There is often a feeling that the Edinburgh Fringe is only about fluff, a playground for kids while the grown-ups tackle the serious stuff in the international festival. It's true there's plenty of fluff around, and some of it nasty and gratuitous. If you're out for shock value, you'll find plenty on offer, whether it's a stage hypnotist who encourages participants to simulate sex to any number of theatre companies whose show titles are little more than marketing ploys.
But on the ground things looks somewhat different. Amid all the pot-noodle theatre (and, hey, sometimes it's pot noodle you fancy, particularly late at night) there's plenty to get your teeth into, and a week after the start of the Fringe some themes are beginning to emerge. As the Scotsman's Joyce McMillan pointed out in her review of Truth in Translation a few days back, "the idea of forgiveness stalks this year's Fringe like a ghost."
So it does, whether it's Russell Kane sending up Jade Goody's pitiful attempts to seek the nation's forgiveness in his engaging stand-up-cum-sketch show, Tam Dean Burn's fallen angel Cupid in his stage version of Luke Sutherland's Venus as a Boy, or the young woman in Mile End facing the psychiatrist patient who pushed her husband under a train. "Is it too late to redeem the past?" asks the attorney in Emergence-See!, Daniel Beaty's account of the sudden appearance of a 400-year-old slave ship in by the Statue of Liberty in the Hudson River. The question is being asked all over the Fringe, but nobody has yet come up with an answer - but then, as Adrienne might say in An Audience with Adrienne, "it's good to talk."
If forgiveness is one theme, then the failure of words - and our increasing suspicion of how they are twisted - is another. Truth in Translation considers the slippery nature of truth and what happens when lies are offered as truths, while over at Aurora Nova the Russian dance piece Hangman is like a puzzle that you can't quite unpick, a crossword that ends in death, or a fatal alphabet game at a sinister children's party.
In a world in which we endlessly talk to each other but don't really hear, it takes the formalised experiment of pieces such as Etiquette, also at Aurora, in which two of you get the opportunity to sit at a table and star in a scripted drama all of your own, to make us really listen to each other.
Though, as Kane points out in his show, Goody's loud protests that she wasn't a racist came in a week in which she was due to launch a perfume called Sssh!
