THREE Traverse productions stood out for their acute dialogue and superb performances. Mouthpiece, Kieran Hurley’s two-hander has Libby (Neve McIntosh), a fortyish word-blocked writer, saved from suicide by Declan (Lorn Macdonald), a young down-and-out with an unrecognised artistic talent.

As Libby becomes increasingly interested in his life, she begins to see a play emerging. Throughout Libby informs the audience of how drama works. Declan, at first flattered and warming to her attention, realises that he is being used – a subject rather than a person.

A stunning dramatic climax is set in The Traverse itself — a play within a play — where Libby, at the question and answer session after the premiere of her successful production, faces a semi-hysterical but cruelly articulate Declan whose life she realises she has stolen.
 

Meghan Tyler’s Crocodile Fever, initially a straightforward domestic-cum- political play against a background of the Northern Irish Troubles, turns into a surrealist black comedy. Two estranged sisters, Lucianne McEvoy’s stay-at- home Alannah, caring for a bedbound father, and Lisa Dwyer Hogg’s termagant politico Fianna, confront their respective responsibilities for their mother’s tragic death in a fire.

The real crocodile in the house is Sean Kearns’ oppressive father whom the girls, now collaborators, gleefully dismember only to face his reincarnation as a ghastly monster version.

For scintillating wit, The Patient Gloria from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre excels. Gina Moxley’s extravaganza is based on The Gloria Film Project, three 1963 psychotherapy counselling films designed to demonstrate contrasted approaches of eminent US psychiatrists.

Moxley plays the psychiatrists, all of whom are clearly more in need of analysis than their patient, Gloria (Liv O’Donoghue), whom they mind and manhandle with their respective paternal, aggressive and predatory “treatments.”

If these actual sessions, originally intended for educational purposes, were not available online, they would appear incredible.

In its own way, The Patient Gloria mirrors a recurring theme of much Festival drama – the closeness of theatre to reality.

At The Pleasance, Rhum & Clay Theatre Company present The War of the Worlds, a fresh look at Orson Wells’ famous 1938 radio adaptation of HG Wells’s novel of the Martian invasion where his live, minute by minute commentaries reputedly created panic throughout the US.

When a British media studies student travels to New Jersey, where the aliens landed, to follow up a family mystery, she finds a third-rate tourist industry living off a myth which no one believes or ever believed. We are into the world of fake news.

The four cast members interchange the Orson Wells’s role keeping the action moving at pace. Their handling of the radio broadcast convincingly conveys the manufactured tension of the original programme while amusingly revealing the atmosphere of an early radio studio.

At Summerhall there are Kafkaish and Pinteresque echoes in Tim Cowbury’s The Claim which engages with another theme prevalent in today’s news, the treatment of immigrants.

Serge (Ery Nzaramba) nervously awaits his asylum interview. Faced by questions he can’t understand from questioners who have already decided what answers he should be giving, he is trapped in the complexities of a tangled linguistic web, at times very funny but at the same time potentially sinister.

Serge’s frustrated attempts to tell his story beginning with Willy Wonka leads through the maze of misunderstanding to accusations of having shot his father and being a child soldier in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In Conspiracy at the Underbelly venue three actors engage in untangling the “mystery” behind the iconic 1932 Lunch atop a Skyscraper photograph of eleven workers on the Rockefeller Centre casually taking their lunch break sitting on an iron girder dangling high above New York. Why is nothing known of the photographer and six of the men?

As they unearth the “evidence” the story takes on an ever more disturbing context involving the mafia, the space race, JFK, Elvis, even Princess Diana. As these conspiracy theorists edge into ever-wilder possibilities and assertions their disagreements become increasingly antagonistic.

There is obviously an object lesson in Jack Perkin’s play for Barrel Organ company but we are still left wondering.

Finally, at the Zoo Southside the most disturbing production is undoubtedly the hugely inventive Belgian Ontroerend Goed Company’s Are we not drawn onward to new erA, a palindrome in title and action. Starting with Adam and Eve we watch mankind’s journey as it progressively destroys the natural world it inherited, ending with the erection amidst a sea of plastic bags of a giant golden statue to Mammon, the god of capitalism.

But the second half then video replays the first in reverse offering perhaps the only hope of an answer to the ecological Armageddon we face.
Reality stares us in the face at Edinburgh.