It cannot have escaped your attention that there’s a little bit of theatre happening in Edinburgh at the moment. Lured by the promise of over 3000 #unboring shows, Box of Tricks packed a bag and headed over the border.

With only three days in Edinburgh, we decided to pack in as much as possible, squeezing in 13 shows across the city. Having trawled through Facebook, Twitter, e-mail invites, websites and the Fringe’s brochure we created a watertight schedule of new writing, comedy, physical theatre and children’s theatre.

Arriving in Edinburgh on Wednesday afternoon as the festival was only just cranking into gear we hit the Pleasance Courtyard for a double bill of hilarious Beasts: Solo and Kill The Beast’s League-of-Gentlemanly He Had Hairy Hands.

Thursday’s packed schedule had a very civilised midday start with Not Too Tame’s brilliant site-specific immersive piece Early Doors at The Jingling Geordie pub. A short stroll took us to Luke Barnes’ powerful monologue Bottleneck at the Underbelly.  Momentum increasing, we then caught Anna Jordan’s bold and brave Freak, Rob Hayes’ Awkward Conversations with Animals I’ve F*cked and sprinted across town to end the day with Chris Goode’s thought-provoking solo show Men In The Cities.

Waking to grey skies on Friday we started our day (suitably fortified by a full Scottish breakfast, well it’d be rude not to!) with Dirty Protest’s moving Last Christmas, followed by Manchester’s own Square Peg and their visually-striking new show Icarus. After a quick coffee stop, we then caught nabokov’s theatre-cum-gig Symphony before ending the day with some foul-mouthed Balkan puppets at Boris and Sergey’s fun-packed Astonishing Freakatorium.

The heavens opened on our final day at the festival, but damp spirits were lifted by Unlimited’s playful PlayDough at Northern Stage (King’s Hall) and our visit ended on a high at Paines Plough’s wonderful Roundabout space with Duncan McMillan’s superb two-hander Lungs.

A whirlwind visit, we packed in some top quality shows. Check out our Storify below for more of a flavour of our experiences North of the border…

Hannah and Adam
Box of Tricks