So where was I? Ah yes – the Total Theatre Awards shortlist meeting, and having 28 shows to see in a week, above and beyond the things I already had booked.

Well, I’ve done that. Since the Total Theatre Awards shortlisting meeting on 16 August, I’ve run madly around town, determined to see all the shows in each of the three category shortlists – Physical and Visual Theatre, Innovation, and Emerging Artists. And YES, with Dr Brown tonight as my last show I can say MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. I’ve even managed to write some reviews in between times, for example, here’s one of Chris Goode’s lovingly crafted verbatim piece transposing children’s words to adult voices, Monkey Bars. And here’s one of a surprisingly joyous piece about illegal immigration and exploitation, Juana in a Million (shortlisted in the Emerging Artists category).

Also in Emerging is the extraordinary XXXO – suffering a little in a totally unsuitable space at Pleasance Courtyard, but rising above that to create an adventurous piece of theatre which is ostensibly about girls crying, but broadens out to be a reflection on how we respond to all the sadness in the world, real or fictional. Each of the works in the Emerging group have been so completely different in form and theme – from the grown-up puppetry of Tortoise in a Nutshell, Grit, investigating modern warfare, to folksy and heart-breaking music-theatre piece Beulah by the Flanagan Collective, to Lecoq-trained bouffons Clout, to the knowing multi-media experiments of Sleepwalk Collective, to the live art/theatre cross-over of Best in the World, an homage to darts-playing and to celebrating one’s personal best, to the comedy-theatre crossover Not Treasure Island, in which Sleeping Tress make a bid to be the new Penny Dreadfuls.

In the Innovation category, I saw Sue MacLaine’s Still Life for a second time (the first was in Brighton last year) and was pleased to find the show as rich and rewarding second time round – if you haven’t experienced it yet, it merges a poetic biographical story with a life drawing class – experienced artists and absolute beginners equally welcome! The Pride was a weird one: I started out hating it and ended up loving it – a kind of Australian Abigail’s Party acted out by a trio of people in lion suits who use ‘lion-ness’ to investigate gender, social climbing in suburbia, and masculine pride and competition. Great jungle wallpaper too! There are two children’s shows on the shortlist this year:Paperbelle and The Curious Scrapbook of Josephine Bean – the former for under-sixes and the latter for over-eights. Paperbelle is – and I know they will hate me for pointing this out – too close to the subject matter of previous Scottish show White to really rise above the comparison, although it is a charming and lovely show with a gorgeous design and great live music (the eponymous Paperbelle’s voice rendered on guitar). Shona Reppe’s Josephine Bean is gorgeous, just gorgeous – all based round a scrapbook, the contents of which are cleverly animated; a truly innovative children’s show, and performed with great panache by Ms Reppe.

I also got to see Dr Brown – and all I can say is go, get a ticket and go. He takes physical theatre and clowning to new levels – and as for how he works the audience… Wow! See Edward Wren’s review here, he sums it all up pretty well!

I’d seen much of the Physical and Visual category pre-shortlist, but Teatr Biuro Podrozy’s Planet Lem was a late opener, so I got to see that – a large-scale sci-fi extravaganza that featured humanoids depicted as what one person I know described as ‘Tellytubbies with tits’, dominated by a terrifying team of robots. As always the stilt work and staging was great, and good to see TBP going for a different aesthetic and playing with comedy. Great spaceship too!

Nothing is Really Difficult is enormous fun: three male clowns of the highest order and one big box – cue an hour of rip-roaring fun that manages along the way to investigate masculinity and parody the notion of three blokes stuck together for life. And they surely have the most innovative show flyers in the world – they are wood, in the shape of ‘Dutch animals’ or handbags or maybe just plain wooden squares, carved before our very eyes from on top of their box pre-show.

Knee Deep is contemporary circus at its best, skills-wise – astoundingly talented performers challenging our expectations of male and female roles in circus performance. You’ll have to go a long way before you see a female base with this strength and power! Stepping outside of the shortlist for an hour or so, I nipped in to see Tumble Circus, mostly because I wanted to compare and contrast with Knee Deep. Tumble is flawed, and the skill level nowhere near as high, but it is a very interesting piece, using circus to investigate what it is to be a circus performer. Navel gazing, perhaps? Well, theatre has certainly had its share of shows that turn the gaze on itself, and I for one greatly enjoyed this piece that reflected the agony and the ecstasy of being a ‘circus couple’.

I finally got to see the much-touted sell-out show at Summerhall, Teatr Zar’sCaesarean Section: Essays in Suicide. And yes, wow, a great piece of ‘total theatre’– the song, music, movement work, and scenography all superb. I will also confess that this company have been trying to attract my attention for the last couple of years, and I have received numerous emails about this work as it was developed and presented in Poland and Italy – and in a very biased way kind of ignored it because of the title. Well, just goes to show… Song of the Goat’s Songs of Lear is amazing and beautiful in some similar ways, but with a radically different staging – almost a recital, although with the company’s physicality evident in the dramaturgy. So good I saw it twice!

Outside of the TT Awards shortlist I have also managed to attend the Guild of Cheesemakers event at Summerhall – good cheese and wine, but I wasn’t personally taken anywhere by the accompanying story of timelessness versus ageing, even if the three performers and various ‘non performers’ – experts on bread, wine, and cheese – were all highly entertaining and watchable. I got to travel on a boat to a remote island for a rendition of Macbeth that is a tribute to a classic Demarco production – beautiful experience, gorgeous site, but a rather dull production of the Scottish Play which missed many opportunities to really use the site, although there were some nice touches such as witches popping up in windows above us, footsteps echoing around the old abbey, and a lovely servant woman with a great Scottish accent who spoke Shakespeare’s lines with a natural ease missing from the other performances.

We Are Not Here, like the above two a Summerhall show, is an interesting piece of dark clown work – very dark clown! – that knowingly references the works of Samuel Beckett (Godot arrives in a pram at one point). Feisty performances from what are obviously seasoned physical theatre actors, presented in the suitably terrifying Demonstration Room. Like Clout’s How a Man Crumbled and The Shit, this is a show that really suits this spooky space, with its hooks and shadows and peeling walls and pews.

Elsewhere, in St Andrew’s Square to be precise, I caught most of a Made in Scotland outdoor aerial-dance show called Leaving Limbo Landing. A strong all-female team of acrobats, aerialists and dancers telling a tale of migration and investigating the meaning of belonging, using sound recordings, and played out on an outdoor rig using rope and silks as well as floor-based choreography. A familiar theme, and it was hard not to compare to Mimbre who are also an all-woman circus-trained company who have made a (better) show about ‘leaving home’. But there are some lovely touches – great costumes including a luggage-label dress, and nice to see side-by-side rope, and to see the contrast between air and ground used well. Oh and there’s a water feature, the show’s USP which is – yeah – a nice climax, although I struggled to understand what it meant, dramaturgically. This could be because I missed the beginning of the show!

I’ve also managed a couple of cabaret shows, although I find it hard to stay awake after 11pm with so much daytime activity going on. Bourgeois and Maurice are their usual outrageously witty and entertaining selves in Sugartits. And East End Cabaret – also a two-person singer and musician combo doing songs with outrageous lyrics and playing with their ambivalent onstage (and suggested offstage) relationship – go from strength to strength. They are so beautifully bawdy, so wonderfully in control of their audience, such a great singer and multi-instrumentalist, that it is hard to find fault. They do come with a health and safety warning though: if you are easily offended by women who are not afraid to name body parts and state what you can do with them, then this is not the show for you!

So, it is close to the end of this year’s Fringe. Just one last weekend. Today I am having a day off from seeing shows in order to judge the Total Theatre Awards. The winners will be announced at 5pm (Thursday 25 August). Oh and also to say that unlike other awards, ours involves a long and convoluted process of assessing and judging by an impressive mix of national and international critics, producers, artists et al – so it’s not just one or two people’s opinions. And we NEVER tell people before the announcements if they’ve won or not, no-one is in the know!

So, we wait on the cusp…