I’ve just returned from Warsaw to Edinburgh. To anyone attempting the journey, I offer some advice: get to the airport early – because your flight will be busy.

When Poland joined the European Union in 2004, the government predicted that, though migrant workers would come and go, few Poles would settle in the UK. But figures out this month suggest that more than 35,000 are living in the Scottish capital alone, and there is no sign they are going anywhere in a hurry. In some parts of town, it’s easier to find a pierogi dumpling than a haggis supper these days.

Nonculinary aspects of Polish culture have been slower to filter into the mainstream. But that’s about to change, as the Fringe welcomes a clutch of exciting offerings. Why now? Because Poland is learning that, if it’s going to convince the world it’s not a nation of ill-educated, vodka-swilling hicks (it’s not, apart from the vodka-swilling), then exporting a little of the country’s thriving culture is as good a place as any to start. The presence of a ready-made audience of young Poles – many of whom will bring British friends to events – is simply a bonus.

Gone are the days when any Polish production suggested intense-looking actors, dressed in black, on a black stage, muttering black thoughts. The crop of 2007 shows could hardly be more stylistically or thematically diverse.

I’m not even sure how to describe The Table (Aurora Nova). It has two subtitles: “a maple swish and shush” (too fanciful) and “a piece for four men and a table” (too reductive). Despite looking like something you might find at Ikea, the titular piece of furniture is actually a specially built musical instrument. From the opening moment, when the four musicians fling knife blades into the maplewood surface – conjuring a supernatural twang – this surprises.

Every tap of the finger and swish of the hand is picked up by 29 tiny microphones beneath the wood, sent to a mixing desk, and fed back to the audience in glorious quadraphonic. Four acts – based on points of the compass – run the gamut of world music: Scandinavian lullabies, soca rhythms, Lou Reed and the theme from Rosemary’s Baby all feature. There’s even Mongolian throat-singing. Somehow, however, the unearthly spawn of these influences sounds wholly original.

What makes this more than “just” a concert is the way that the performers, forced by the unique design of their instrument to stare into one another’s eyes, interact. It ensures that – while there may be no plot – a thousand little subplots and mysteries enrich this remarkable feelgood show.

Feelgood isn’t the first epithet you would apply to this year’s other Polish shows. Following the huge success of last year’s Chronicles: A Lamentation, Song of the Goat Theatre return with Lacrimosa (Aurora Nova). The company create a characteristically uncompromising piece of physical theatre out of Mozart’s Requiem, fire-walking possession cults, and the story of how, in 1485, Arras’s citizens culled a fifth of its people in order to rid the town of the evil that brought plague.

Trip to Buenos Aires (Assembly Universal Arts) is an impressive one-woman show about an old woman enduring memory loss. Bitterly funny at times, it is distinguished by the compelling performance of Gabriela Muskala, who wrote it with her sister after their grandmother succumbed to Alzheimer’s. That Muskala plays the confused but sometimes lucid Valerie (Walerka in Polish) without a wig or ageing make-up adds to the poignancy, providing a constant reminder of the spirited former teacher imprisoned in a failing mind.

Teatr Biuro Podrozy are best known for their Carmen F u n e b r e , inspired by the Bosnian war. Stripped to a barebones text, their open-air Macbeth: Who Is That Bloodied Man? (Old College Quad) uses many of the same devices, including pyrotechnics and their trademark stilts, as well as motorcycles, and is just as visually ravishing.

Four productions out of thousands: given this festival’s scale, that might not sound very much, but it is significant – as is the backing of the Polish Cultural Institute in London. If its energetic new head, Pawel Potoroczyn, gets his way, the Edinburgh shows will be the tip of an artistic iceberg drifting Britain’s way.

The are already signs of this: earlier this year, Song of the Goat performed their Macbeth at the RSC, while Biuro Podrozy’s adaptation of that most famous Anglo-Pole Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has just premiered at the National Theatre’s Watch This Space festival on the South Bank.

“It’s the perfect time for us to press our foot on the accelerator,” Potoroczyn says. The funding crisis in Britain’s arts – or as some regard it, “the Olympic deficit” – has made international co-productions more desirable. Potoroczyn has scheduled a year-long showcase of Polish arts in 2009-10, and there are plans for an ambitious collaboration with one of Britain’s biggest cultural institution at the 2008 Edinburgh festival.

It might not be as easy as it used to be to find a decent Polish electrician or plumber who isn’t booked up for months, but if you want an actor, playwright, artist or composer, I know the man to ask.