and stars, do a remarkable job of playing the show's many characters, with Brasch also on keyboards while Leonhard-Hopper handles the sound effects using an impressive array of props to take us through every swish and whoosh. If you're wondering how it all comes together, it is in large thanks to the incredible chemistry the pair share on stage — you can tell they are having fun, and in our experience, the audience is too.
Stamptown
Where: The Bell House in New York
When: Sept. 10 & 15
Zach Zucker, aka the bad boy of clowning, hosts this raunchy, high energy variety show, built around an ensemble of improvising, slightly manic and frequently very offscript performers.
Fresh off a Netflix special that premiered earlier this month, Stamptown crams in a dizzying mix of acts — think fire breathing burlesque dancers, aerial pole acrobats spinning above you, and some of the sharpest, strangest clown comedy around.
Do some of the bits go on a bit too long? Absolutely. Does Zucker — seem capable of veering off in any direction at any moment? Also yes. But that unpredictability is the point. Half the fun is never quite knowing where the show is headed next.
Elf Lyons is The Woman on the Edge
Where: Soho Playhouse in New York
When: Sept. 24 to Oct. 18
Elf Lyons is not a household name in the United States — but that will hopefully change with her breathtaking show The Woman on the Edge, one of the most spectacular pieces of this year's Fringe.
Lyons, who started her career in standup before training as a clown at the École Philippe Gaulier in France, opens her show in character, wearing a red wig and speaking in a strange mid-Atlantic accent seemingly plucked straight out of old Hollywood, working her way across the stage on her tip-toes. "I am a woman on the edge!" she shouts.
For the first ten minutes, the audience seems a little unsure where any of this is going — something Lyons is self-aware enough to address. But by the end, we understand the full depth of what she means by being "on the edge." And boy, is it something.
As the manic character starts to chip away and the real Lyons begins to break through, the show reveals itself as something far more vulnerable. We learn about the collapse of her engagement just days before her wedding day, the subsequent heartbreak and the disappointment following a brief liaison with a 40-year-old unnamed man who seems to think a high step count is an adequate substitute for actual therapy.
Lyons uses her extraordinary physicality — slipping between a range of accents, mime, and endless amount of gestures to hold together a piece that could easily fall apart.
By the end, the audience is left almost speechless — and still thinking about this singular, deeply original performance long after Lyons has left the stage.
John Robertson's The Dark Room
Where: PAX West in Seattle and ASYLUM in New York
When: Sept. 4 to 7 (Seattle) and Sept. 9-12 (New York)
Interactive shows are having a moment, but Australian comedian John Robertson can reasonably claim to have gotten there early. The Dark Room was born in 2012, from a 5-minute comedy routine about "how crap videogames were in the 1980s."
As the story goes, the audience, a room full of "delightful nerds" — started playing along with a game that did not exist. More than 3,000 shows and a sizable cult following later, The Dark Room has evolved into a choose-your-own-adventure live action video game, presided over by Robertson as its obscene, merciless and incredibly quick-witted host.
The premise is simple enough. The audience is, quite literally, trapped inside a dark room.
There is only one goal — escape.
Robertson hand picks audience members and forces them to choose between four options flashed up on screen. Win, and there's £20 on offer — and maybe a sandwich from one of the festival snack carts. Lose, and everyone knows what comes next:
"YA DIE, YA DIE!"
Along the way, the audience can expect tons of humiliation, terrible second prizes, and the guarantee that Robertson will turn at least one poor soul's wrong turn into several minutes of unhinged public destruction.
Garry Starr: Classic Penguins
Where: Studio Seaview in New York
When: Sept. 3 to Oct. 4
What if all the Penguin Classics books were actually written by penguins?
Such was the inspiration for the bizarre premise behind Australian clown Damien Warren-Smith's hit show Garry Starr: Classic Penguins.
Just like actual penguins, books are on the brink of extinction. And our protagonist Garry Starr (yes, that's Garry and Starr with two R's), is determined that he can save penguins and literature at the same time. His solution is to tear through a long list of Penguin Classics one by one — Moby Dick! Wuthering Heights! The Little Prince! — all while completely naked, save for a pair of penguin flippers, a tuxedo coat and a black top hat.
To pull it off, Starr needs plenty of help from the audience — and remarkably they are more than willing to play along.
And that willingness to play is really the point.
"All of us remember what it was like to play as a kid — to be in that moment," Warren-Smith says. But something generally happens to us in adulthood that makes us forget.
Warren-Smith's goal is to coax the audience back to that uninhibited flow state. What's remarkable is just how quickly people are willing to surrender to it, and the increasingly ridiculous risks they are willing to take once Starr has given them permission to play again.
And a few we hope will make their way to this side of the Atlantic…
Coco The Time-Traveling Tart
Oh no, darlings!
Coco, our glamorous host and self-described "historical hazard," has lost one of her pearl earrings, and she must enlist help from the audience to retrace her steps.
Fortunately, Coco has booked us all a time-shifting Big Black Cab. What follows is a ridiculous hourlong romp through history, taking us everywhere from the Garden of Eden with Coco's gal pal Eve to some misadventures involving Napoleon. Some of the history is factual. A lot of it is not. All of it is a guaranteed good time, thanks to Coco's sass, glamour and effortless charm. Standing 6-foot-7 without heels, she looks a little like Princess Diana stretched to improbable proportions.
Coco is the brainchild of comedian Max Norman, who describes the show as "revenge" on his artist mother, who used to drag him around the Tate Museums as a child.
Norman, who also leads a host of gloriously entertaining tours around London and beyond, built this show around the same idea — that even the driest elements of history become much more fun when everyone is invited to join in.
On a separate recent tour at the National Galleries of Scotland, Coco had her audience galloping like horses across one room to the next, collapsing dead on the floor during a history lesson about the downfall of the Jacobites — and — naturally, pausing to appreciate a few bulges along the way.
It is history stripped of any obligation to behave itself. One can only hope Coco finds a way to bring her Big Black Cab stateside one day.
Jess Fuchs: Feral
The 32-year-old Aussie comic Jess Fuchs claims she isn't interested in learning lessons.
"Really, I'm just here to talk s***," she tells the audience at the start of her debut Fringe standup.
Turns out, Fuchs is deceiving us, because what follows is a neatly crafted and hilarious hour of storytelling that begins and ends with a hilarious note on the Titanic — a tragedy Fuchs can relate to for reasons that will all become clear by the finish.
Fuchs easily charms the audience with her keen observations on pretty privilege, obsessions about her weight (featuring a doctor's remark that Fuchs, a descendant of Holocaust survivors, has a body type that was designed to "survive war and famine") and all around relatability.
EVITA TOO
You've probably heard of Evita Perón (and it's okay if that's only thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber).
But what about Isabel, the second wife of former Argentinian President Juan Perón?
As it turns out, many people in Argentina don't actually remember who she was.
Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole, the duo behind Sh!t Theatre, wanted to know why — and how — Isabel Péron was erased from history.
Especially given that she became one of the world's first female presidents, after assuming her husband's position following his death in 1974 — until a military coup about two years later.
What follows is part history lesson, part journalistic investigation, and a deeply nuanced and very funny musical trying to get to the bottom of it all.
Who was Isabel Perón, and why has history chosen to forget her? What does a woman have to do to be remembered?
There are, of course, more questions than there are answers. But isn't that always the way with the most compelling stories history leaves behind?
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