Sunday, July 19, 2026
Our 10 Unmissable Children's Shows at the Edinburgh Fringe 2026
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe runs this year from 7 to 31 August 2026, and while the festival's reputation is built on late-night comedy and boundary-pushing theatre, the mornings and early afternoons belong to families. The children's programme is genuinely one of the strongest strands this year — the ten shows below are the ones worth building your day around. Always double-check dates, times and prices on edfringe.com before booking, as festival schedules can shift.
1. The Listies: 110% Ready — Assembly George Square Studios
The Australian duo have been a fixture of family programming for a decade, and their superpower is genuinely rare: they entertain the adults just as hard as the children, without ever winking over the kids' heads to do it. The giggling genuinely does not stop — regulars talk about leaving with their cheeks aching. If your family has never seen The Listies, fix that this year; if you have, you've already stopped reading and gone to book.
2. Mario the Maker Magician — Underbelly, Bristo Square, 11.00am
If you only book one children's show this August, make it this one. Mario builds his own robots, does slapstick like a silent-film clown, and somehow makes card tricks and homemade contraptions feel like the same act of wonder. He's been on The Tonight Show and Sesame Street, toured with David Blaine — who's called him "the best kids magician in the world" — but the reviews that matter are the ones from parents who say they laughed as hard as their kids did. This isn't a magic show you politely watch; it's one you get swept into, and in years of Fringe-going I've never once heard anyone come out of it unhappy.
3. Splash Test Dummies — Underbelly's Circus Hub on the Meadows
The crossover pick from our circus list, and it earns its place on both. A trio of Australian acrobats doing a PG send-up of Baywatch, full of slapstick, audience participation and genuinely impressive hoop, silk and rope work hidden under the chaos. It's been a Circus Hub regular for years because it works: kids leave buzzing, adults leave more impressed than they expected to be. A brilliant first circus show for younger ones.
4. Comedy Club 4 Kids — check listings for venue and times
Swear-free stand-up, silly sketches and a fresh line-up every single day — which means you can go twice and see two completely different shows. In August 2025 they won the Edinburgh Comedy Awards' panel prize for embodying the true "spirit of the Fringe," and that's exactly what this is: proper comedians doing proper sets, just without the material you'd have to explain in the car home. The rotating format also makes it the perfect rainy-day wildcard when nothing else fits your schedule.
5. Mama G: The Magic Bookmark — Gilded Balloon Teviot
"Everyone's favourite pantomime dame" (Metro) and Britain's Got Talent semi-finalist Mama G returns with an award-winning panto adventure in which the villainous Book Worm steals all the books from Mama G's library, and only the audience — plus a mysterious Magic Bookmark — can help save the day. It's warm-hearted, big-spirited storytelling about why books (and everyone in the room) deserve to be part of the story. Panto in August shouldn't work, but in Mama G's hands it absolutely does.
6. Olaf Falafel’s Stupidest Super Stupid Show: This Time It’s Stupider! — Free Fringe
The comedy show comedians take their own kids to, back after a sell-out run last year. Award-winning comedian and children's author Olaf Falafel (if that is his real name) promises jokes, poos on pogo sticks, truth-telling cheese, a time-travelling portal to the future and a live drawalong. It's free-Fringe, which makes it the easiest possible yes on a packed festival day — and the fact that it sells out anyway tells you everything about how funny it actually is.
7. Hugo's Rainbow Show — Underbelly, Bristo Square
A drag show for kids about the science of rainbows, and one of the most joyful concepts in this year's programme. New Zealand's Hugo Grrrl leads a musical hunt for Ray The Sun, Misty The Cloud and the fabulous Archie The Rainbow, making meteorology genuinely fun through original songs, dress-ups and outrageous costumes. It's pitched at 2–10 year olds and made with neurodiverse audiences in mind — wholesome, goofy and glamorous in exactly the right proportions.
8. BATSU! Presents GANBA!! — Underbelly, Bristo Square
The most physically involving show on this list — your whole family enters the Dojo to train like ninjas, taking on ridiculous challenges while the mischievous Spirit of Batsu tries to derail your training. It comes from the team behind the international hit BATSU!, and the interactivity is the point: this is for the kids (and parents) who can't sit still through a conventional show and don't want to. You have to go for it. You have to GANBA!!
9. Frogs in Bogs — Pleasance Courtyard
In 2026, a crack amphibian plumbing unit was locked up for a contamination crime they didn't commit — and if that A-Team setup has already made you smile, this is your show. Superhero frog plumbers Turner and Constable must smash the Megaclog and defeat the evil Cwac-Ty-Bach in a blockbusting amphibian comedy that comes with the Fringe programme's finest content warning: "Contains poo! May entertain teenagers!" Gloriously daft in the best Fringe tradition.
10. FoRT — Assembly George Square Gardens
The gentlest and most beautiful pick on the list — a multi award-winning show inspired by the timeless craft of turning living rooms upside down. Everyday objects transform into fantastical places to play through ridiculous clowning, spectacular acrobatics and genuinely lovely visual imagery. It's the one to book for the child who builds sofa-cushion fortresses at home, and the one you'll be quietly moved by yourself. A perfect palate-cleanser between the louder shows above.
A note on booking
Children's shows at the Fringe tend to cluster in the mornings and early afternoons, and the popular ones sell out at weekends especially — book ahead rather than chancing the box office. Always confirm venues, dates, times and age guidance on edfringe.com or the venue's own site before you book, as festival schedules can shift right up to and during August. And if you're after an extra pick, Max Fulham's family-friendly Monkey Business (Gilded Balloon Teviot, 11:50am, 5–16 August) — the companion show to his main evening hour from our cabaret list — is well worth a look for the first half of the festival.
Saturday, January 31, 2026
Paddington The Musical — Savoy Theatre
★★★★★ (5/5)
I want to start by admitting something a little embarrassing: I did not expect to cry at a musical about a bear.
Getting tickets alone felt like an odyssey. I refreshed booking pages at odd hours, set alarms for release dates, and eventually resorted to something between bribery and pure luck to get a seat. By the time I actually sat down in the Savoy, I'd built the evening up so much in my head that I fully expected to be let down. I wasn't. Not for a second.
There's a moment early on — Paddington alone on the station platform, suitcase in paw, utterly lost — that catches you off guard with how much weight it carries. It would be easy for a show about a marmalade-loving bear to stay safely in the realm of children's entertainment, all bright colours and simple jokes. Instead, what struck me most was how unflinching it was willing to be about what that image actually means: displacement, loneliness, the fear of not belonging anywhere. The show never hammers this home with a heavy hand, but it doesn't shy away from it either, and that honesty is what elevates it from "nice family outing" to something genuinely moving.
The puppetry deserves its own paragraph, because I still don't quite understand how it works as well as it does. There's a performer physically embodying Paddington's movement and a voice performer working the vocals and expressions from off to the side, and yet within minutes any awareness of the mechanics simply dissolves. You stop watching a puppet. You start watching a person — or a bear, I suppose — with real interiority: hesitation, hope, disappointment, joy, all legible in a few inches of fabric and glass eyes. It's one of those rare pieces of theatrical craft that doesn't ask for your suspension of disbelief so much as it earns it outright.
As for the cast — genuinely, I don't think I've seen a company this uniformly strong in years. Bonnie Langford is a masterclass in comic timing as Mrs Bird; she doesn't have to reach for a laugh, she just exists in the scene and the laugh arrives on its own, which is the mark of someone who has spent a lifetime perfecting economy of performance. Victoria Hamilton-Barritt is a gloriously unhinged Millicent Clyde — camp, menacing, and vocally spectacular, particularly in her big villain number, which had the audience half-laughing, half-recoiling in delight. And Amy Ellen Richardson's Mrs Brown gives the whole story its emotional ballast; she's the one who makes you believe that kindness, offered without condition, is a radical and difficult thing to practice, not just a platitude.
Musically, it's a genuinely well-crafted score — melodic, warm, unafraid of a big earnest ballad, but also sly enough that the adults in the room are laughing just as hard as the children. I'll confess "Marmalade" has been stuck in my head for the better part of a week, in the way only the very best show tunes manage.
If I'm being properly honest, there are moments in the second act where the plot's ambition slightly outpaces its runtime — a subplot or two could probably be tightened, and there's a sense toward the end that the show is reluctant to let go of its own momentum. But I mention this only because it's the sort of thing you notice on reflection, not in the moment. In the theatre itself, none of it mattered. I was too busy feeling things.
What lingers, days later, isn't a single scene or song — it's the accumulated warmth of the whole evening, and the quiet, stubborn optimism underneath it. This is a show that genuinely believes people can be kind to strangers, that difference is not a threat, that a small, polite bear from Peru might have more to teach us about decency than we'd like to admit. In a moment when so much of the world feels defensive and closed off, there's something almost defiant about a West End musical built entirely around the idea that we should look after one another.
I left the Savoy convinced of two things. First, that I will be back — probably more than once. Second, that this show isn't a passing sensation to be enjoyed and forgotten. It has the rare combination of craft, heart, and universal appeal that keeps a production running for decades, not seasons. I'd genuinely put money on Paddington still charming full houses at the Savoy ten years from now, hard stare and all.
Please look after this bear. London certainly is.
Saturday, January 3, 2026
Mario the Maker Magician — Underbelly Boulevard, Soho
★★★★ (4/5)
London doesn't get many children's magicians of any real calibre passing through, let alone one flown in from New York with a wife-and-kids operation and a suitcase full of homemade robots. So there's already a novelty to Mario the Maker Magician before he's said a word — and within about ninety seconds of walking on stage, he's dispelled any worry that the novelty is all there is to it.
The show runs an hour with no interval, and it barely pauses for breath. Mario works the room like he's been doing kids' parties his whole life (he has), coaxing a rowdy, sugar-rushed energy out of an audience of under-tens without ever quite losing his grip on the room. That's the real skill on display here: not just the sleight of hand, though there's plenty of it, and not just the "maker" gimmick of tin-can robots and cardboard contraptions, though they're a genuinely charming touch — it's the crowd control. Getting several dozen five-to-ten-year-olds to yell in unison, chant back call-and-response lines, and stay just the right side of pandemonium for a full hour is its own kind of magic trick.
What elevates it above a standard children's party act is the sincerity underneath the noise. Mario drops in references to Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and his own "do what you love, use what you have, have fun" mantra, and somehow none of it lands as trite. It helps that you can tell he means it — this is a family business, built from nothing, and that authenticity comes through even at full volume with a kazoo in his hand.
If there's a criticism, it's that the "maker" premise — the robots, the DIY tech — occasionally feels like the marketing hook rather than the backbone of the show. The homemade gadgets get a lovely, extended showcase, but Mario himself, his patter and his physical comedy, are doing most of the heavy lifting. That's not really a complaint so much as a note that the show undersells itself: you don't need the robots to sell this. Mario would carry it regardless.
It's unmistakably built for kids — this isn't adult magic with a family gloss — but the parents in the room were laughing just as hard, and a fair few of them looked like they'd happily sit through it again without the excuse of a child in tow. For a summer holiday afternoon in Soho, you could do a lot worse.
Verdict: Chaotic, warm, and far sharper than it looks — a rare and very welcome visitor to London's family theatre scene.
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