Every Show You Will See at Edinburgh Fringe This August

It's August, the Heatwave of Our Lives is somehow still going, and most of the UK has entirely forgotten what it was like to have to wear a jumper. Everyone else is Instagramming themselves on one of those watermelon pool floats in Ibiza, or failing that they've at least gone somewhere in Eastern Europe where pints cost two quid.

But you, an intellectual, are instead spending several hundred pounds and ten whole days of your precious annual leave on a trip to Edinburgh, in fucking Scotland, to spend two weeks queuing in the rain with a bunch of hardcore university Drama Soc nerds, loads of middle class families dressed in all-matching Mini Boden and an impossible number of loud Americans, all so you can pay £8 for the privilege of watching some extremely below-average stand-up in the cramped basement room of a Mexican chain restaurant. Nice one.

Here are all the shows you're going to end up seeing:

Somehow, despite there being upwards of a hundred scathing takes on The Donald at last year's Fringe festival, the 45th President still hasn’t been impeached. But don't worry, because it would seem that the UK theatre industry simply will not rest until "Wotsit Hitler" is no more. You know what might do him? Yet another not-even-tight 45 where the main act comes out dressed in fat suit, perma-tan and a wig. Be afraid, sir! Be very afraid!

Brexit is still happening too, apparently, but I’m almost certain we can turn it around if we can just get Dominic Raab up to the Fringe and sell him the benefits of remaining in the single market via the medium of musical theatre. Brexit stand-up, if nothing else, proves the universal yin and yang: before the referendum, pro-Brexit campaigners were weirdly obsessed with making lo-fi and mad songs about how good leaving the EU would be, and now it's the turn of the cheery face of the left. Ask yourself a question: has a musical, ever – literally ever – fixed anything?

Oh, you like Stranger Things do you? Well you’ll love this hilarious parody version where the main character is called Twelve. Or: are you one of those grown adults who puts their Hogwarts house in their dating app profiles? Well, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is sold out for the next two years, but don’t worry because a theatre school from Aberdeen is doing an extremely "unofficial" Potter-themed sketch show, and look at that! It's 2-for-1 during previews! Take – if you have one – a friend!

"Have you seen that play at the Traverse?" everyone is saying. "Absolutely incredible. Best thing I’ve seen in five years probably!" They’re all talking over you in a beer garden. "Lyn Gardner gave it five stars! Sold out obviously, but you must queue for returns!" Far be it from you to disagree with Big Lyn, so you wake up at 8AM one day, trek over to the other side of Edinburgh and spend two hours in the returns queue, all so you can drop £30 that you don’t really have on a ticket for… the most disappointingly average thing you’ve ever seen. At least you can be all smug about it in the pub later though, I guess.

Yeah, you've seen Macbeth before – they almost definitely made you watch that one with Judi Dench in Year 10 English – but I bet you haven’t seen anything like Macbeth: Mafia Boss! Sounds sick, right??? Sure, everyone knows Romeo and Juliet, but, right – no, listen… what if Romeo is actually from an alien planet at war with Earth? Wouldn’t that be good? You’d pay good money to see that searing interpretation, I’m sure. Yes, King Lear is widely considered to be one of the greatest English language plays ever written… bu-u-ut, don’t you think it would be even better if instead of being a profound examination of old age and mortality, King Lear was actually a nightclub owner choosing which of his three favourite strippers to give his club to when he retires??? No. Obviously fucking not.

Every uni improv troupe comprises the following members: one posh bossy girl who doesn’t really drink, seems to hate everyone else and goes to bed at 11PM every night; four boys named Will who all went to Eton; one lad whose main personality trait is being Extremely Northern; an incredibly shy European international student who's only in one sketch and looks like she's about to cry every time she goes on stage; a postgrad who’s pushing 30 and keeps trying to make everyone watch Spaced; and two impossibly upbeat American exchange students. Prepare to be aggressively flyered by every last one of them.

Your mum has come up on the train for a couple of nights, and she wants to see this show because a nice young man handed her a flyer for it while she was waiting for you to meet her at the station. You give it a quick read and it seems pretty innocuous, and it’s only £6 a ticket, so yeah, why not? And that’s how you end up sat in the middle of the front row while an incredibly aggressive simulated orgy scene takes place in front of an audience of seven people, two of whom manage to sneak out during the first scene change. You file out in complete silence an hour and ten minutes later, and never speak of it again. You never speak to your mum again.

Fourth wave feminism is great, but I really, strongly feel that it’s still sorely lacking in spaces for cis white middle class women to discuss their problems, and I’m honestly just so thankful that we have the Fringe to make up for it, aren’t you?

You meet this guy in the bar at the Pleasance Courtyard and he seems really sound and doesn’t even aggressively try to sell his show to you until you’d been chatting for a whole hour, and even then it sounds pretty alright to be honest. "You should come along, it’d be great to see you there!" he says. Ten minutes in, you realise that when he said it was about "political correctness and media bias", what he actually meant was "I am a sentient Daily Express column." You duck out halfway through and spend the rest of the month running in the opposite direction when you see him on the Royal Mile so you don’t have to explain to a neo-Nazi why you didn’t like his show.

The thing about self-deprecating humour is that it actually has to be funny, doesn’t it, otherwise you’re just ranting about your divorce to some strangers in the upstairs room of a chain pub. Maybe try to stick a few jokes in there, if you can manage. Makes the whole crying thing a bit less awkward.

"A lot of kids in this show," you're thinking, as you wait for it to start. Maybe you didn’t notice because you’re too hungover from drinking pints in Assembly until 4AM, but nothing about the poster suggested that the target audience was three to five-year-olds… and then the lights go down and a nursery rhyme starts playing from the speakers, and now it's too late to leave without climbing over three prams and potentially stepping on a sleeping toddler, so you’re stuck for the next 40 minutes being forced to join in with "Incey Wincey Spider" by an extremely passive-aggressive out-of-work actor dressed as a clown. Tenner, the ticket for this cost you. Everyone else went to Ibiza.

All of them wearing boot cut jeans and a blazer!

It isn't. Anything worth seeing will be on in London in the next five months anyway.

@RosieHew