With work from Bosnia, the Palestinian territories, Iran, Belgium, Switzerland and even Scotland on offer this year, the official Edinburgh Festival’s theatrical subdivision has a more eclectic, adventurous look than usual. On Saturday it began operations in fine style with the first of two Polish pieces: a version of Szymon Anski’s Dybbuk that extended the original play’s reach to embrace the uncalm ghosts of those who didn’t survive the Warsaw ghetto.

Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production begins slowly, with members of the TR Warszawa company, yarmulkes on the men’s heads, sitting and talking of famous rabbis, a Messiah who wouldn’t come “because nobody was waiting for him”, a God who is “ajin” or “not-something”, a Faustian mystic dangerously steeped in the kabbalah, and the problem of evil.

Similar discussion recurs during the play itself, but it serves a purpose: which is to give context, texture and depth to Anski’s tale of Lea, who was invaded by a dybbuk on her wedding day, and Hanna Krall’s short story about Adam, a Polish-American possessed by the half-brother who was murdered in Treblinka.

When Magdalena Cielecka’s Lea is in her bridal dress, running like a demented White Rabbit from a nervous groom and then clouting him in the face, a tantalising evening turns riveting. The relatives who have been painstakingly preparing for the wedding before their mirrors gather on plastic chairs at plastic tables to hear an antique rabbi dissect the problem.

One of the strengths of Warlikowski’s revival is that it shows how extraordinary the very ordinary can become. Lea, you see, now belongs to the dead son of the best friend of her father, who long ago promised that their two children would marry and then reneged on his vow.

Cielecka’s Lea reels, slumps, collapses, slurps down bits of melon as they try and fail to exorcise the brazen, growling, cackling but undeniably lovelorn dybbuk that has taken control of both her and her voice. And then, just when you think the play is over, she transmutes into the frustrated wife of Andrzej Chyra’s Adam, who is normal yet schizoid thanks to the rage that wells up from the dead boy who has made his home inside him. Like Lea, he can’t escape the clamour of history: she a frustrated lover, he a victim of the Holocaust, past beings whose future was stolen.

Somehow the linkage between the old play and the modern story works. I wasn’t sure what was added by the lions, unicorns and other creatures moving on the cartoon tapestry at the back of the stage, but the acting is impeccable and the musical score, which ranges from the delicate and atmospheric to the rumbling and scary, adds much. In sum, a most striking start to the festival proper.

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