Eddie Izzard. — Eddie Izzard is among the standups returning to Edinburgh this summer. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer

Edinburgh fringe 2019: 12 of the best shows

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In the run-up to the Edinburgh festival we’ll be picking highlights from the programme. Here’s a dozen for starters, including Eddie Izzard and a ukulele comedy

Eddie Izzard: Expectations of Great Expectations

Assembly George Square Studios
Eddie Izzard was born 150 years – to the day – after Charles Dickens. Which seems as good a reason as any for the gloriously surreal standup to perform a 90-minute work-in-progress version of the classic Victorian novel.

Bout

Summerhall
Some of the festival’s best dance is in its Taiwan season. Chang Dance Theatre are four brothers who create deeply personal and sweetly soulful shows about growing up together. Their new piece, Bout, is inspired by the rituals and rhythms of boxing.

Phil Wang: Philly Philly Wang Wang

Pleasance Courtyard
No standup was more conspicuously absent from 2017’s Edinburgh award shortlist than Phil Wang. After a year away from the fringe, the former engineering student is back with a new set of supremely constructed gags.

111 (one hundred and eleven)

Emerald theatre, Greenside
The inclusive dance company Candoco reached a huge new audience when they performed with the BBC’s Strictly professionals in 2018. Candoco’s Joel Brown, a paraplegic dancer, duets with Eve Mutso, former principal dancer with Scottish Ballet, in a piece about power and vulnerability.

When the Birds Come

Underbelly, Cowgate
Tallulah Brown’s Songlines was one of 2018’s most lovable plays: a bumpy countryside romance accompanied by haunting tunes from Brown’s band Trills. Her new drama is about a family – and climate – crisis in Alaska.

Anguis

Gilded Balloon
The Bob Dylan drama Girl from the North Country showed Sheila Atim to be a mightily talented actor-singer with a tight connection to your heart. In her debut as a writer, she deconstructs myths about the life and death of Cleopatra.

Baby Reindeer

Roundabout @ Summerhall
Richard Gadd’s Monkey See Monkey Do was a searing, bizarre and brave hour of comedy from a standup on a treadmill. It rightly won the Edinburgh comedy award and now Gadd is back performing his own play about obsession and delusion.

Rosie Jones: Backward

Pleasance Courtyard
For a comedy newcomer, Rosie Jones has striking control of the audience, joyously toying with perceptions of her cerebral palsy. The jokes unfold slowly; punchlines come from nowhere. Jones likes to hand out humbugs – hazardous if you’re laughing this hard.

Daughterhood

Roundabout @ Summerhall
Charley Miles has the honour of reopening Leeds Playhouse this autumn with a superb drama about women living through the Yorkshire Ripper’s reign of terror. But first she brings a new play about two sisters, one of whom cares for their dad, to Edinburgh’s essential pop-up stage.

Zoë Coombs Marr: Bossy Bottom

Monkey Barrel
Australian comic Zoë Coombs Marr has previously stormed Edinburgh in the guise of the sexist, tinny-swigging ocker Dave and as one-third of the bare-bottomed, critic-baiting Wild Bore. This year she’s just doing a few jokes. Or so she says …

Chores

Assembly George Square Gardens
Presented by Australian company Hoopla Clique, this could be one of the most anarchic family shows at the fringe. Two jaw-dropping acrobats refuse to tidy their room and instead kid around with pranks, each outdoing the other. Watch out when they wield the toiletpaper guns.

#HonestAmy

Pleasance Dome
A ukulele comedy directed by Kathy Burke? Why not? Amy Booth-Steel performs the story of how the four-stringed instrument came to her rescue when she had mental health problems. Larky songs that will strike a chord with many.

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