FROM August 2-26, the Edinburgh Festival carnival again takes over the Scottish capital with its unique mix of cultural entertainment from the most original and thought-provoking to the comically inane.

Among the wealth of foreign productions featured in the main festival programme, Sydney Theatre Company’s adaptation of Kate Grenville’s prize- winning novel The Secret River catches the eye.

It deals with the life of William Thornhill who, deported to Australia in 1806, carves out a new life and helps to create a new world for the European settlers.

Two home-grown new works are both set in repressive societies. Scottish Ballet presents Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, while Scottish Opera combine with Opera Ventures to perform Breaking the Waves, based on Lars von Trier’s film on the sexual tensions within a strict Calvinist community.

The Traverse, Edinburgh’s home for contemporary theatre, as always features its own outstanding programme, organised so that any of its 11 productions can be seen at different daily times throughout the three-week festival.

Along with five world premieres, the Traverse’s co-production with Glasgow’s Tron Theatre is How Not to Drown, a drama of an 11-year-old Kosovan boy’s struggle for survival as he flees flees the chaos of war, which is billed as “hilarious, painful and engaging.”
 
Crocodile Fever, Meghan Tyle’s surreal, grotesque black comedy set in the Northern Ireland of the 1980s, and the enigmatically entitled Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran, also look particularly promising.

The huge Fringe programme of 3,841 shows, as always, is dominated by comedy. On the theatre front, the inventive Rhum and Clay company use Orson Wells famous broadcasts which terrified the American public to bring The War of the Worlds (The Pleasance) into our era of fake news.

The title Pizza Shop Heroes (Summerhall) could mislead punters but, performed by four former child refugees from Afghanistan, Eritrea and Albania, Phosphoros Theatre’s production promises to communicate their experiences far more personally than any media treatment.

Dream of a King (theSpace Triplex) is set in Martin Luther King’s hotel room on the night of his assassination, with Christopher Tajah’s solo performance exploring the strengths and human weaknesses of this great civil-rights campaigner along with the contemporary political tensions besetting the movement.

Another struggle for freedom is the subject of The Passion of the Playboy Riots (PQA Venues, Riddles Court). Here the place of Ireland’s famous Abbey Theatre in the creation of modern Ireland offers an entertaining and instructive view of the relationship between theatre and politics.

Are We Not Drawn Onward to a New Era (Italian Cultural Institute) intriguingly offers a visual metaphor for this crucial moment in our future history, following humanity on its path towards its downfall — or salvation.

A couple to cheer the spirits are Marie Lloyd Stole My Life (the Space on the Mile), which attempts to explain “how a music hall sweetheart and pantomime star ended up as a small blue plaque in Islington” and Marx in Soho (PQA Venues, Riddles Court) where the great man has returned from the dead to offer a few words and declare that “the revolution has been resurrected.”