This year's Edinburgh festival seeks to prove it can be more than the sum of its parts. Photograph: Chad Ehlers/Getty
The Edinburgh International Festival programme has just been launched and what distinguishes it - alongside the mouth-watering list of names from Matthew Bourne to Valery Gergiev - is the coherence of the theme that binds it all together. For the second year in a row, artistic director Jonathan Mills is offering a purposeful line-up that seeks to prove a festival can be more than the sum of its parts.
Where last year he suggested links between Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and the Wooster Group's La Didone, this August he is building the event on the idea of European borders. "As always, the theme is not comprehensive," says Mills. "Not every single piece of work in the festival conforms to this theme. However there is a sufficient through-line within the programme to elucidate the theme itself."
The presence of Poland's TR Warszawa illustrates the way he's thinking. First of all, the company is from a country whose borders have constantly been redefined, Second, the company's production of The Dybbuk reflects on the history of the borderless Jewish people and in particular the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto. Third, the comapny's staging of Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis (which I've seen and is tremendously powerful) takes us to that borderline between sanity and madness.
Doing similar things are Sarajevo's East West Centre, which relocates Nigel Williams's Class Enemy to a violent post-Yugoslav landscape, and Belgium's Muziektheater Transparant which, in Ruhe, presents a Schubert recital rudely interrupted by verbatim testimonies of SS volunteers.
By allowing his definition to include what's outside the border as well as what's in it, Mills has included Jidariyya, a poetic meditation on life and death by the Palestinian National Theatre, and a film installation of a traditional Iranian Tazieh, an epic form of sung storytelling - both novelties in a festival that has rarely looked to the Middle East.
You can apply interpretations of the theme to Barrie Kosky's adaptation of Poe's The Tell Tale Heart, and to the National Theatre of Scotland's 365, which is about teenagers leaving the care system. Or you can forget the theme altogether and simply look forward to new pieces by Heiner Goebbels and others.
The same is true in the opera, dance and classical music programmes. But is a theme automatically a good idea? My enthusiasm about all this could be because I'm a journalist. How much easier it is to write about a coherent programme rather than a jumble of events. I also have the privilege of being able to see a range of performances within the festival: not something available to everyone.
Mills claims: "We are also not shoving it down people's throats. We're not saying, 'You have to get this theme in order to get the festival.' Rather, it's something there lying beneath the programme, a rationale for the programme. You can enjoy any individual part of the programme and you can enjoy any combination with this theme in mind. We're encouraging people to discover this thing for themselves and take their own view of it." I guess we'll see.
