The Edinburgh Fringe may be over but its energy goes on

Brexit, written by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky, is in the style of Yes Minister, with polished dialogue, quality acting by a stellar cast, subtle satire and cheap jibes, but it is also an arena for genuine debate on the issue of the day. Timothy Bentinck plays the indecisive PM, trying to persuade remainer and leaver minsters to choose between ambition and principle, while fending off the demands of the EU negotiator (an ice-cool Jo Caulfield, who also has her own show elsewhere). The abrasive women mock the high-sounding inanities of the males as the PM settles for a strategy of “frenetic inertia”, and while the work will offer remainers the soothing comfort of a warm bath, leavers will be able to indulge in a well crafted spectacle.

Joanna McNulty’s show is curiously titled Wine Tamer, but the wine has been mislaid somewhere. She herself is hilariously untamed as she tells tales spiced with sharp one-liners of her own experiences, sexual and other, and of her dealings with her cohabiting boyfriend. She involves some members of the audience in her exchanges, although never belittles them, but generates a high level of excitement with an inventive, non-stop and whacky performance, being especially brilliant in her spontaneous ad libs.

The Prisoner was one of the three works put on by the renowned Theatre des Bouffes du Nord from Paris, the company established in 1974 by Peter Brook when he withdrew from London. Taken together, these three productions are the jewel in the crown of this year’s festival. At 93, Brook shows no sign of failing creativity or of the narrowing of vision or cosmopolitan ambition. The Prisoner is set in a desolate, barren place, with an international cast, but has as its focus one man seated year after year outside a prison, gazing at it but never taking advantage of his relative freedom to escape. His crime was patricide committed after acts of incestuous transgression in his home. People arrive to talk to him, some random strangers, others friends and relatives from his past, but he is intent on remaining there until the due time, which will be known only to him, arrives.

The play has the elemental force of Greek tragedy or the Book of Job. This is theatre as a sacred place, where spectators can search for poetry, images or explanation if they wish, or ponder questions of responsibility and justice or simply submit to the power of the enigmatic tale. There is a stillness and a calm to the acting of Hiran Abeysekera which makes his embodiment of guilt and his willingness to expiate all the more powerful.

The same company produced La Maladie de la Mort, based on a story by Marguerite Duras, adapted by Alice Birch and directed by Katie Mitchell. That already implies a certain distance from the original, and the distance is heightened by the decision to doubly refract the work as both theatre and cinema. The action is set in a hotel room where the encounters between the man and the prostitute, who was not such in the original story, takes place. The room is filled with sound technicians and cameramen, and the action is replayed on a giant screen above the set, making it impossible not to focus on that rather than on the stage.

Questions of masculinity, male power and the impact of the male gaze have been questioned in many theatres this year, but here it is given greater force in a work written decades ago. The Man is willing to pay the Woman anything she asks provided she does his bidding without question, and in particular makes no attempt to engage him in conversation. His is not exactly a demand for sex without fuss, since his malady initially seems to be his inability to love and his craving for something deeper, but the Woman analyses him as suffering from a deeper malaise, the malady of death, something more insidious and implacable than a Freudian death wish. We are on the fringe of forces beyond rationality, and Irene Jacobs’s narration does not offer culturally fashionable solutions absent in the dialogue, but it does frame and enhance the splendid, subdued playing of Laetitia Dosch and Nick Fletcher.

A radically updated and rethought version of John Gay’s 18th-century work The Beggar’s Opera, directed by Robert Carsen, makes up the trio of productions by the company. Gay overturned conventional standards and expectations, focusing on the lives, loves, betrayals and felonies of the London underworld, while simultaneously lampooning the great and good of the day. The political references in this reworked version are to Brexit and contemporary issues, the acting is full-throttle and the cast of rogues is largely as they were in the original, with Macheath (Benjamin Purkiss) two-timing both Polly Peachum (Kate Batter) and Lucy Lockit (Olivia Beretton), while Mr Peachum (Robert Burt) states the underlying (im)moral belief of this cast of thugs and cynics – “What’s in it for me?” Who was it who said more recently that there is no such thing as society? The pace is lively, the lyrics are as they were, but the lost music is recomposed in the style of Gay’s day.

A LOST story from Scotland’s past was retold both in a session at the Book Festival and in an operetta with the same title, The Tumbling Lassie. Alan MacLean, an advocate, told the audience in Charlotte Square that while doing other research he came across the history of a young girl, whose real name is lost, but who had been sold by her parents to a company of travelling players, for whom she performed as an acrobat. She was in a condition of virtual slavery, from which she was rescued by a friendly family. The company raised a court action in 1687 to have their “property” restored, but the judges rejected their case on the grounds that slavery was unknown to Scots law. This incredible story was made into an one-act operetta by Alexander McCall Smith and composer Tom Cunningham, Scotland’s Gilbert and Sullivan, and given an enchanting, full-scale production with band and singers from the Edinburgh Studio Opera.

The dominant figure at the Book Festival was not any of the illustrious living authors who were invited, but Edinburgh’s Muriel Spark, the centenary of whose birth was celebrated with several sessions, two discussions of radio adaptations of her works, and a performance-reading by well-known actors of her only play, Doctors of Philosophy. Several sessions, chaired by Alan Taylor, promoter and “onlie begetter” of this year-long fiesta, examined aspects of Spark’s work. One, featuring Rosemary Goring and James Campbell, was supposedly given to discussion of London in her novels, but the audience turned it to a debate on the presence of evil and of uncompromisingly wicked characters in her novels. Was she part of a Scottish literary tradition of obsession with evil, or was her own personal interest in the issue a factor in her conversion to Catholicism, some wondered and the questions hung in the air.

As did exhilaration at the performed reading of her play. Probably the cast of nine will make it impossible to finance a full-scale production, so this is the best we can have but the production, directed by Marilyn Imrie, was very good indeed. The collective noun for a group of such characters featured here should be something like a squabble of PhDs, and Spark brought them, idiosyncrasies and all, together in house in a fashionable area of London. Hetty Baynes Russell made Annie an unashamed vamp, while Elaine S Smith brought out the pawky humour of the housekeeper, while Maureen Beattie had fun with the conventional Mrs Delfont. Maybe there is somewhere a philanthropist who will allow this play and Tumbling Lassie to be seen beyond the confines of the Edinburgh Festival.