My Brilliant Career review – a joyous heroine lights up this rare and beautiful period drama

Bonnie Tyler's friend Mal Pope heard Total Eclipse of the Heart playing throughout Mumbles in Swansea.

Summerhall, Edinburgh With increasing speed, Sam Ward tells the story of a woman who finds holes in her garden – but is it just a shaggy dog story? And there is a man sitting at a desk, welcoming us to the theatre and opening a folder. And the folder contains a sheaf of paper that the man proceeds to read. And the more the man reads, the faster he goes. And the man hits such a speed we realise why he did not learn this script: it would be too prodigious a feat of memory. And as if to emphasise the pace, the man is soon accompanied by a percussive score by Carmel Smickersgill, which has a jazz freedom as well as a sense of urgency and is rather good. And as the story rattles out, so Han Sayles’s lighting design closes in on the man, who is the writer Sam Ward in this solo show by his company YESYESNONO and he seems to be going faster still. At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 31 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews..

Summerhall, Edinburgh Vengeance for a slaughtered pig is the starting point for a riotous parody that suggests the meat industry poses an existential threat to human survival That’s my next hotdog ruined. Shakespeare’s “too solid flesh” is squeezed into a sausage-shaped form in Mary Higgins and Ell Potter’s inventively guilt-trippy new show. Leaping wildly from Hamlet, this outrageous, confrontational performance-activism layers hooting comedy with world-ending dread as Mary (a vegan) attempts to persuade Potter (nicknamed “the sausage queen” by their dad) to change their meat-eating ways. Transposing Hamlet’s existential questions to the future survival of humanity via the meat industry’s impact on the planet, Higgins takes on the role of our stubborn, sauntering prince, seeking vengeance for the ghost of a poor, slaughtered, strangely seductive pig. Suave and silly, Potter is both ghost and Gertrude, the latter reading madness into the truth only her son is brave enough to face. At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 30 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews..