Fest Best: Clowning around

The Hermitude of Angus, Ecstatic

UNDERBELLY, COWGATE, 4-28 AUG (NOT 17), 10.45PM, £6-£10.50

With a string of international awards including Best Comedy at both the Melbourne and Auckland Fringes, and a warm trail of praise in its wake, Greek-Australian Vachel Spirason interweaves dance, music and clowning in his tale of Angus: an “odd boy with a murmuring heart” who, amongst other things “loses his virginity to a chocolate cake”. A splendid slice of the surreal, buoyed by a virtuoso central performance.

 

Tokyo Game

THE BODY TIGHTS MAN SHOW, JUST THE TONIC AT THE CAVES, 4-28 AUG (NOT 11, 17, 25), 5.30PM, £6-£9

The madcap Japanese clowns unleash their lurid non-verbal performance upon an unsuspecting Edinburgh promising an audience-involving show that’s “wildly entertaining, inventive and dangerous.” Beyond that, the exact content of The Body Tights Man Show is left to the whim of spontaneity. Suffice to say there’ll be bizarre games, human sculpture, video projection, wigs and unbridled Asian lunacy. All aboard.

 

New Art Club

QUIET ACT OF DESTRUCTION, ASSEMBLY GEORGE SQUARE, 3-28 AUG (NOT 9, 16), 6.20PM, £6-£14

Standup comedy and experimental modern dance? That’s the particular preserve of NAC’s Pete Shenton and Tom Roden. But far more than two unshapely blokes squeezing into leotards looking for cheap laughs, the pair call upon over a decade’s worth of experience at the sharp end of modern dance, reprising their favourite routines interspersed with an intuitive feel for banter, daftness, clowning and costume. [Joe Spurgeon]