Brendon Ludlow
17 Aug 2026
An Evening with Dame Granny Smith: The Apple of the Fringe’s Eye ★★★★
I’ve seen Dame Granny Smith before, but that is part of the joy of this wonderfully strange solo show: every performance is a little bit different. For its Edinburgh season, the show has been slightly reimagined, with tweaks to the script and enough room for each audience to give the performance its own flavour.
From the opening moments, the audience is completely captured. It begins somewhere you might not expect, clever, intellectual and surprisingly sophisticated and before long, you genuinely forget that the object speaking to you is, in fact, an apple.
That illusion is testament to the exceptional ventriloquism skills of David Salter. The technical ability on display is extraordinary. You stop watching a ventriloquist operating a character and simply start listening to Dame Granny Smith.
And then come the apple puns. So. Many. Apple. Puns.
There’s also a generous sprinkling of queer fairy dust, alongside clever improvisation and audience interaction that means no two performances can ever be exactly alike. We had a particularly brilliant audience at this performance, which elevated things even further. I’m not going to tell you exactly why the audience becomes such an important ingredient, that particular surprise is better left unspoiled.
What makes Dame Granny Smith work so well is that it refuses to become a conventional ventriloquist show. There are twists, turns and unexpected additions throughout. You think you know what you’re buying from the label, but you end up getting considerably more.
Each time I see this show, I seem to appreciate the craft behind it even more. Salter is, in my opinion, one of the best ventriloquists I have ever seen. This is high-calibre, wonderfully ridiculous queer entertainment delivered with exceptional skill.
★★★★ Four stars