No Show dir by Ellie Dubois – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Five female circus performers occupy a remarkably small stage, all the more so given the spectacular tricks they are about the perform. It soon becomes apparent this is not a traditional show. Two of the troupe bully a colleague into holding harder and harder handstands. While one woman performs in the steel ring, another commentates on the precise nature of the injuries she will suffer if she misjudges a spin. The trapeze artist gives us a dummy version of her act, as the ceiling is around 10 metres too low for an actual trapeze. At one point, the five sit in silence and stare at the audience while eating doughnuts.

No Show is a brilliant, multi-layered piece of theatre. Fran, Kate, Michelle, Lisa and Alice are all astonishingly strong acrobats whose tricks make the audience gasp. It also emerges that they are less than impressed with their treatment as performers. As women, they are expected to look decorative, smile a lot and leave the strength work to the men. No Show systematically dismantles the veneers of the circus and, in an understated but cheerfully confrontational manner, exposes the sexism beneath. The result is not only the best circus you’ll see at the Fringe, but one of the best shows full stop.

Odyssey by George Mann and Nir Paldi – Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh

Odyssey, a one-man performance of Homer by George Mann, needs no reviews to boost its prospects. Having run since 2009, it continues to sell out at the Fringe and attract awed crowds. Despite this success, however, Odyssey is a mannered and at times infuriating show. Mann is a highly demonstrative storyteller, accompanying his tale with illustrative sounds effects and gestures like a dancer. He gives a technically accomplished performance, but nothing is left unremarked. When an eagle soars there is a squawk, when waves break there is a splash. Like a beatboxer, Mann is adept at making sounds with no equipment other than himself. However, he leaves little to the imagination.

While some ideas work well – the deathly slow creaking of a mast, for example – the rush of effects quickly overwhelms the story, leaving the listener no room to think or breath. The show becomes about Mann’s performance, rather than the story he is telling. This is unfortunate because the Odyssey is a strange and troubling tale crying out for some examination. Instead, we have the audience applauding a hero who has just hung 12 servant girls as part of a grim revenge. Mann presents the Odyssey as a triumph of the storyteller’s art, but the story cannot stand still and the focus should be on the tale, not the teller.

Stand By by Adam Macnamara – Army @ Summerhall, Edinburgh

The partnership between The Army and Summerhall, the Fringe’s experimental flag-bearer, may seems unlikely, but the festvial depends on Edinburgh’s endless supply of churches, meeting houses and masonic halls. The new venue, a Territorial HQ in Broughton staffed by very polite squaddies, is become an ideal location for performances about the Army itself and, in the case of Stand By, the police. Adam Macnamara’s tightly written drama is set in the back of a riot van, as officers wait for the signal to end a siege. Four characters pass the time bickering, playing jokes on each other, asserting status and expressing various levels of cynicism about the police and, particularly, the public.

The situation is a classic dramatic set-up, reminiscent of Pinter’s hitmen on stand-by play The Dumb Waiter. Macnamara is a former policeman, and this proves the perfect showcase both for his inside knowledge and impressive writing skills. His dialogue is particularly strong, and it is clear that he knows exactly how the police behave behind the scenes. Each of his characters is well-defined and complex, behaving as themselves rather than to type. The cast makes the most of the parts, with fine performances from Andy Clark, Jamie Marie Leary, Laurie Scott and Macnamara himself. The play is very funny, but also credibly tense as the situation outside the van lurches alarmingly out of control. The consequences of police under-resourcing are addressed as a natural part of the drama. Stand By is top quality writing in the hands of actors with the talent to make it sing.

Flesh and Bone by Ellliot Warren – Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh

Set in an East End tower block, Flesh and Bone is a highly energetic ensemble performance which keeps the audience entertained. However, its broad characters and knockabout comedy do not lend themselves to the social issues its also attempts to examine. Written in droll, cod-Shakespearian/Clockwork Orange couplets, it comes over very much like an adult pantomine. There is entertainment from the pervy grandfather, the streetwise girlfriend, the hardman boyfriend, and the enormous local drug dealer. These characters are familiar from Shameless, and from the depictions of council estate life it parodied.

While Shameless balanced comedy with currency, Flesh and Bone is not the cutting edge drama about life on the edge that it sets out to be. The grandfather is lonely, one brother is secretly gay, the other is secretly tolerant and the dealer has a heart of gold. Intended to connect to wider social themes, these characters are stereotypes, and the introduction of issues such as gentrification is superficial. While it works as a comedy, with Warren’s writing baroque and amusing, Flesh and Bone is not equipped to deliver wider meaning.

Eggistentialism by Joanne Ryan – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Joanne Ryan’s one woman show is reckoning with middle age. Reaching 35, she claims that if she died in an accident it would no longer be a tragedy. Having arrived at the point of no return for having children, she attempts to make a decision, which proves practically impossible. Ryan makes this much more than an exercise in self-examination. She is funny, very funny, and so is her aging mother who makes tart, pre-recorded additions to the story. And she is politically very aware.

From Limerick, it soon becomes obvious to Ryan that her own fertility cannot be separated from the history of sex in the post-war Republic of Ireland. She belongs to the first generation in a position to decide whether to have children. When she was born, at the start of the 1980s, rape was legal in Eire, contraception illegal, and the doctor who examined her pregnant mother offered to have the child taken away. How far women have gained in the short time since is the real subject of the show. Ryan is a charming and astute performer and she hits home by showing personal experience as inextricably, unavoidably political.

Adam by Frances Poet – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

It is only gradually that the audience at the Traverse realises what it is seeing. Adam narrates the struggles of a girl fleeing Egypt for Glasgow in 2011, escaping not only the bloody Arab Spring but also the constrictions of gender. A cast of two, a young man and a young woman, play out the two sides of the fraught conversation in Adam’s head as he struggles with the attitudes of his family and Egyptian society to his conviction that, although born a woman, he is a really man. Played on a clever set (by Emily James) with props that unfold from the tiled floor, it seems like conventional theatre until it dawns on us that none of this is fiction.

The central character, played by Adam Kashmiry, is himself and his story is astonishing and heartening. The trauma of coping with refugeee status while injecting testosterone to induce a second puberty and become a man is both terrifying and horribly ordinary. Yet the story is a one of great hope. Adam’s performance, and that of Nesha Caplan as his female alter ego, is powerful. Some of the detail of the story seems to stretch credibility, yet any criticism of narrative or structure is rendered embarassingly irrelevant by thetruth of the events. A final Skype appearance from his real life mother in Egypt, provides an emotional denoument, while the internet plays a crucial role in showing Adam he is part of a community. This is a play that is direct and real, and it leaves the audience astonished.

Q&Q by Liwaa Yazji – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

A new play presented in a rehearsed breakfast reading, Yazji’s work packs an overwhelming emotional punch. Three women caught up in various ways by the war in Syria are interviewed by administrators, from NGOs and governments, in the places to which they have fled. Each has a story as disastrous and distressing as anything you may have read or heard, in a war of mulitiple personal tragedies. Their particular experiences relate to the particular experiences of being female a war, and to the spirals of rape and prostitution which have entrapped them, and of childbirth.

The play is extremely sharply written, and if anything gains from the simplicity of its presentation. The three women are angry, traumatised and forced to struggle not only with attackers in Syria and people smugglers, but with the controlling and patronising systems that dictate their lives in Western refugee camps. One of four plays produced by Birth, a childbirth campaigning organisation, Yazji’s work is difficult but captivating, and will surely receive the much greater exposure it deserves.

Ivona, Princess of Burgundia by Tibaldus – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Belgian company The Tibaldus Collective has reworked a classic of Polish theatre, a dark allegory written in 1938 by Witolds Gombrowicz (‘the Polish Shakespeare’) using a mixture of drama and dance. Surrounded by the audience seated in a circle, they play out a bizarre and gruesome nightmare of fairytale in which a girl who is apparently such an ugly, awkward social embarassment that she makes people uncontrollably ugly destroys the royal court without speaking a word. Faced with her inability to be anything other than herself, the King, Queen, Prince and courtiers are driven to confront their own dissembling, and are brought down by their demons.

The material is fascinating, but Tibaldus presents them a in performance style best described as alienating. Dialogue is in English-as-a-second-language style, and dramatic tension is constantly deconstructed through strange pauses and awkward delivery. There is a certain black humour in this, but running at 1 hour 40 mins, it becomes an endurance test. The sporadic outbursts of movement are expressive and committed, but there is not enough of it for a company definitely at its best when dancing.

Get A Round by Eggs Collective – Summerhall, Edinburgh

Eggs Collecive aren’t messing around. They promise a legendary night out – a night of hard drinking, hard dancing, and hard throwing up. Summerhall has give them alcohol training, so they can liberally dose their audience with something that might be Hooch. Dressed to hit the town, Leonie Higgins, Lowri Evans and Sara Cocker take the audience with them, assigning roles such as ‘Hugh What’, the guy who needs everything explaining to him very slowly.

The party tunes and clubbing confessions seem familiar at first, but Eggs Collective are subtle performers. Experts at drawing the audience in, they play gently with the stereotypes and shared experiences of three young women on a night out together. Recreating something we recognise, they also show us a darker side. Could it be that we are only able to express our real insecurities head in a bucket at 2am? Are friends the only people who can rescue us? A hugely enjoyable evening, Get A Round shows off the talents of three watchable, clever performers who together make up a strong and subversive ensemble.