Cezary Goes to War by Komuna/Warszawa – Army Reserve Centre, Edinburgh

Four men in an Army drill hall, clad in Adidas tracksuit tops and shorts, sing lieder and dance in an athletic, chorus line fashion. A woman accompanies them on the piano. All five claim to be called Cezary, and they have a bone to pick with the Polish military c.1994, which has classified them as ‘Category E: unfit for military service.’

Cezary Goes to War is a strange and unforgettable piece that combines high camp with the songs of Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko. It is often funny, as the performers cartwheel across the stage while singing or line up for physical inspection in their pants. However, its awkward, endearing surface conceals a piece with strong political purpose. The story is autobiographical, written by classical musician and director Cezary Tomaszewski, who is also one of the performers. The criteria for physical categorisation which flash up on the screen are both absurd and disturbing, with echoes of the Nazis. The underlying assumption is that Cezary was rejected by the army because he is gay. This show is a clever, unclassifiable queer response, identifying and examining discrimination while delivering some very fine songs. The Army hall setting, with uniformed territorial personnel tearing tickets, only adds to the impact.

Notorious Strumpet and Dangerous Girl by Jess Love – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Jess Love is a circus performer, with skills on the trapeze and with hula hoops that make ordinary mortals gasp. However, her show is in the setting of an AA meeting. Love, from a strict Christian family of teachers, went the other way and became addicted to drink and drugs while touring Europe in various circus shows. Her story is a catalogue of grim blackouts and gathering despair, and Notorious Strumpet is her attempt to come to terms with the way her life has gone.

The show is multi-layered, too much so at times. At the heart of the show are Love’s remarkable circus skills, as she performs a trapeze sequence while pissed, terrifying the audience. There is also audience participation, as Love is sometimes too drunk (in her story) to read out the AA pronouncements that now guide her life. She serves tea and biscuits as we file in. There is family history as Love uncovers a drunken great-grandmother, the ‘notorious strumpet’ of the title. And there is science, with an attempt to track addiction genes using bingo. While there are excellent scenes, which make the evening memorable, the whole does not hang together well. Questions are left hanging, particularly how Love went from being in a very bad place only six months ago, to touring a fringe show. The audience would love to know.

The Spinners by Limosani Projekts – Dancebase, Edinburgh

A collaboration between Scottish director Al Seed and Australian choreographer Lima Limosani, The Spinners is an enthralling dance piece that shows us The Fates in action. The three women –  Limosani herself, with Tara Jade Samaya and Kialea-Nadine Williams – occupy a sort of workshop hung with woven dolls, each representing a human life. They conduct repeated rituals drawing out and tying threads to create, and snipping the threads before casting dolls into a deep cauldron to end what they began. The three dancers work beautifully together, hinting a combined series of female creation myths beyond the Greek narrative. They are birthed from one another, forming a line of three that never ends, and perform miraculous sequences tangling and disentangling threads with their limbs and a set of giant knitting needles.

The story involves conflict and dissent, but the women work together always. They creates images by using their bodies as trio, with sequences of shapes flowing as they merge and combining. The soundtrack by Guy Veale is electronic, suggesting churning activity emerging from this strange room. The Spinners is a show of the highest quality, with a range of exceptional skills creating something captivating and original.

Coriolanus Vanishes by David Leddy – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

The first thing you notice about Coriolanus Vanishes, is the way it looks. A woman in a suit sits at a desk against a background that is a shifting field of colour. When she opens the desk drawer, a strange light emerges. Her glass glows from the inside. She illuminates herself and the audience with a fluorescence tube and lamps with shaped beams of light. The lighting, by Nich Smith, in combination with Becky Minto’s deceptively simply set, is distinctive and fascinating. However, it does not dominate, but complements Irene Allan’s one-woman performance as Chris, in prison for reasons that only eventually become apparent, after three people close to her have died.

When it premiered last year Coriolanus Vanishes was performed by its author, David Leddy. The switch to a woman is such a success that it is hard to imagine a different version, and it creates an unusual lead role in which the character’s bisexuality is not the focus. Irene Allan tells us a story, scene-by-scene, which encompasses personal and political moral conflict, the theme of private versus public examined in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The play neatly incorporates quotes from its antecedent, but the story belongs to Irene Allan. Her character has a sweet Scottish charm which, increasingly disintegrates as she reveals her grim background and the things she has done. The writing is pin-sharp, dealing with grief, anger, addiction and death in ways that are  entirely believable and, as a result, all the more terrifying. The play links Chris’s personal turmoil with her politically toxic job selling arms to the Saudis. Leddy works hard to integrate the elements of home and work that we, in the West, have the luxury of keeping separate. The production is visually stunning and driven by Irene Allan’s powerful performance. It ends with a feat of physical theatre which takes the audience completely by surprise, and leaves them open-mouthed.

Everything Not Saved by Malaprop Theatre – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Malaprop Theatre’s new show is about the unreliability of memory in a time of relentless recording. Although the digitised world generates endless versions of ourselves, we have come to realise they only serve to obscure any idea of truth. We will exist after we have gone, but Everything Not Saved aims to show that any version of the self we recognise will be long gone.

The show questions our ability to distinguish reality in any meaningful way at all. While the subject has potential, Malaprop’s approach seems underdeveloped and lacking focus. Three performers act out tangentially related scenes, on a set with stage manager who continually intrudes. They skip from the recreation of Princess Elizabeth’s first broadcast, to an training interview for officers interviewing children about abuse to an audition to play Rasputin. This eclecticism, while entertaining, reveals the fundamental problem behind the show, that it cannot decide what it wants to say. A range of semi-related subjects, including competing versions of history, conflicting memories of experience events, the nature of digital memory and the playing of roles. Too much ground is covered for any clarity to emerge, and the dancing Rasputin finale does not provide enough distraction to make up for this.

Lights Over Tesco Car Park by Poltergeist Theatre – Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh

The four young performers behind this show are enthusiastic, but their attempts to inject energy cannot disguise the fact that their material is extremely weak. Based on emails and then meetings with a man claiming to have seen strange lights over the Tesco car park in Magdalen Street, Oxford, the central narrative leads nowhere. The space is filled with self-consciously wacky costumes, anything and everything ‘space’ related, and the relation of randomly selected historical accounts of UFO encounters. Relentless audience participation seems to have no purpose except to fill out scenes. The show lacks purpose, direction and self-awareness, and the result is a production that is studenty for the wrong reasons.

Spaces – Sweet Grassmarket, Edinburgh

Spaces is a four-hander about the multiple stresses and pressures of being young and female. It is staged with a certain  imagination, and the four women who perform it are engaging and committed. However, their material has a level of earnestness that quickly becomes patronising. Playing university students, each struggles with personal difficulties (anxiety, divorcing parents, sexuality, religion, race) but learn that supporting one other is essential to tackle their problems. Lacking nuance beyond the bright-eyed message that we all need to listen to one another and that it is ok to be different, the show provides explanation rather than insight. The effect is close to watching a public information film.

Another One by Lobke Leirens and Maxim Storms – Summerhall, Edinburgh

On the evidence of their Edinburgh show, Another One, Maxim Storms and Lobke Leirens are geniuses. They spend an hour performing, mostly without  words, as an elderly couple in fur hats, who appear to live in a teepee. They may be Russian, but there is no way of knowing as they are entirely focused on one another. They act out sequences of mutual dependence, both affectionate and violent, moving in a style that makes them seem like poorly-wired marionettes. The two nameless characters live through a series of  baffling and fascinating ritual. They play a high-speed, aggressive card game. Storms slaps Leirens in the face repeatedly, harder than the audience is comfortable with. Later, she slams him into a plywood wall thirty times in a row. The climactic scene, if such an unconventional production could be said to have one, involves Leirens dressed in shamanic furs, eating a dead something – bird, weasel or both – raw. The action is entirely unpredictable, and formalised to the point of being surreal. It is also funny and upsetting in equal measure.

The two performers inhabit their strange roles with complete physical commitment, and a degree of startling originality that marks them out as theatre makers to follow. Big in Belgium, always responsible for some of the strangest and best Summerhall productions, has brought Storms and Leirens to the Fringe and their show is exactly what Edinburgh needs to unsettle, confuse and provoke. It may be an acquired taste, but Another One is absolutely unlike anything else at the Fringe, or indeed anything else at all, and that is some achievement.

Void by V/DA and MHZ – Summerhall, Edinburgh

J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island is a classic critique of the car-dominated city. A driver crashes on a traffic island in West London, and finds himself as marooned as on a desert island. Dancer Mele Broomes has taken on a text that is both white and male, and reclaimed it as a black, female performer. Against a chainlink fence, she tells the story through an intense, physical and confrontational dance piece. She works in collaboration with MHz (Bex Anderson and Dav Bernard). Their digital projections dominated by flickering analogue-style interference, are an alienating and beautiful backdrop that switches from blue seas to glaring yellow sun and off-channel tv. Car lights flash by and tires squeal on a pounding, electronic soundtrack. As it becomes clear that Angela (Broomes’ character) will not be rescued, she stops her frantic attempts to escape (climbing the fence, using her high heels) and looks within herself as her dancing becomes more fluid and confident.

Choreographed, as well as performed, by Broomes, Void is a highly original piece which slams into the audience like a vehicle leaving the motorway at speed. Broomes’ dancing is magnetic, and the show is unforgettable and uncompromising, cleverly bringing a work from a different time careering into the 21st century.