Hopes are high for John Tiffany's production of Euripides' The Bacchae. Photograph: Frank Baron
And we're off: the first weekend of Edinburgh's month of festivals has already passed off in a blur of route marches from venue to venue in rainy streets, many glasses of red wine in the Traverse bar and bumping into people you see only once a year. So far, what's the deal?
While Andrew Dickson's hopes were very high for David Grieg's new play Damascus, at the Traverse, and I really enjoyed the first half - about dislocation, culture clash and the provisional nature of language - I wasn't quite sure where it all went in the end.
The best play I've seen so far is - also at the Traverse - The Walworth Farce, almost Beckettian in its mingling of humour and bleakness, but frankly less uplifting. I'm not selling it hard, I'm realising. Trust me, though. It's a good 'un.
I'm also looking forward enormously to seeing Lacrimosa, from the brilliant Polish company Song of the Goat Theatre, at Aurora Nova. A few years ago they brought the also cheerily named Chronicles - a Lamentation to the fringe, and it went down a storm with its inventive, eerie use of music and dance.
My personal strategy with stand-up comedy is to get the estimable Brian Logan to tell me the one or two shows that I really have to see to spare me the trouble of traipsing round myself. He has recommended the avant-garde Dutch stuff he wrote about in today's paper.
I am also a huge fan of Stewart Lee, whose stand-up show Brian has also reviewed. But I am particularly looking forward to Lee's piece at the Traverse, with Simon Munnery, called Johnson and Boswell Late but Live. It sounds like a hoot.
The international festival kicks off at the weekend - and with it comes the thing I'm looking forward to most in the festival, namely John Tiffany's production of Euripides' The Bacchae, for the National Theatre of Scotland. It's probably the most hotly anticipated show in the festival: Tiffany directed last year's hit show Black Watch, and it stars Alan Cumming, back on the stage in Scotland after nearly two decades. Also in the cast, as repressed king Pentheus, is Tony Curran, who was so fabulous in Andrea Arnold's Glasgow-set film Red Road. It's one of my favourite plays, ripe for reinterpretation. I just feel for Tiffany and co this year: expectations are cruelly high.
Also causing a buzz is the first appearance in three decades in Britain of the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. I've heard them play in Rome and I've been to see their pioneering work in Caracas. Believe me, they are completely phenomenal.
