The Bacchae

Traces

The Walworth Farce

The Container

Johnson and Boswell

Ravenhill for Breakfast

Exits and Entrances

Life in a Marital Institution

Venus as a Boy

With the amount of drinking that goes on in this town, it seems apt that the big International Festival show should be The Bacchae (EIF @ the King’s) – talk about matching a play to an audience.

Performed by the National Theatre of Scotland, David Greig’s new version of Euripides’s tragedy has, inevitably perhaps, been nicknamed the “wacky Bacchae”. It’s clear why from the off, as Alan Cumming’s Dionysus makes his entrance from above, dangling by his ankles in a gold lamé dress. It’s probably the campest thing the King’s Theatre has ever seen.

Like much of this production, Cumming’s panto turn of a performance is captivating. The director, John Tiffany, knows how to stage a spectacle, so we’re treated to a real river of wine, a huge fire effect and a very unGreek chorus of scarlet-dressed soul singers. The trouble is, you need more than flamboyance to crack this often puzzling play – which pits sexual licence against patrician restraint – and its uncomfortable sexual politics (out-of-control women go bad). Against Cumming’s hip-wiggling, the grief of Cadmus and Agave doesn’t stand much chance. The result is an unbalanced, if entertaining, evening.

Traces (Assembly) also delivers spectacle. Like Cirque du Soleil, the young circus troupe Les 7 Doigts de la Main come from Quebec. But, unlike their compatriots, they haven’t (yet?) been franchised into corporate blandness. The show seems to be set in a dystopia of the near future, but we needn’t read too much into that. What matters is that, whether springing through hoops, doing scarcely believable things up poles or weaving pretty patterns on skate-boards, these performers are having fun and know how to communicate it.

The same could be said of Druid’s breakneck-paced production of Enda Walsh’s bonkers but brilliant The Walworth Farce (Traverse). Three Cork men – a father and his two sons – spend their days in a south London tower block, eating pink wafer biscuits, drinking Harp lager and acting out the kind of farce Joe Orton might have written had he lived in Cork. What begins as a raucous comedy of Oirish stereotypes morphs into something darker and emotionally richer.

There is less site-specific theatre around this year: a good thing, if you ask me. A notable exception is Clare Bayley’s The Container (Udderbelly), a play about people-trafficking set in the back of a lorry, which delivers an authentically claustrophobic experience. It has moments of theatre-in-education-style worthiness, but its strength is its presentation of asylum-seekers as individuals, with disparate motives and morals.

Johnson and Boswell – Late but Live (Traverse) pairs the comic-writing talent of Stewart Lee and the divine madness (it’s everywhere this week) of Simon Munnery, playing the great Scot-hater and man of letters, Samuel Johnson. The conceit of this amiable nonsense is that Johnson and his besotted biographer (Miles Jupp) are posthumously promoting their book about the Hebrides. It’s really an excuse for Munnery to look bug-eyed and make silly jokes about Caledonian culture. Worth it just for the moment when Boswell, crushed by his mentor’s abuse, has to eat an entire haggis.

Jupp may need to go on a diet come September. So may the lucky ones who’ve been getting up early for Ravenhill for Breakfast (Traverse) and partaking of the bacon rolls. Free food is an old Fringe trick to sell duff productions, but nobody has ever done it with a show – or, more accurately, shows – this good. Mark Ravenhill’s series of 17 self-contained but interlinked short plays deals with the war on terror in more ways than one. A central concern is how the public has been colonised by fear since 9/11, prompting not engagement, but retreat into denial and self-justification. I’ve seen three so far and, despite their brevity, each one has been a festival highlight. This is the antithesis of crude agitprop, and the casting (done on the hoof, taking the cream of actors from other shows) is flawless. Go, but watch your cholesterol.

It has been interesting to watch how, in the decade since Shopping and F***ing, Ravenhill has gone from young turk to (almost) theatrical establishment. Generational shift permeates Athol Fugard’s Exits and Entrances (Assembly), a sort of South African version of The Dresser, charting the relationship between “the Afrikaner Olivier”, Andre Huguenet, and an aspiring playwright bearing a likeness to the young Fugard. Beautifully acted, this is a play about tempered idealism and artistic father figures (no accident that we first see Huguenet playing Oedipus). The most moving moment is when the old man says he’s too weary to go on creating. Let’s hope Fugard, now 75, isn’t speaking through him.

Nothing coded about Life in a Marital Institution (Assembly), in which the New Yorker James Braly dissects the mouldering corpse of his toxic marriage. This is a stylish monologue, reminiscent of those of Spalding Gray: it’s also the only Fringe event (I hope) to offer a recipe for placenta (pan-roasted in cumin).

Finally, in Venus as a Boy (Traverse), the National Theatre of Scotland’s adaptation of Luke Sutherland’s novel, Tam Dean Burn gives an astonishing performance as a transvestite. He’s called Cupid, has a divine gift for bringing sexual pleasure to others, and wears a gold lamé dress (did the NTS get a job lot?). Dionysus has competition.