Comedy shows and college mysteries – the best things to watch, visit and read this week

I need a bit of cheering up this week. It’s so hot I can hardly focus, my local supermarket is all out of ice lollies and my homemade solar eclipse glasses showed little more than a few cornflake crumbs. So if I could be beamed up to Edinburgh Fringe for the world-famous comedy festival, I’d be gone in a heartbeat. And I’d be glad to have our guide to the 11 best shows of 2026 to steer me.

As a former nerdy child who spent my school lunch breaks gossiping with the dinner ladies, I’m particularly intrigued by Lady Bolognese: Class War. Dinner ladies Barbara and Veronica (played by comedy duo Tanika Lay-Meachen and Matt Straker) serve up “a scrumptious blend of greasy friendship and anarchic delight”. The show notes describe it as Thelma & Louise meets George’s Marvellous Medicine meets a big pile of offal. It sounds every bit as bonkers as a Fringe show ought to be.

Our festival reviewer (a comedy expert at the University of Edinburgh) also recommends How to Art from New Zealand’s Ratbags Theatre, in which two bananas wake up duct-taped to the wall of an art gallery.

If you happen to find a spare moment in Edinburgh, then we suggest you try and see Catherine Opie: To Be Seen at the Royal Scottish Academy. The show features nearly 80 portraits by Opie who rose to prominence in the early 1990s for her powerful documentation LGBTQ+, transgender, leather, and queer subcultures.

Opie’s work has always examined the politics of representation and here her photographs are hung along a portraits from Scotland’s national collection. Such curation invites visitors to ask questions about the politics and practice of portraiture and who gets to be visible. Our reviewer, visual arts expert Katarzyna Kosmala, found it be a thought provoking show. She writes that her portraits are a “compassionate record of how people create meaning, make connections and build their own sense of home”.

Catherine Opie: To Be Seen is on at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, until November 1

Ever since I read The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1993), I’ve been dying to know what exactly went down during her time at Bennington College. The novel is dedicated to her classmate, Bret Easton Ellis (author of American Psycho) and seems to satirise her actual college experience, reflecting an elite, insular social bubble and a dark fascination with the classics.

Now a new TV adaptation of one of Easton Ellis’s own books, The Shards, may shed more light on the question. Like The Secret History, it also focuses on a tight-knit group of teens, though this time at an LA high school in the 1980s.

The protagonist is a fictionalised version of Easton Ellis himself (a standout performance by Igby Rigney) who is muddling his way through final year. Things are intensified by the arrival of a charismatic and mysterious newcomer (Homer Gere) and the terror wrought by a serial killer at large.

The show’s intrigue is magnified (for those interested in this sort of thing) by the casting of Gere and Kaia Gerber. Their parents, Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, were briefly married during the 1990s.

The Shards is now streaming on Disney+

In August 1901, Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton set off on the first expedition that would make them famous explorers. The Discovery Expedition (1901 to 1904) was the second major British expedition to Antarctica and its aim was to explore the frozen land further and collect scientific information.

In his new book, historian of exploration Edward Armston-Sheret writes about how, despite most of the crew having little polar experience, the men mapped large areas, gathered geological and zoological specimens, and recorded valuable weather and magnetic data. The expedition went on to shape Scott and Shackleton’s future careers, inspire the race to the South Pole, and establish Antarctic exploration as a major British achievement.

The Grip of the Ice: Scott, Shackleton and Survival in the Frozen Frontier is out now

A new exhibition at The Art House in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, explores the connection between music and a sense of home for women who have experienced migration or seeking sanctuary. The artist, Kadir Karababa, presents a series of video installations of women singing their songs. Alongside the screens are short testimonies describing the story of the song and objects from their past.

Our reviewer’s mother is one of the women featured. She shares a Malagasy lullaby from her childhood in Madagascar and a well-thumbed exercise book in which, as a child in the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote down the words to every song she knew.

One Song is at The Art House in Wakefield until August 31

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