The (Hong) Kong Girls by PK Wong, Alice Ma and Justyne Li – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Three women perform connected but very different dance pieces, responses to the derogatory ‘Kong Girl’ identity given to wealthy Hong Kong residents. PK Wong dances naked and vulnerable, her head covered by an giant inverted red dress suspended from the ceiling. Alice Ma presents herself in a doll-like dress on a platform, but stuffs it full of black feathers which spill out in ritualistic fashion. Justine Li seems to fight herself as she dances. All three pieces are startling and compelling expressions of self – an hour of high quality contemporary dance.

InHaus by KlangHaus – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Long-standing band The Neutrinos play a gig, but it takes place in a Summerhall basement in a room full of old sofas and bric-a-brac. Band and audience wander around the space, experiencing it as they please in an atmospheric deconstruction of live performance that feels casual but lingers in the mind as an experience that is cleverer and more unusual than it seems on the surface.

Funeral by Onteroend Goed – Zoo Southside, Edinburgh

Onteroend Goed are sometimes described as the best theatre company in the world, and there is certainly no-one like them. With Funeral they’ve hit on a theme of death and collective mourning that can be found all over the 2023 Fringe – an unconscious response perhaps to everthing happening in the world, not least climate change which preoccupies the company. Funeral is a triumph: every moment is stripped to its essentials, and each is unlike any other experience the audience will have at a stage show, from shaking hands with every person in the room (itself a post-Covid affirmation) to processing in a spiral to cast confetti over a makeshift altar, like ashes. The ceremony is about nothing specific and therefore everything, and has meaning for every person in the room. It’s the collective ritual we all need, and Onteroend Goed understand that deeply.

Lovefool by Gintare Parulyte – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Produced by Théâtre National du Luxembourg, Lovefool is a one-woman play about failing to find happiness. Kristin Winters is very funny in a show that can be rather heavy-handed but has moment of hilarity – a supremely awkward vintage sex education film – and of shock – her character’s self-harming. Sometimes it feels like familiar ground is being trodden on the way society convinces women its failings are their fault, but when it works it is original and revealing.

Dark Noon by Fix&Foxy – Pleasance at EICC, Edinburgh

Seven South African actors, six black and one white, reenact the brutal story of the settlement of the USA and the destruction of Native America. Faces in white powder, their story-teeling style is cartoon-like and all the more barbaric for it. As they perform, a wild west town rises around them from the red dirt. This is an impressively ambitious production in terms of both scale and theme and, while it would benefit from a stronger script, it delivers moments that are hard to forget – not least when an audience members recruited for a country dance realise they are being lined up for sale as slaves.

Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz by Nathan Queeley-Dennis – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Nathan Queeley-Dennis’ one-man play, of which he is both writer and performer, may appear to be about nothing significant – a likable young Brummie guy’s advnetures in dating – but it is a tight and clever piece of writing. Nathaniel is winningly self-aware is his quest to present himself in the best light but, while keeping the audience throughly entertained, creates a convincing picture of life as a young man – the spaces of work and the city, and the relationships between black men, symbolised by the black heart emoji, which are touchingly supportive and positive. He makes himself a role model for non-macho manhood.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by Javaad Alipoor & Chris Thorpe – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Javaad Alipour’s new show uses his trademark multi-media techniques to explore the nature of knowledge and cultural ownership of information, through the unsolved murder of the ‘Iranian Tom Jones’, Fereydoun Farrokhzad. The fact he is constantly described in terms designed to explain him to a Western audience is tip of an colonial iceberg below the surface of Iranian culture and politics. fronted by the affable Alipoor, the show includes an Iranian musician, Raam Emani, wildly famous in Iran as the singer King Raam, but a waiter in the USA where he has fled following the murder of his father. Not content with confronting us with the living embodiment of these parallel worlds, Alipoor also does a nice line in satirising the all-pervasive true crime podcast style, with a host played by Asha Reid. A complex, multi-layered play that for the most part holds together very well and takes us on a very unexpected journey.

The Last of the Soviets by Spitfire Company – Zoo Playground, Edinburgh

Inga Mikshina-Zotova and Roman Mikshin-Zotov sit behind a news desk, reading us items from the work of Svetlana Alexeivich verbatim accounts from ordinary people caught in the collapse of the Soveit Union. The material is staggeringly dark and they illustrate it, appropriately, with tableaux in miniature filmed live on their table. These scenes are disturbing – plates are smashed, soil mashed into chicken and Inga’s hair, and everything sprayed black leaving a strong whiff of solvent. These may be historical accounts, but Irina and Roman are Russian actors living in Prague and the application of these stories to Russia today is left in no doubt. Each performance is dedicated to Belarussian political prisoner Palina Sharenda Panasyuk. It’s raw, upsetting, necessary.

Woodhill by Matt Woodhead – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Woodhill is verbatim theatre about HMP Woodhill, a prison on the edge of Milton Keynes, with the country’s suicide rates. Three people – two mothers and brother – tell the stories of how each of their loved ones died in Woodhill via taped accounts. What makes this piece even more extraordinary than its deeply depressing subject matter is the way that they words are expressed on stage through dance. Tyler Brazao, Marina Climent and Miah Robinson embody the three relatives through fierce, uninhibited movement around a set of archived record boxes.

Written by Matt Woodhead and produced by LUNG, the show is a tribute to the three men who died – Chris Carpenter, Stephen Farrar and Kevin Scarlett – and a furious indictment of a prison system that locks people rather than treating their mental illness, and is so under-staffed that regular cell checks don’t happen, leaving it as a lottery whether you are found in time to save your life or, as in the case of the three men, too late. Remarkable theatre – awful that it is needed.

After All by Solène Weinachter- Dancebase, Edinburgh

Dancer Solène Weinachter’s solo piece is clever, funny and rather brilliant. She engages very naturally with the audience, chatting us through her experience of being asked to dance at her uncle’s funeral, with no warning, and how it has made her think hard about how she wants to plan her own send-off. She does a lot of talking, but there is dancing too. She dances comically, a very hard thing to pull off well, and brilliantly when she finally expresses herself, while creating select moments of theatricality. Such is her confidence, she even pause to blindside an audience member into taking her phone number during the show’s final, dramatic moments. Her confidence alone makes the show a pleasure to watch.

You Are Going to Die by Adam Scott-Rowley – Summerhall, Edinburgh

The fact that Adam Scott-Rowley performs entirely naked throughout is not the most remarkable thing about this show. It is just a vehicle for an hour of physical performance in which he abases himself in front of us, some of his performance involving a strange attachment to a toilet, the only object on stage. There are strong hints of Kenneth Williams in his sneering, joking/not joking persona, and indeed the toilet obsession. The show is unapologetically about physical decay and death, and is exactly the sort of challenging, impossible-to-forget performance that the Fringe should be all about.

Fool’s Paradise by Britt Plummer – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Britt Plummer is an Australian clown, and Lovefool is autobiographical, about a relationship with another clown, from Norway, which developed during lockdown. She thinks she’s invited us to her wedding, but we’re not so convinced things are the way she imagines. The show has charm, and some very funny moments including her sexually explicit re-enactment of the affair using only two coffee cups. There’s not enough focus though, or clowning, to take it to the next level.

When We Died by Alexandra Donnachie – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Written and performed by Alexandra Donnachie, When We Die is a very strong piece that packs quite a punch. Working in an undertaker’s, she has to prepare the body of a man who raped her a few months earlier. The show is remarkable both on the realities of embalming, which Donnachie clearly knows a lot about, and the impact of sexual assault which is revealed in heartbreaking detail. If Donnachie’s writing is precise, honed and exceptionally good, so is her performance which leaves us unsure what she will do right until the final moments of the play. As a show, it’s a complete success.

Blizzard by Emily Woof – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Emily Woof’s one-woman play, Blizzard, has many strengths. She is an engaging stage presence, talking to the audience in a way that leaves us uncertain whether what she is presenting is fact or fiction. She talks about her marriage to a neuro-surgeon, who thinks rather differently to her, and the experience of delivering a scientific paper on his behalf. The set-up works better than the pay-off though, and it seems that Woof didn’t quite know how to end the piece. However, her insights into the human mind are lightly delivered but worth hearing.

N.Ormes by Agathe and Adrien – Roxy, Edinburgh

Agathe and Adrien are two French-Canadian acrobats. Their show is an exercise in challenging gender expectations as they perform increasingly astounding feats, taking equal roles. This is quite something given that Adrien is around 6 feet tall, and Agathe more like 5. Her backflips while seated on his hands, and their arm balance with her handstanding on his upstretched arm are particularly breathtaking, but the whole piece was moment after moment of impossible physical achievement.

Phaedra/Minotaur by Benjamin Britten/Kim Brandstrup – Lyceum, Edinburgh

A show of two halves. Mezzo-soprano Christine Rice performs Benjamin Britten’s cantata Phaedra, with a pianist, in Deborah Warner’s staging. Thrilling dramatic. Then in Kim Brandstrup’s dance piece, tense throughout, Tommy Franzen, Jonathan Goddard, Isabel Lubach dance around a set that has a climbing wall as a backdrop, into the Minotaur’s lair. Some of the dancing on this wall is astonishing – hand-stands on climbing holds for example. Both pieces were of the highest quality, short because that’s all they needed to say what they had to say.

The Last Show Before We Die by Ell Potter and Mary Higgins – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Ell Potter and Mary Higgins live in each other’s pockets, ex-lovers, current flatmates, co-performers. In a piece reminiscent of the messy, very real relationships at the centre of Sh!t Theatre’s shows, they navigate the end of theirs through a show about endings. Performing naked apart from translucent body stockings that are going to holes, they reveal themselves emotionally, falling out on stage, pulling each other apart and then reassembling what makes them love one another. There are some very funny moments – Mary’s determination to deliver a crow impersonation over a recording of her deceased grandfather for example – but what really stands out is the emotions of two people whose lives are heading in separate directions, and can only express their feelings through low-budget, home-made experimental theatre. It is a beautiful thing.

Strategic Love Play by Miriam Battye – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Miriam Battye’s play about dating is performed by Letty Thomas and Archie Backhouse as Her and Him, meeting in a pub for a potentially awkward encounter. Potentially a highly conventional scenario, Battye super-sharp writing jolts it into something else entirely – an unpredictable, coruscating tirade about relationship conventions. Thomas is much too clever for Backhouse, a guy who thinks he’s ‘nice’ and wants things simple. She doesn’t want nice at all, and strips him intellectually and emotionally apart. But of course it’s not that simple and everything turns around more than once. The performances are very funny, with her uncontrollable disdain for herself and everyone else pitted against his genial bafflement. Battye is quite a writer, and this a very good play indeed.

Papillon by We All Fall Down Interdisciplinary Creations – Summerhall, Edinburgh.

Canadians Helen Simard, choreographer, and Roger White, composer, have worked together for 20 years. As We All Fall Down they produce dance with live music. Three performers – Nindy Banks, Mecdy Jean-Pierre, Victoria Mackenzie – dance in contrasting styles, radiating pure energy, while White and two musicians including a live drummer pound out a techno-kosmiche soundtrack. It’s thrilling stuff in a small room, the power of their sound and movement threatening to burst the confines of Summerhall and explode across the Meadows. The music is apparently based on Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies card system, and the whole piece by chaos theory, which makes its unity even more impressive.