Scarborough

Yellow Moon

Damascus

This Piece of Earth

Breaker Morant

The Human Computer

Is This About Sex?

Truckstop

Dai

England

Finding decent accommodation can be a nightmare in Edinburgh in August, but one B&B is creating a stir this year. Go to the Assembly Rooms entrance, turn sharp left, and it is behind the first door you see. The wallpaper is peeling, grubby whorls stud the bathroom door – this seaside guesthouse would struggle for a star rating. Yet the show that takes place inside it is another matter. Fiona Evans’s two-hander, about a 29-year-old female teacher having a dirty weekend with a 15-year-old male pupil, Scarborough (Assembly Rooms), is the Fringe’s equivalent of a good boutique hotel: compact, stylish and utterly individual.

This is the kind of experience the festival does best. In a tiny space, dominated by a double bed, the audience is forced to crouch or stand where it can. Physical discomfort is the least of it, though; the actors are so close, and the hyperrealistic set so minutely detailed, watching feels like a violation.

Taking place over the weekend of the boy’s 16th birthday, the story traces the arc of the relationship, from joy to despair, in 40 tense minutes. Evans tackles the delicate subject matter with a light touch, inviting uneasy laughter, and lets the characters speak for themselves. Under Deborah Bruce’s direction, this taut, naturalistic script gets the performances it merits. Sixteen-year-old James Baxter is exceptional as Daz, the cheeky Geordie who is not as mature as he thinks, while Holly Atkins economically hints at the damaged core beneath Lauren’s breezy surface.

Some may criticise Scarborough for not judging more. But by turning its audience into voyeurs, this troublingly erotic production (there, I’ve said it) says something rather more interesting about our prurient, sexually confused culture than any moralistic diatribe.

Down the road at the Traverse, strange rumours are circulating about the Scottish playwright David Greig. Is he really one person, or is there a secret laboratory banging out stubbly, superintelligent clones, each modified slightly to suit the project in hand? How else do you explain not just his output (three plays at this festival alone), but his mastery of so many styles? In another year, Greig’s Traverse 2 show, Yellow Moon– an epic ballad about Silent Leila and Stag Lee, two city teenagers who flee, Bonnie and Clyde-style, to the Highlands after a murder – might have been one of the Traverse’s main attractions. This is Greig in fiercely elemental mode, crafting a satisfying myth of innocence regained from a series of doubles: two killings, two self-harmers, two gangsters, two stags.

Excellent as TAG’s production is, though, it is doomed to spend the festival in the shadow of Damascus at Traverse 1. Set in a Syrian hotel lobby, where a publisher called Paul is trying to secure an order for English-language textbooks, this is the most ambitious and funniest thing Greig has written for a while. At its simplest, it tells the story of an innocent abroad, trying to bridge the culture gap. Prevented from returning to Scotland by a bomb scare and a snowstorm, Paul finds a life-changing moment of connection with his translator, Muna. His attempt to engage with Zacharia, the hotel clerk (whose twin preoccupations are foreign girls and the Hollywood screenplay he has written about his life), has more tragic consequences.

Around this, Greig spins a dazzling, sometimes dizzying, extended metaphor about a relationship between the West and the Arab world that is built upon mutual fantasy and projection. Damascus isn’t perfect. Sometimes it feels as if you’re watching an elegant football team that passes each ball beautifully without quite finding the back of the net. But Philip Howard’s languidly atmospheric production carries you over the odd frustration to the bloody end.

It’s been a more frustrating than normal first week this year, although that is probably just luck of the draw rather than a reflection of quality. The biggest disappointment was This Piece of Earth (Underbelly) from Ransom, who brought Hurricane, the excellent show about snooker’s Alex Higgins, a few years back. It’s hard to grasp how this cliché-strewn dirge, about a couple walking to a ship to escape the great famine, got from page to stage. Rarely has so much wailing been to so little effect.

On the day I saw it, Breaker Morant (Udder-belly), the Australian classic about Boer war soldiers tried for murder, suffered badly from technical glitches: it was like watching actors go over the top at some theatrical Gallipoli. But a bigger problem is the comedian Adam Hills’s anaemic performance as Morant. They should have cast the more rough-and-ready Brendon Burns, who is excellent in support.

Far more enjoyable is The Human Computer (Traverse Drill Hall), Will Adamsdale’s attempt to confront his technophobia. You have to love a man whose idea of fun is to construct a giant computer out of cardboard and sticky tape. “You can’t win sex, but you can lose,” Adamsdale says in passing. “Basically, what you’re after is a high-scoring draw.” It is a sentiment that the characters in Rough Magic’s Is This About Sex? (Traverse Drill Hall) would share.

Christian O’Reilly’s play is a slickly entertaining erotic farce about two Dublin couples having affairs with each other’s partners. It’s more to do with the mechanics of plot than the workings of psychology. But you could say that about some of Shakespeare’s comedies.

While the Dutch thriller Truckstop (Zoo) is long on atmosphere, but short on menace, Dai (Pleasance) has plenty of both. Set in a Tel Aviv cafe shortly before a suicide bombing, Iris Bahr’s moving one-woman show conjures a cross-section of Israeli society you don’t often find represented in the media. Don’t go if you don’t like bangs.

Finally, what can I say about Tim Crouch’s England, at the Fruitmarket Gallery as part of the Traverse programme. One of his themes is whether complete connection with another person is possible, explored obliquely in this characteristically stripped-back show. I know I ought to love his brand of theatre, which makes the audience’s imagination paramount, in the same way you know you ought to love Marmite or oysters. But, every time I see one of his shows and his Scientologist-like grin, I get the same shiver of visceral unease you get when assailed by a charity mugger. My loss, I suspect, but you can’t fake these things.