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.

Square Go by Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Writers Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair have strong Edinburgh records, and they join together at Summerhall for a play which generates serious late night energy. The round auditorium becomes a wrestling ring, as Max (Scott Fletcher) and Stevie (Gavin Jon Wright) prepare for a school fight. Playing teenagers with a love of 1980s wrestling stars, the two wear singlets but the opponent Max is preparing to face (in a ‘square go’) is school bully Danny, who he has accidentally upset.

The writing is very tight, effortlessly recreating the ’80s Scottish school experience, rich in dialect. We are immersed in a world where nothing is more terrifying or more important than facing up to Danny in the right way. The performers relish the area-like space, bringing the audience onside and demonstrating how easily the mob mentality can be triggered. The Roundabout’s mini-lighting rig is at full stretch, and the soundtrack pounds. However, the play has no illusions about the damage caused by macho posturing. Its compassionate clear understanding of the family background that leads to a boy becoming a bully leads to an inevitable conclusion, that the ‘square go’ is not the sacred school ritual it seems, but a pointless spectacle that must be overcome.

Margo: Half Woman, Half Beast – Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh

Margo Lion was a singer and cabaret performer in Weimar Berlin, who loved Marlene Dietrich and Marcellus Schiffer, her partner whose songs she sang. Cabaret was the symbol of the era, dark but liberated performance in a city sliding unstoppably into fascism. As the Nazis took power, Margo took refuge in booze and cocaine, but her song offered up a continuing resistance.

A little known figure, her story is expertly performed by singer Melinda Hughes, as a cabaret show. From the relative safety of her apartment, Margo observes unrest on the streets and sings the songs that once made her famous. Margo is essentially a cabaret show,  and the story is a vehicle for Hughes’ dark-hued voice, accompanied by pianist Michael Roulston. Songs include new material alongside songs of the time, by Schiffer and Kurt Weill. It is a classy, if polite, evening that deservedly revives the story of a woman whose appeal to be “Sincere and queer in Berlin” is, sadly, more suited to the 21st century than the notorious era when she was in her prime.

Chase Scenes by Ming Hon – King’s Hall, Edinburgh

Three women spend an hour recreating, with barely a pause, sixty separate movie chase scenarios. They dash from one set-up to the next, scattering costumes and scenery, while filming each other on mobile phones, the footage projected on screens behind. Each scene is announced with a title – such as ‘Axe’ or ‘Nightmare’ – but removed from its context. The production literally cuts to the chase again and again, focusing on the physical process not only of being chased – in terror, determination, play, or transgression – but also on the process of filming each scene.

While the ambience is home-made and, on the surface, amateurish, it soon become clear that the show is a miracle of timing and coordination. Intensely choreographed, Chase Scenes is more than just a piece of fun. The low budget aesthetic is often very funny, from toy police car chases to the strategic use of plastic fronds to simulate a jungle. The centrepiece of the show is ‘Parkour’, a very silly attempt at simulating parkour that spills off stage onto the balcony and then out into the foyer.

The inherent misogyny of cinema is also played out for the audience, as the nature of a chase is inevitably examined. A substantial proportion of the scenes involve a woman being chased, with violent intent. Devised by Ming Ho and performed by her with Hilary Crist and Alexandra Elliott, Chase Scenes is conceptually brilliant and ingeniously performed. It succeeds simultaneously as entertainment and critique, like a piece of installation art.

How to Keep Time: A Drum Solo for Dementia by Antosh Wojcik – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Antosh Wojcik is a poet and a drummer, an unusual but logical combination. In his one-man Summerhall show, he brings his skills to a performance that is highly distinctive – both experimental and emotionally powerful. He tells the story of his attempts to connect with his grandfather – ‘dziadek’ in Polish –  who is suffering from advanced dementia and apparently out of reach, from behind his drum kit.

With an astonishing ability to improvise on the drums while performing scenes with his father and grandfather, he conjures up a piece that is all about rhythm. Fresh from band practice, he shows up in the care home ward with his drum kit and plays for his grandfather, reminding him of shared memories. Images from the his childhood repeat, such as eating a gooseberry given to him by his dziadek. His expressive playing recreates the stuttering replies he receives, and accompany his own thoughts.

The show is also funny with ideas, such as a future in an old people’s home full of aging metalheads, trying to recall riffs of the past, amusingly played out. As a performer Wokcik’s style lacks a little naive and his craft can develop, but his shows is entirely charming, and his open, creative response to the closing down of conventional communication channels is very moving. Wojcik is a talented writer and performer who seems to have invented a genre that is all his own, and we are sure to see more of him.

The Political History of Smack and Crack by Ed Edwards – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Ed Edwards’ new play takes the hopeless territory of addiction, a never-ending round of petty crime, near death, recovery and decline, and places it a remarkable geo-political context. The Political History of Smack and Crack is a two-hander that cleverly combines an alarming conspiracy theory with a study of the impact of addiction on individuals. Edwards’ follows Neil and Mandy, friends, sometime lovers and smack addicts whose lives in Manchester are on a route to catastrophe that lasts 35 years. The pair reconstruct scenes from their lives together from drug-fuelled capers to the height of the 1981 Moss Side riots. Both characters witnessed the chaos on the streets, but also the organised resistance to the police that followed.

Edwards’ bombshell claim is that the disorder seen in every major British city during the  summer of 1981 prompted the Conservative government to turn a blind eye to the mass sale of heroin, which was funding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, on inner city streets. Before July 1981, smack was available only to the few; afterwards, it was for sale on street corners across Britain, and the modern epidemic of dealing, crime and addiction began. Was the government complicit in unleashing mass destruction to head off a working class revolt?

The theory is disturbing and little-known, albeit supported by only circumstantial evidence. However, it is expertly woven into a story of the destruction wrought on ordinary lives. The two performers are excellent. Eve Steel, as Mandy, is brittle and fierce, and Neil Bell is a shambling, street-addled Shaun Ryder. In the round at Summerhall, with no decor and only for a crutch as a prop, they jump eras, conjuring up  the streets of Manchester and the full sweep of social decline with energy and commitment. Remarkably enough, it is also a play about hope. Edwards, a former addict himself, knows that there is a way out, but it is only for the lucky few.