A hellish birthday party

Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14) JJJ Last year Chris Forbes told Fringe punters about the unusual hobby he shares with his girlfriend Eleanor – pretending to have popped off this mortal coil. Yep, it’s weird, but hilarious the way he told it. Their uniquely romantic dance of death comes up again in this sequel show, in which we learn that Glaswegian Forbes and super-posh Cambridge gel Eleanor are getting spliced. If only our hero could stop imagining that three lines in a Brad Pitt film might make them best pals for long enough to get the wedding sorted.

That’s overthinking for you, and the type which gives this collection of reminiscences its title. It’s not all bad, mind – Scot Squad star Forbes may still be alive today (sorry, Eleanor) only because he’s thought long and hard about how to avoid getting on a plane that’s fated to fall.

Then there’s Forbes’ latest effort to amuse himself – saying outrageous things on social media via an invented personality in the hope trolls will come out to play. The results are a hoot, though the Fringe trend for Twitter and Facebook mischief must surely end soon.

The big surprise is what a good musician Forbes is, playing the accordion he subverted as a boy, and the guitar he took up as a teen to impress an ‘angel’ who worked in Pizza Hut. His mellow, west of Scotland speaking voice translates into a very pleasant instrument, as he sings the silly love songs he’s written down the years. Including one for Brad Pitt. Eleanor didn’t like them, but the packed house certainly does. If overthinking is what it takes to come up with a show this good, let’s hope that mind keeps on churning. MARTIN GRAY From Hull-based Bellow Theatre, two somewhat precious tales of women teetering on the edge.

Annie, a normal lass with aspirations, receives news that her boyfriend Joe has awoken after four years in a Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) JJJJ Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) JJJ It’s difficult to write about violence in Scottish society without conjuring up a raft of tired and unhelpful stereotypes; and the gifted Gary Mcnair is a writer-performer who seems, instinctively, to understand that. In all his shows, there’s a backbeat of violence in his experience as a boy growing up in an ordinary west of Scotland town. Yet the fear is part of a rich and often affectionate picture of that community; and that richness is fully present in his monologue Letters To Morrissey, co-produced by the Traverse and the Tron.

Almost seeming to channel a young Billy Connolly with his gift for conjuring up the working-class absurd, Mcnair tells the story of how back in the late 1990s, as a solitary teenager, he found solace in the music of Morrissey, and wrote letters to him, asking for advice.

He never received it, of course. Yet the letters mark out a coming-of-age story richly peopled with characters both tragic and comic, from Gary’s doomed friend coma, news which sends her back to her adolescence and then forward through the last ten years of her life, with a bit too much information about her safe but mundane job in fish processing required to introduce her central fishy metaphor about swimming against the stream. Her hankering for more out of life than traditional stability is credible, sad and, ultimately, tragic in its final twist.

The moment that Sophie introduces the metaphor of Arabian Nights narrator Scheherazade, who told a different story for 1001 nights to stave off her execution, it’s apparent that her own story will not end well but, as she informs us with chilling fortitude, “It’s amazing what you can get used to.”

Their interspersed though unconnected accounts are punctuated or underscored to no great effect by gently picked guitar from Isobel Rogers.

0 Arlene – Louise Ludgate, centre – holds court in The Whip Hand Tony with his terrifyingly violent Dad, to his slightly scary chum Jan The Lesbian (she insists on the full title). It’s Jan who finally offers Gary the ticket to a Morrissey concert in Glasgow that provides the show with its climax; and gives Mcnair the writer – 20 years on – a chance to tie up some of the loose ends of this powerful and touching show about what music can mean to a lonely boy.

Douglas Maxwell’s The Whip Hand, by contrast, is a much more ambitious and risky attempt at a dramatic confrontation with some of the underlying violence of Scottish history and society. In the spacious living-room of a grand Victorian villa in Glasgow, three men – uncle, nephew, and uncle’s ex-wife’s

Both women are looking for a way out, though the hopeful note on which they end is surely bittersweet. FIONA SHEPHERD

JJJ Tweedy, tall, but not as posh as he looks, Glenn Moore is from a bucolic, idyllic and slightly dull corner of southeast England.

But by some accident of nature Moore seems to have been blessed with an overactive intelligence and a mind that relentlessly churns out jokes.

There are is an astonishing rate of gags per minute in this show, which combines a story of awkward young love with the strange and mysterious tale of missing woman. new husband – are fiddling with a slide-show presentation that the uncle, Dougie, wants to make on his 50th birthday. The women arrive, in the shape of successful wife and ex-wife Arlene, played with loud flair by Louise Ludgate, and Molly, her daughter from her marriage to Dougie. Yet even before the slide-show starts, there’s a sense of menace, emanating mainly from Arlene; and once it begins – bringing with it accusations about the family’s former complicity in the slave trade, the levels of aggression and mutual resentment soar off the scale.

The problem, though, is that long before the end of Tessa Walker’s sitcom-styled production, its deliberately complex moral structure has

Part thriller, part romance but with a touch of darkness at the edges, Moore’s tale is rooted in the scenes of his village childhood.

His mum, dad and grandad are introduced – although in somewhat sketchy fashion – in a tale which mixes fact with fiction.

Sometimes you wish Moore would unleash his imagination a bit more and bring in a whiff of surrealism, some more outlandish characters or some genuine wildness.

They say you should write what you know, but in comedy surely, you can write whatever you like.

Despite the awkward persona, Moore is confident and relaxed on stage.

His writing is dazzling, dense and accomplished, and you suspect there is quite a lot more to him than this buttoned-up parody of Englishness. CLAIRE SMITH descended into exhausting theatrical chaos, as Dougie (Jonathan Watson) suddenly morphs from well-meaning loser into a caricature of a working-class hard man, and everyone shouts at everyone. What emerges is an increasingly familiar assertion that middle-class liberalism is an ugly sham, and that western civilisation is built on levels of violence that will ultimately destroy it; and if that alone is no longer enough to sustain an interesting drama, Maxwell’s effort to give the story a Scottish dimension seems even more problematic, full of half-processed assumptions and stereotypes. JOYCE MCMILLAN

JJ Mad Like Roar make a decent Fringe debut with this piece on grieving for a parent who is still alive – the unseen yet ever-present Alan, once a keen gardener, who has retreated to his room.

Dutiful daughter Daisy takes up the green-fingered mantle with her husband Christian while her disengaged brother Ollie goes on the pull.

The chipper mundanity of their distraction techniques – tend his garden, buy him a puppy, employ a carer to deal with him – can only keep a lid on the unresolved anger for so long, but the switch to darker melodrama still feels like a clumsy conclusion. FIONA SHEPHERD Last year lots of political comics had to rewrite their shows at the last minute after Brexit. This year Andrew Doyle rewrote his show after falling out with a bunch of his friends in an argument about Jeremy Corbyn.

Doyle, who is co-creator of the angry internet sensation Jonathan Pie, and is known for his left-leaning acerbic wit, believes there is a schism in left-wing politics.

He’s not afraid to hold unpopular opinions. He’s a gay man who disapproves of gay marriage and he feels alienated by the complexity of debates about sexual identity and gender.

He’s religious, but is sceptical about the messiah-like qualities currently being ascribed to the current leader of the Labour party.

Doyle wants to encourage free speech but doesn’t have a coherent enough notion of how to go about it. There are some interesting ideas here but it feels unfinished.

The show is best when things get personal and Doyle taps into the hurt he felt when his middle-class Labour-supporting friends refused to listen to his point of view. This would have been a better starting point to work out what he really wanted to say. CLAIRE SMITH Greenside @ Infirmary Street (Venue 236) JJ Andrew Shires’s bizarre two-hander doesn’t work as a play but is an innovative way to present a series of odd sketches in service of a framing story. Unfortunately, most of the sketches aren’t particularly funny – and the story goes nowhere. Commissioned to write a book of short stories for Kevin Spacey, a ghostwriter and his flatmate enact Spacey’s rejected original stories. There are brief flashes of wit here (the blind date story is particularly neat) and the cast give it their all but there’s far more chaff than wheat. RORY FORD