40/40 by Katherina Radeva – Zoo Southside, Edinburgh

Katherina Radeva’s one-woman show is a rare piece of authentic self-expression. Not many people decide to mark their 40th birthday with an Edinburgh Fringe show, especially not a dance show if they are neither a performer nor a dancer. Radeva is not everyone, so this is exactly what she has done. Watching her is a cathartic and surprisingly moving experience. Her stated aim is to “fuck about and have fun”, but she also includes her own recorded voiceover explaining who she is and why she’s doing this – apparently added after misgivings that anyone would want to watch her just dancing for her own amusement. She’s no professional dancer, but she still mesmerises with her expressive movement to everything from Sweet Dreams to Bulgarian folk music. As we discover, she came to the UK aged 16 and her experience as an immigrant has been all about working – as a printmaker and stage designer. Now she gets to do something for herself, throwing herself completely into physical performance, cheerfully undressing on stage and looking authentically knackered at the end of each dance. She is very funny, and entirely herself. Just seeing that on stage is a remarkable experience.

Receptionists by Kallo Collective – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Receptionists is a totally enjoyable hour of clowning, mime and laser focused fooling. Finnish performers Inga Björn and Kristiina Tammisalo make the perfect comedy duo as they inhabit their domain behind the reception desk of a 5 star hotel. They arrange their fruit bowl, turning an apple to hide the eaten half, keep each other awake with the service bell, and engage in ludicrous routines in which they entirely fail to answer the phone or to retrieve a stray neckerchief. Later, they do some chaotic chambermaiding. There are few words, and both are exceptional physical performers, but when they do speak it’s in an invented Euro-gabble involving words such as ‘flappety’, which is very funny. There are no serious themes – it’s shamelessly just fun – but it is a pleasure to see such precisely choreographed, expertly delivered comedy. Kallo are proper artists, and their work really is as good as it gets.

This Is Memorial Device by Graham Eatough & David Keenan – Wee Red Bar, Edinburgh

David Keenan’s novel has become a cult in its own lifetime. His completely convincimg and entirely fictional etymology of the early 1980s Airdrie alternative music scene is beautifully written and can only have come from someone who was there. As a stage version it has a ready-made audience consisting of people of a certain age who were also there. Yet it’s not obvious how such a literary work could be successfully staged. Fortunately, as a one-man show fronted by the excellent Paul Higgins, it works a treat. Adaptor and director Graham Eatough casts him as the central narrator Ross Raymond, and we believe him entirely as he explains how legendary band Memorial Device played a gig “in this very room”. Higgins gives a masterclass, constructing the characters from shop dummies as he describes them, and even playing their instruments for them. Other characters give their testimony on filmed clips, including Mary Gapinski, Julie Wilson Nimmo and Sanjeev Kohli – all very funny. Keenan’s achievement is to create something that seems more real than the reality, a shared myth that we can all claim a part of because none of us were there. Of course it ends in disappointment and failure as all mythologised times must do. At the end of the evening, the man sitting behind me, big, bearded and in his 50s, was in tears, which says it better than any review.

The Silent Treatment by Sarah-Louise Young – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Sarah-Louise Young is a professional singer with an impressive career that includes West End shows such as the Julie Andrews musical Julie, Madly, Deeply, smaller scale work like An Evening Without Kate Bush, and directing. She is brisk, charming and authoritative, engaging the audience in vocal warm-ups as they take their seats. Her confident stage demeanour sets the scene for a one woman show that becomes remarkably revealing and painfully honest. She tells us about her visits to a consultant about her growing vocal problems, traced to cysts on her vocal chords which have been there since she was 7 years old. That’s when something traumatic happened that made her scream so hard she permanently altered her voice.

Young’s storytelling techniques are light touch but clever. She uses a looped scarf to represent the vocal chords, taking us on a tour of the anatomy of the throat and climbing inside her own pharynx. She also songs her own original songs, in a beautiful voice cured, as we discover, by surgery. Her tone is bright and at times seems like a jolly front. However, the material uncovered in her story around the sexualising of young women and the treatment of performers, is anything but. Young strikes a clever balance between entertainment and challenge, distilling all her experience to captivate the audience from start to finish.

The Chosen Haram by Sadiq Ali – Summerhall, Edinburgh

A deceptively simple show, The Chosen Haram pulls off powerful storytelling through remarkable physical movement, without a single word. Sadiq Ali and his co-star, Alexander Duran Davins, are dancers and circus performers. Bursting from the wrappings that encase them as the piece begins, they climb, tumble, spin and drop on a pair of Chinese poles. Their skills are mesmerising and often alarming, especially when they fall 20 feet, headfirst, stopping inches from the stage, something they pull off with apparent ease. However, the strength of Sadiq Ali’s work is the way he uses these performance skills to tell a moving and tragic story of a gay couple, one struggling with the contradictions between his Islamic teaching and living a queer life. Drugs and domination, sex and separation all feature. Told purely through the two men’s bodies, this is as touching and original a show as the Fringe has to offer.

Antigone, Interrupted by Scottish Dance Theatre – Dancebase, Edinburgh

The story of Antigone, killed by her insistence on burying her outcast brother, is well known but at Dancebase, the audience seated in a circle around a single performer, it seems entirely new. Solène Weinachter, known for her work with dance theatre company Lost Dog, performs solo under the direction of Joan Clevillé. She talks to the audience as they come in then slips into the role of storyteller, playing the characters of the story – King Creon, his niece Antigone, her sister Ismene, Creon’s son Haemon. And she starts to move, twitched around the stage by unseen forces as the mortals in her story are drawn to their fates by the gods. Her use of the space is powerful and expressive, and noone dares breathe as she conjures spirits before our eyes, transforming herself into people and animals, crouching on all fours to growl like a dog. The soundscape, by Luke Fletcher, consists of the sounds of breathing and Solène’s voice, looped live, and completes the feeling that we have entered a world that is complete, within the circle of onlookers. Antigone, Interrupted is exceptional and thrilling dance and, like several productions at this year’s Fringe, reverts to Greek myth to provide stories for our trouble times, with remarkable results.

See You by Hung Dance – Dancebase, Edinburgh

Hung Dance are a Taiwanese company, and their production at Dancebase of choreographer’s Lai Hung-Chung’s See You is an awesome demonstration of their quality. On a black box stage eight dancers, four men and four women dressed in white dance as one. The piece explores the difficulty of maintaining connections between people, triggered by a car accidents Hung-Chung witnessed. This is represented in the opening scenes, where a dancers writhes above a sea of bodies, buffeted by a collision, and then becomes a terrifyingly dead weight as she collapses. See You is all about dancing together, and the coordination of the performers is remarkable. They move in the kind of close proximity that requires precision rehearsal, and produce a series of technically astonishing sequences. There are also duets and solo sequences that show the dancers have everything in their collective lockers. The work is beautiful and sometimes funny, such as when the dancers line up queue-style and twitch their heads and bodies around each other to see ahead, moving faster and faster. Much of the work is danced in languorous slow motion as they weave around one another, apparently effortlessly. the controlled power and physicality on display holds the audience in a spell, and at the end of the hour there is no doubt we have witnessed a real tour de force.

Ghosts of the Near Future by Emma + PJ – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Emma and PJ are a new performance duo and their first show, Ghosts of the Near Future, is a mysterious and inventive contemplation of reality. Using simple but effective techniques including live projection of maps and miniature landscapes using a tiny, handheld camera, they create a truly original piece of nuclear American Gothic. Sandwiched between anecdotes about childhood experiences, cats, trees and death, they lead us into a Nevada landscape stalked by gun-toting preachers, cocktail-toting show girls and a magician, planning the ultimate disappearing act on a Las Vegas stage. Their deceptively simply, homemade storytelling techniques breeds layers of meaning, encompassing the nuclear industry of the Nevada deserts and the end of time. The show does not follow any templates and generates its own, blurry and intoxicating atmosphere. Magic and climate change fuse, while a scrolling text blinks out existential angst, PJ drinks pure gasoline in a ruined desert bar while Emma wears a mushroom cloud hat. It’s a show full of personality and personal obsessions which link effortlessly to the things that are secretly worrying us all. Ghosts of the Near Future is a perfect Fringe show, and looks very much like the start of an important theatrical partnership.

Megalith by Mechanimal – Zoo Southside, Edinburgh

Mechanimal, a Bristol company led by Tom Bailey, are known for their multimedia sound-based productions that often explore natural and scientific questions. Megalith is nominally concerned with copper mining, but it is a great deal less didactic than that might imply. Three performers (Charles Sandford, Xavier Velastin and a third musician whose name I have been unable to track down – sorry) unpack boxes filled with rocks and form them into what seems like a stone age computer. Behind them on the big screen a tech support programme goes rogue, and banks of electronics build crunching, rhythms – literally, rock music. They perform electronic music of a very high quality – varied, layered and intense. As the production progresses, a giant sun illuminates stone circle alignments constructed on stage, and the music becomes blissed out and otherworldly. Perhaps they could have eased up on the multi-tracked singing bowls which seem to occupy a significant chunk of the show, but the overall experience is absorbing. Megalith is a complex, fascinating response to the power of geology, and the musicianship and gadgetry on display is a triumph.