Front Row

A review of two of the big shows at this year’s Edinburgh Festival: Olivier award-winning writer Isobel McArthur has had great success with her genre-busting works Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of) and Kidnapped. Her latest play The Grand Old Opera House Hotel is a rom-com set in a haunted house filled with opera arias – it’s worlds apart from Funeral, a calm, interactive meditation on the nature of life and death by the Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed.Our reviewers give their verdicts on the comedy shows they’ve sampled this year. Kieran Hodgson is a Yorkshireman outsider in TV’s Two Doors Down: his new show Big in Scotland reflects on identity and belonging; magician and clown Geoff Sobelle explores the comedy of consumption in his show Food; and Sonja Doubleday’s comedy of the absurd – Cheekykita: An Octopus, The Universe, ‘n’ Stuff – features a nonsense trip through space.The impact of artificial intelligence has been cited as one of the reasons for the current writers’ and actors’ strikes in Holly