Edinburgh fringe with the family: five shows for kids | Edinburgh festival 2025

Whale, The place Are You Going?Meeting Rooms, 10.10am, till 24 AugustThe outdated man who sits on the centre of this imaginative mix of object theatre and shadow puppetry from Taiwan’s S Manufacturing is the cantankerous kind, tied to his routine and resistant to vary. His day is an uneventful parade of duties: enamel brushing, newspaper studying and failing to place his socks on.It’s a lot to his shock that he wakes to seek out the room tidy and his secret field of recollections moved. And it’s a lot to his consternation {that a} boy seems from one other field, unruly, undomesticated and curious.It’s that very curiosity that unlocks the outdated man’s backstory and rejuvenates him. Inside the key field, the boy finds proof of a dangerous biplane crash over wartime seas and a drowning pilot rescued by a whale.By my reckoning that will make the outdated man about 125 years outdated, which might additionally account for the old school Boy’s Personal Journey focus of the present. It’s simple to place that apart, nevertheless, when mischievous humour and visible inventiveness abounds, whether or not it’s paper planes floating overhead, deathly waves inundating the stage or the large blue whale swelling to the total peak of the partitions round us.Tactile marvel … toooBtoooBPleasance Courtyard, 10am and 11am, till 25 AugustI often take the post-show play session as my cue to go away, however this one is pleasant. We now have simply watched Tamsin Fessey carry out a hypnotic dance, geared toward 6-24-month-olds, from inside a vibrant tube. Hidden inside, she rolls and stretches, giving life to this wriggly creature and making a face of the orange hoop at one finish.Tuning in to the priorities of the younger viewers, she is variously shy, inquisitive, hungry and sick. She dances when the music calls for it and sighs when it stops. She performs video games with the springy containers round her and discovers attractive silvery balls inside.This toooB appears to have a lifetime of her personal till, slowly on this wordless manufacturing by Angel Exit, attractively designed by Verity Quinn, we spot the performer inside: a foot, a hand, a cautious eye. And together with her emergence, it’s time for the viewers to affix in: new balls and tubes showing round us to create an toddler journey playground, filled with tactile marvel.James Joyce for youths … You will See … You’ll See …Pleasance Courtyard, 12pm, till 24 AugustIt appears like a joke. Take a famously impenetrable basic of world literature, a stream-of-consciousness Dublin odyssey stretching to 250,000 phrases, and switch it right into a present for the over-eights. However Helen Gregg is for actual and her adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses is a pleasure.Introducing a e book that few of the adults within the viewers may have learn, she strips it right down to its narrative framework, judiciously modifying for household viewing, and turns it into 45 minutes of day-in-the-life storytelling.Leafing by huge pop-up books – three of them, identical to the sections of the unique – she traces the comings and goings of a cut-out Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, flanked by a metropolis’s price of quirky characters, from funeral to workplace to pub. In Marc Mac Lochlainn’s manufacturing for Galway firm Branar, it’s carried out with wit and lucidity, to not point out musical interludes. Gregg is an excellent interpreter and makes an imposing novel sound like a enjoyable factor to sort out at house.Sensory delight … Howdy Birds. {Photograph}: Neal MegawHello BirdsAssembly George Sq., 11.30am, till 17 AugustHard to think about a extra light introduction to theatre than this sensory efficiency for infants, written by Jasmine Cole and directed by Connie Crosby. Narrated by Hannah Platts and carried out on a big floorcloth over which the viewers can roam, it’s set in a backyard the place the leaves are tactile, the mushrooms rattle and the pond is product of silver foil.A bee buzzes by as the kids acclimatise, then it’s time for the large reveal: a sequence of material puppet birds, manipulated by Jennie Rawling, launched with birdsong and welcomed with a reasonably human tune. Issues get no extra dramatic than when the starling imitates a cow and a tractor and, because the lights dim, an evening owl soars overhead with stars shining by its wings. The stakes is perhaps low, however is pitched completely at a mesmerised viewers.Discovering methods to attach … The Unlikely Friendship of Feather Boy and Tentacle Woman. {Photograph}: Tommy Ga-Ken WanThe Unlikely Friendship of Feather Boy and Tentacle GirlAssembly Roxy, 11.25am, till 17 AugustFeather Boy and Tentacle Woman are opposites. One lives within the metropolis; one within the nation. One is tough; the opposite clean. One sunny; one bitter. However though theirs is a relationship of contradictions, they discover a approach to join. They do that by the mutual dependency of acrobatics, balancing excessive above the stage, shifting in cautious synchronisation.On this aerial present for the over-eights by circus artists Vee Smith and Sadiq Ali working with Catherine Wheels theatre firm, it’s as if the 2 have been let unfastened in an outsize play park, mocking gravity as they grasp the other way up, spin precariously or plummet to the ocean depths. Narratively gentle and open to interpretation, it reaches a climax with a spectacular storm of crimson and white feathers on Jen McGinley’s set, swirling in windy chaos.