Politics always plays a big part in the fringes of Edinburgh. But with an outgoing prime minister, several Westminster scandals and a fast-moving Tory leadership race, the potential for material is unusually ripe for performers this year.
As well as interviews with political heavyweights including Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and current and former Labor leadership including Gordon Brown, Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Jeremy Corbyn, the satire arena has a large part in politics.
“There’s a real appetite for politics everywhere at the moment,” said standup, journalist and former Labor councilor Ayesha Hazarika, who has had to leave writing the start of her show to the last minute due to the fast pace of political events.
“We’re living in this very hyperactive roller-coaster era of emotional politics right now, and it’s getting crazier,” said Hazarika, whose “State of the Country – Power, Politics and Tractors” show opens Monday, Aug. 8, at the Gilded Balloon.
In the last few days alone, he has given up on sacking Rishi Sunak as Tory leader, but he went one better in a Sky debate on Thursday and fell the next morning with his comments about diverting funds from deprived urban areas to wealthy places like Tunbridge Wells. .
“You’re like, ‘Okay, buddy, please stop now because I’ve got a play to write,'” he said.
Boris Johnson will no doubt feature heavily in various political stimuli – including the debut of Sarah Southern, former David Cameron aide and Matt Forde – but he has also inspired a number of whole works.
Boris the Third in the Pleasance Courtyard imagines an 18-year-old Johnson, unprepared, playing Richard III. Written and directed by Adam Meggido, the comedy stars Harry Kershaw Johnson.
Meanwhile, Nadine Dorries Productions presents ‘My Dad and Other Lies’, a one-woman show at the Pleasance Dome, by ‘Charlotte Johnson’, who describes herself as ‘Boris Johnson’s illegitimate daughter’.
Improv show Boris Live at Five, at the Gilded Balloon Museum invites the audience to ask the Prime Minister “anything you like”.
Comedy website Chortle recently said Johnson would play a huge role at this year’s festival with a series of performances “trying to make sense of the mess that has been Westminster politics of late”.
“He’s a comic figure, he’s also a tragic figure and all that stuff is great for comedy,” Chortle editor Steve Bennett said, adding that Johnson was “a product of our time”. “A mythic story of his rise and fall. What made him popular brought him down.
Like society, there’s a lot of anger in comedy right now, Bennett said. “Comedy fueled by anger, satire fueled by anger, and Boris’ own tragicomedy are probably the leading things.”
Southern, whose show Scandalous! opens at the Voodoo Rooms on Saturday, promises to take audiences behind the scenes at Westminster. Amid Partygate, Beergate, resignations and the former health secretary Matt Hancock affair, he said: “I don’t think there’s been a better time to write a show about scandals. These are the things that have brought us together as a nation since Covid.
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He added: “One thing Boris has provided is a lot of substance for us.”
Combining political influences from both sides of the Atlantic, Claire Parry’s Boorish Trumpson at the Assembly Rooms promises to “#MakeMusicGreatAgain” with “an interactive, musical and clowning interrogation of power and those who hold it”.
Other political productions include Bloody Difficult Women, columnist Tim Walker’s comedy play about Gina Miller’s case against Theresa May’s government; “The Room Next Door” by Michael Spicer; Mankind’s Last Hope by Extinction Rebellion activist Kate Smurthwaite; and AfroPolitiCool by model Eunice Olumide.
“It’s a fantastic time for political comedy,” said Forde, whose show Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right runs all month on Pleasance Beyond and interviews Gordon Brown on Sunday.
According to him, the appetite for political comedy grows every year. But as British politics become increasingly chaotic, it is on a dangerous trajectory, he warned. “Unfortunately, I think things are getting worse. The upside is that it gives me a lot of material to write about.
