Beyond student humour

Pleasingly, there was an increase in student companies this year which is quite an achievement considering the ever-increasing costs of mounting even a week at this increasingly professional showcase, month-long spree.

My eye was caught by King's College Players' production of Clifford Odets's groundbreaking 1935 play centred on the New York cabbies' strike, Waiting For Lefty (Pleasance Theatre).

Notable for the famous Unity Theatre production in Britain, the action takes place at a union meeting with the corrupt placatory union leader Harry Fat facing the vociferous opposition of desperate members calling for action while they wait for their spokesman Lefty.

Vignette scenes depicting the cruel destruction of relationships within the workers' families caused by destitution are interwoven into the action.

The King's students, training to be doctors and lawyers, tackle a world they can't know but genuinely respond to and convey the play's message - "Don't wait for Lefty. That man may never come."

With equal commitment Warwick University students' treatment of Naomi Wallace's lyrical trilogy The Fever Chart (Radisson) captures the anguish of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict in three moving insights on the personal anguish involved. It features a meeting between Ahmed, whose son had been killed by Israeli soldiers, and a trainee Israeli nurse who had been given life through his transplanted donated lungs.

There is a much more brutal take on a similar persecution situation in High Tide/Escalator East to Edinburgh's superbly performed Lidless (Underbelly) in the claustrophobic setting of what is in effect a large plastic box space, with the small audience packed within touching distance of the cast.

Trained to use any disgusting treatment to extract information from Muslim prisoners, Guantanamo interrogator Alice is encouraged to use sex and humiliatingly rapes an inmate. When he turns up 15 years later demanding that she give him back his ruined life by donating part of her liver, her attempts to build a conventional family life with her husband and a daughter, who finds a suspiciously strong bond with her mother's nemesis, are doomed.

Jack The Knife (Assembly Rooms) provided a break from theatre stress. Master communicator Jack Klaff first hit the festival 30 years ago with his stunning Nagging Doubt exploring the reality of his apartheid South Africa through a host of characters.

Here he is himself, using quicksilver changes of reference from his personal history to the world of show business and its distorted political mirror image, to explore through story "the clothes of truth," the central human predicament of choice - one's own or the manipulators'?

Themes always emerge in Fringe drama and this year, with shows based on dementia, autism and Asperger's, society's increasing awareness of issues of the mind came to attention. (Bye)Polar (The Space, Jeffrey Street) from Z Theatre Company dealt with the destructive impact on victim and family of vertiginous falls into the depths of unfathomable depression.

Here the most painful aspect of the teenage daughter's illness is not only her parents' and psychiatrist's but also her own inability to understand her devastating and suicidal mood changes. No answers - just demanding questions to face.

Two shows at Diverse Attraction on Edinburgh's Royal Mile demanded attention. In A Handbag students from Coventry's Biblike School enthusiastically tackle Anthony Horowitz's play about their own contemporaries, here in an institution for young criminals "therapeutically" preparing a production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest. The discordance between their own world and that of Edwardian wit and elegance leads to provocative and stimulating argument.

Ava Hunt poignantly juxtaposes the lives of two remarkably brave but determinedly non-heroic women in I'm No Hero.

Decades and continents separate Irena Sendler, who helped to save over 2,000 Jewish children in nazi-dominated Poland, and Rachel Corrie, the young US peace activist crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer demolishing the homes and lives of the Palestinians she was trying to protect. The contrast between victim and oppressor lies as an acid subtext to an affecting and effective performance.

Finally a remarkable late-night Grande Guignol experience Sub Rosa takes its small audience through the gloomy interior of Hill Street Theatre's Masonic Lodge building.

In each of the rooms we meet different members of a Victorian music hall and have slowly revealed their parts in a ghastly and grotesque story of sexual exploitation and murder.

With relief we emerged, before being reminded by the celebratory firework display of the Military Tattoo that our world is as fraught as that of any predecessors.

Needless to say neither RBS nor HBOS sponsored the National Theatre of Scotland's Festival production of Caledonia which retells the story of the first great Scottish collapse of capitalism the 17th century Darien crisis.

Instrumental in the 1694 founding of the Bank of England, Scotsman William Paterson, with his golden dream of untold riches through establishing a Scottish colony on the Isthmus of Panama, drew in hundreds of wealthy investors longing to become wealthier and many poverty-stricken Scots yearning for a new life.

Inhospitable local conditions and the opposition of both Spain, the dominant power in the region, and England determined to prevent the rise of pre-unified Scotland, led to inevitable economic disaster and real tragedy for many devastated emigrant families.

Writer Alistair Beaton and director Anthony Neilson treat all the wheelings and dealings involved in the preparation for the doomed expedition with pantomime verve. The comic, caricature treatment gives way largely when the action transfers to the "promised land."

Paddy Cunneen's songs with Beaton's lyrics capture the rollicking ballad quality Of The Beggars' Opera.

The lesson spelled out to an appreciative, apparently largely Scottish audience was clear - "Don't give your money to the Royal Bank of Scotland."

After 35 years, New York's famous experimental theatre company The Wooster Group are now approaching middle age. It is beginning to show.

Founder and director Elizabeth LeCompte claims that with her work, "We never know what is coming next." But we do - a high-tech, high-velocity presentation that often leaves audiences in the dark.

This is almost literally so with LeCompte's treatment of Tennessee Williams's largely autographical play Vieux Carre drawn from his experiences living in the late '30s in a doss house in the French quarter of New Orleans.

The set is a dimly lit, scaffolding erection often obscuring sight lines. The audience are lucky if they can make out what is going on on the multiple video screens at the back of the stage.

The play is here offered as a painful dream. Amplified dialogue is augmented by an ongoing accompaniment of sounds, which might certainly suggest that the old house run by the witch-like Mrs Wire is in as desperate a state as its occupants.

The set is a dimly lit, scaffolding erection often obscuring sight lines. The audience are lucky if they can make out what is happening on the multiple video screens at the back of the stage.

Williams's depiction of his fellow borders all struggling with survival and their emotional needs, however, seems less important for the Woosters than the demonstration of their technical expertise.