Back at the start of the festival (whether it was weeks, months or years ago, I can no longer tell), Andrew Dickson suggested that Damascus could be this year's Black Watch. I knew immediately he was wrong. This is no reflection on David Greig's Damascus, which is one of the better offerings at the Traverse, but an observation about the festival itself.
Every August all of us - audiences and commentators alike - head out in search of this year's hit. Knowing no better, we always imagine it will be in some way like last year's hit. Only it never is. Black Watch was nothing like David Harrower's Blackbird, the must-see hit of 2005, and that show was nothing like Song of the Goat's Chronicles a Lamentation, the most mesmerising show of 2004. If any show had been like Black Watch this year, we'd have written it off as being too 2006.
The festivals in Edinburgh thrive on innovation and, almost by definition, the most sensational shows are always where you least expect to find them. With that in mind, my vote for "this year's Black Watch" goes not to anything at the Traverse with its avalanche of new writing, not to anything at Aurora Nova with its smorgasbord of international physical theatre, but to a converted sports hall at the Pleasance where Eurobeat: Almost Eurovision has been whipping a deliriously raucous crowd into a nul-pointes frenzy of silly musical fun.
Lyn Gardner has written all you need to know about this feelgood hit. I don't mean to denigrate the fine shows I've seen on serious subjects such as violence, prejudice and reconciliation when I say that next year I'll be going round complaining about the lack of affectionate parodies of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Call me superficial, but I'll also be looking in vain for the new Fuerzabruta, a show whose dizzying defiance of gravity had a surprisingly similar sensory impact as my other favourite show, Smile off your Face. Where Fuerzabruta played to a crowd of 1200 at a time, this show by Belgian's Ontroerend Goed company was for a single spectator, blindfolded, sat in a wheelchair and exposed to a barrage of smells, tastes, sounds and physical sensations.
It was the kind of idiosyncratic experience - like seeing Beowulf recited in Old English, like watching Phil Nichol stage four shows in a day, like listening to four Polish musicians performing on a table - that reminds me why I came to Edinburgh 20 years ago and never left.
So another Fringe is drawing to a close and Eurobeat is dead. Long live Eurobeat! And go Estonia!
