Throughout the 2010s, performance artist Bryony Kimmings rose to fame with a string of bold, witty, candid shows exploring her own problems, from STDs (2010's Sex Idiot) to illness (2016’s A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer) and post-natal depression (2018’s I’m A Phoenix, Bitch). In recent years, she has turned to screen work, co-writing the 2019 film Last Christmas with Emma Thompson and the recent television adaptation of Liz Jensen’s eco-thriller The Rapture with Rebecca Manley, but she returned to the stage last October with Bog Witch, a climate-crisis-themed account of her experiences living off-grid in rural East Sussex. The show opened at Soho Theatre Walthamstow last October and now runs at the Traverse theatre during the Edinburgh fringe - before touring - in Kimmings’s first appearance at the festival in seven years.

I loved this. It is a really funny little book about an actor who gets a job where he just has to sit through these university lectures wearing a big black bag over his head. Eventually, he stops getting paid and just lives in the bag because he is much happier like that. He wants to be passive. He wants to be female. He wants to be an object. It feels quite timely about the masculinity and the manosphere. Maybe all men should live in bags.

I am desperate to see this film. Olivia Colman plays a fishwife who decides she needs a man, but no one in the town will marry her, so she gets a magician to make a husband for her out of wicker instead. He is played by Alexander Skarsgård, the sexiest man on the planet. It is based on a short story by Ursula Wills-Jones, it has a brilliant cast, and it is written and directed by two women, Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. Every woman I know is obsessed. I have seen a lot of stupid memes. It says a lot that so many women want a husband made from reeds.

You need to watch this immediately. It stars David Harbour, of West End Girl fame, and Jason Bateman, and it is about two married guys living in the suburbs of St Louis who go on this app called DTF (as in “Down To Fuck”) St Louis. It plays out like this unravelling murder mystery. It is really heightened, with this amazingly scant script. There is a brilliant moment in the penultimate episode when Harbour and Bateman do this weird music video that comes out of nowhere. It is also extremely funny.

Shedinburgh is a brilliant new venue at the Edinburgh fringe set up by producer Francesca Moody that is trying to operate a new model where artists are paid and supported properly to perform one-off shows and works-in-progress at the festival. It’s very pared down, with no tech and lighting. It is all about the performer and the audience. It is a joyous and intimate space. I am desperate to see Bourgeois & Maurice try out their new cabaret show there next week.

This exhibition by the photographer and digital artist Wendy McMurdo is full of these strange, uncanny images that blur the boundary between what is real and what isn’t. Some of them are stunning. I took my kids, who are 10 and 11, and they loved it. We talked afterwards about perception. Watching my kids engage with art and talking about it with them is so beautiful.

I’m excited about an opera, which isn’t something I’d normally say. I love opera, but it can be stuffy and stupid. This is by the composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek. I was blown away by their opera Breaking the Waves; this new one is about the opioid crisis. Both of them have had family members become addicts. It’s a bit like the series Dopesick, but it is an opera, so it is gruesome and graphic, with blood and guts and shit and gorgeous music. I am in awe of someone that can write music for an orchestra. I just make up stupid songs and sing them by myself onstage.

Interview by Fergus Morgan