Over 1,000 performers from America, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the United Kingdom will appear at this year's 59th Edinburgh Tattoo (1-23 August). The programme announced yesterday includes all the traditional ingredients of massed pipes & drums, massed bands, overseas contingents, and the Lone Piper on the floodlit Esplanade of Edinburgh Castle at the end.

This short effort will cover the run in to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. For the first time in about ten years, I'm directly involved in a Fringe production. I've written this one

As the clock ticks down to the Edinburgh Fringe, EG asks Fringe director Jon Morgan what we can expect this year. Morgan says, in spite of the credit crunch, and fears over a "breakaway" Comedy Festival, the Fringe appears to be appear in good health with around 2,000 shows coming to the city in August.

"Don't cry for me Argentina
The truth is I never left you
All through my wild days
My mad existence
I kept my promise
Don't keep your distance ..."

The Fringe may be about discovering new acts, new writing, and the raw talent of tomorrow's stars, but it is also a place where fading stars come to shine a little brighter and household names present themselves in new guises.

The Edinburgh Fringe rolled out its 2008 programme on Thursday, with cutting edge comedy, the light and dark side of the digital era and world politics - but a notable absence of satire on dour Gordon Brown.

Edinburgh author Iain Banks’ disturbing seminal novel, first published 24 years ago, has not lost its ability to fascinate.

David Grieg's play Yellow Moon engages the audience from beginning to end. Following its run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year (see review

The King's Theatre is on the look-out for the perfect princess for its christmas pantomime.

Children's theatre company Catherine Wheels have created a highly entertaining production with Gill Robertson's dramatisation of a true story.

In the world of showbiz entertainment, many a successful Broadway stage show has been adapted into a hit movie - The Sound of Music, Cabaret, Evita et al. With The Wedding Singer it's the reverse order.

The Royal Lycem Theatre has announced its new season of plays for 2008/2009.

Alma Cullen is an Emmy and Bafta award winning screenwriter for television series such as Northern Lights, Inspector Morse and A Touch of Frost, but it's only in the last few years that she has dec

John Byrne’s trilogy of plays, The Slab Boys, (1978) Cutting the Rug (1979) and Still Life, (1982) followed the hilarious antics of Phil “James Dean” McCann, his best mate Spanky Farrell and the lascivious Lucille, in and out of the slab paint room of a Paisley carpet factory.

Nothing can be trickier or likely to split opinion than comedy. For people who love The Office there's another camp who equally enjoys Carry On while the nightmare of sitting through a Bill Bailey stand-up is unadulterated joy for another. This latest Lyceum production is sure to incite mixed emotions from its audience as it explores ludicrously chaotic humour.

For scale, no show in Edinburgh can rival the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Literally hundreds of performers, both from Scotland and bands and organisations from abroad, gather under the dramatic backdrop of Edinburgh Castle. The series of displays combines breathtaking shows of military precision, often a battle re-enactment, military bands, including the mass pipes and drums.

'Can We Live With You?' cry the McScott
family, on the run from the menacing Mr. Big Fish and his equally terrifying

It's always a brave company that tackles Aeschylus trilogy of plays known collectively as 'The Orestia'.

We all have our own ways of dealing with situations, be it denial or invention, which stems from the resilient inner child in all of us. Stories and myths are integral to humans as a way of communicating when it’s hard to just speak the truth

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray is said to be the only epic English novel to challenge comparison in scale and thematic scope to Tolstoy's War and Peace.