Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews: Alright Sunshine / K Mak at the Planetarium / PAINKILLERS

Alright Sunshine, Pleasance Dome ★★★★★

Edinburgh writer Isla Cowan’s deceptively powerful solo show begins as an almost affectionate tribute to the city’s Meadows, fittingly just a few minutes down the road from the show’s venue – its yummy Morningside mummies taking their offspring to nursery, its chilled-out yoga groups, its joggers and gaggles of students hunched around disposable barbecues. By the show’s blazing close, however, the Meadows has become a place of violence and trauma, and the play has transformed into a blistering howl of fury and frustration at women’s conflicted role in the police, internal divisions and barely repressed terror.

Nicky is a valued female PC, useful to the Force as a non-confrontational presence when breaking up scuffles on hot days, but pushed to her limit because of her position. She’s nonetheless wedded to her role herself: it’s been drilled into her by her father’s similar history, though that’s left her struggling with her own issues of being a woman in a world where she’s ceaselessly told not to behave like one.

Cowan’s expertly paced script is a slow, drip-drip reveal, not only of the dark underside of Edinburgh – all too easy to overlook amid the colourful hedonism of the Fringe – but also of the many levels of conflict and repression hidden in her protagonist’s inner world. Most impressively, Cowan’s gradual reveal – conveyed through resonant repeated images and an inexorable shift in tone across the play’s hour – allows for a crystal-clear exposition of her ideas, but she refuses easy answers: Alright Sunshine might be a deeply political creation, but it’s far from polemical.

And it gets a ferociously powerful performance from Molly Geddes, who prowls the stage like a caged animal as she dons her police uniform piece by piece, and who manages to find both vulnerability and desperate confusion in Nicky’s shocking closing revelations. Debbie Hannan’s close direction finds plenty of nuance and a fair dose of dark humour among Cowan’s colourful writing, as well as a relentless increase in intensity as she turns up the gas under Nicky’s conflicts.

Alright Sunshine is a hard-hitting show that stays long in the memory, but one that refuses easy answers to difficult questions – and is all the more powerful for that.

• Until 24 August
  

K Mak at the Planetarium, Summerhall ★★★

Summerhall’s resident gin distiller Pickerings have installed a gin garden just outside the venue’s back-courtyard Demonstration Room, where K Mak (Brisbane’s Kathryn McKee, pictured above, image by Peter Frankland) is in residence for four shows per day until the end of the Fringe. It feels like a fitting combination: grab a drink, escape the festival madness and chill with blissed-out tunes from the Australian singer/keyboardist and her distinctive ensemble of drums, violin and cello, plus sumptuous visuals projected ceiling-high on the space’s back wall. Okay, the former vet school teaching room might not be quite a planetarium (nor offer comfy reclining seats), but it’s probably the closest Summerhall can provide.

Certainly, K Mak at the Planetarium has a lot to offer in terms of bathing in beats and surrendering to opulent images of the cosmos, sensually blooming flowers, the deep ocean or hypnotic, ever-changing patterns. But sound reflected from the Demonstration Room’s endless hard edges is far from clear, and it’s often hard to fathom connections between the music and visuals, impressive though both are. K Mak’s songs themselves range from imposing walls of sound to fragile, hushed creations, and she’s a hugely watchable presence, with particularly strong support from her string duo. Head over for some festival respite, or some space for reflection, or for a sensory overload of sound and image. For anyone hoping for a bit more than musical and visual escapism, however, K Mak at the Planetarium has a bit less to offer.

• Until 24 August

PAINKILLERS, Summerhall ★★★★

Japan-born, Edinburgh-based theatre maker Mamoru Iriguchi (pictured above, image by Jemima Yong) is something of a Fringe legend, purveyor of increasingly elaborate, often bewildering (if not downright frustrating) shows that nonetheless display a freewheeling, somewhat surreal creativity and an unbridled playfulness. If 2023’s What You See When Your Eyes Are Closed/What You Don’t See When Your Eyes Are Open brought an immense cardboard cyclops on stage, then this year’s PAINKILLERS is in some ways a more modest, focused creation, even if its layers of meaning, its through-the-looking-glass (quite literally) logic and its not-quite repetitions maintain Iriguchi’s trademark playfulness and elusiveness.

Clad in a voluptuous (and, probably, sweltering) knitted, full-body women’s body suit, Iriguchi plays magician’s assistant Anastasia – or is that Mari, or even the magician himself, whose name might be Alessandro even if he’s really called… Mamoru? He divulges unreliable details of the couple’s meeting and their belief-defying tricks, but as identities become more and more closely knitted together, and as audience members find themselves sucked into Iriguchi’s whirlwind of identities, PAINKILLERS quickly becomes a witty dissection of social expectations, the trappings of gender, and the fragility of self. Like many of Iriguchi’s creations, it’s a playful, deceptively homespun work that gently prods at some profound questions. It will no doubt infuriate some, but charm and captivate many others. But whatever its impact, it only serves to confirm Iriguchi as a true Fringe original, with plenty of interesting things to say (perhaps too many), and some unexpected ways of saying them.

• Until 25 August

• The Edinburgh Fringe runs until 25 August 
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