Or, to give it its full title: Here is the News from Over There (Over There is the News from Here), a Borderless Twitter Ballad from the Middle East, which follows on from last year’s romping success The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project, also led by Northern Stage’s director Lorne Campbell, with playwright David Grieg on board as dramaturg. Last year it was Scotland. This year, the emphasis is on the Middle East, the project featuring new writing, provocations and performance from over 20 artists and writers from Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Palestine, and Iraq (amongst other countries) together with artists based in the UK whose heritage is linked to the Middle East and/or the Arab world (which are not the same thing, we are reminded).

Let’s begin at the end: We’re here to create a song that will build nightly throughout the Fringe. We learn the chorus. It goes ‘ Aha aha oh oh, Aha aha oh oh – sheb-sheb, sheb-sheb!’ And what does sheb-sheb mean? Flip-flop. Congratulations, you have your first word in Arabic…

Building up to this moment is a rather chaotic – but yes, that is par for the course – mix of readings of short stories or other texts, and a reconstruction of a notorious interview on Egyptian TV.

It’s all held together, sort of, by compere Abdel Rahim Alawiji, a Lebanese man in a kilt who has the vibe of a stand-up comedian, but is in fact a writer of short fiction and film scripts, aided and abetted by Egyptian woman writer who might be called  Sabrina, who is not credited in the programme notes for the day (today’s show has something of an Egyptian bias). Each night will be different, but what we get first at this, the opening show, is a short story called Cairo Taxi Driver, read with the help of an audience member as passenger, and footage on the large screen behind them of the chaos of Cairo in the rush hour, where (we learn) the way to cross the road is to look the car drivers steadily in the eye and never lose nerve.

We next hear five or six short pieces by Palestinian writer (again, information is not easy to track down) which include a very poignant short story of a boy playing with a balloon in an alley, the balloon bursting as a group of Israeli soldiers enter the alleyway…

Today’s special guest Hassan Abdul Razzak presents a reconstruction of a TV interview with an Egyptian self-proclaimed atheist, who blogs and posts on YouTube. This interview is an affront to good broadcasting, with the interviewer turning on her interviewee and accusing him of abandoning his faith and thus his country. An expert, a psychologist, is brought in to offer pronouncements on how misguided this young man is; how he things he understands how things are, but his information is false. ‘Scientists propagating Darwinism are mostly Jewish’ this so-called expert says at one point.

What’s extremely interesting about this interview is how familiar the language of his accusers is. He is, apparently, under the influence of people who are corrupting his mind. He is spending too much time on the internet browsing suspect websites that are trying to radicalise young people. He comes from a good home, but he has rejected his parents and they don’t understand how this could have happened (his mother is brought into the debate in a phone  interview!). Yes, we’ve heard it all before – but  the evil terror that we are hearing about over here is ‘Islamism’ not ‘atheism’.  Interesting, very interesting.

Behind all this, at the back of the stage, is a whole crowd of people doing who knows what on laptops. Plus a woman weaving on a loom, live, images of her busy-fingered activity sometimes projected onto the screen. Plus to the side the cast of Third Angel’s The Paradise Project, who have been drafted in to play bit parts in the readings. It’s a great big glorious mess, and it will grow and grow. Future guest performers will include playwright David Grieg, Daniel Bye, Tassos Stevens, Nazli Tabatabai-Katambbakhsh from Zenzeh, Amit LaHav from Gecko, and Nir Paldi from Theatre ad Infinitum.

So I can’t say what you’ll see and hear, but I can say it’ll be an interesting mix. And I have given you a head start with the song, as you now know the chorus.

All together now:

‘Aha aha oh oh, Aha aha oh oh – sheb-sheb, sheb-sheb!’

Presented nightly at 23.10, Northern Stage at Summerhall. Information on special guests will be posted on www.northernstage.co.uk/edinburgh

A young man moves across the stage, walking along a corridor of light, slowly and carefully placing each foot, his hands busy juggling three white balls in a tight little circle, the balls illuminated in the semi-darkness, and taking on a life of their own: a kind of automata; a perpetual motion machine.

The stretching and conflating of time is a strong theme in the piece. Once, time was seen as an absolute. Einstein’s theory of relativity changed all that, as science took on what philosophers and mystics had known forever: time is elastic. Anyone who has known a moment of crisis has the experience of everything almost standing still as the impact hits. Or, on a more mundane level, of time whizzing by when we are busy. And of how time shifts as you age – at one point we hear a voice-over of recorded text, in which an older person says ‘ …how fast it flies…’

In this adept and accomplished solo piece that combines object manipulation (of the circus sort) and dance (of various sorts, including contemporary and hip-hop), Clement Dazin explores time and motion. At times he leaps and flies and spins, sometimes without, but mostly with, one, two, three, four, or more juggling balls in tow. He leaps, he catches, he dives. At other times, he moves the juggling balls with almost unbearable slowness around his body, kneeling to the side of the empty space, a focused light highlighting his pale face and hands, and the white balls that slide along his arm or around his neck. A beautiful chiaroscuro painting in flesh and light. The lighting design throughout is minimal but beautiful. Corridors of light, squares of light on the floor, a row of blue lights at the back of the stage, beams of light focusing on the performer. Often, Dazin stops moving and just stands in the light. So good to see peace and quiet on a stage!

The excellent soundscape (by Gregory Adoir) supports and complements the physical action. A drone, a cello. Murmurings of crowds, and the occasional short burst of recorded voice. Ticking clocks and ringing bells marking the passing of time. The traffic sounds and sirens from outside add an interesting random layer of sound design. Life goes on, outside and inside the tent. Although talking of tents, it does seem that this show belongs in a regular theatre space with proper blackout, not a circus tent that has been disguised as an end-on black box studio theatre.

I read in my programme notes that Bruit de Couloir is inspired by NDE (Near Death Experience). Which isn’t particularly clear when you watch it, but makes sense once you know.

A thoughtful piece of work, expertly performed by Dazin, who is a graduate (2012) of the National Centre of Circus Arts in France. – and it is always good to see quiet, reflective circus work. At just 35 minutes, a brief work – but feeling complete. Time held captive for a short while, a welcome respite from the hurly burly of life at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Bruit de Couloir is presented by Crying Out Loud and Vive le Fringe! at Institut Francais d’Ecosse as part of the Edinburgh Fringe 2015.

‘The numbers on your headphones should match the numbers on your seats.’ There’s a slight air of anxiety as people try to find their seats, which aren’t in numerical order. We notice as we sit that although it is a sell-out show, there is no-one in the seat to either side of us. whole columns are empty. So friends are separated, and we each sit alone with no human contact, staring at a screen. ‘This is your last chance to leave’ warns the screen. We see some photos of a bland hotel room. A bed, two chairs, light fittings, a nondescript ornament or two. The lights dim, we’re in the dark. Total blackout, not even an emergency exit light.

Then the voices start, far away at first, then very close. The person whispering in my ear is called Julie. You have to imagine that with a French accent. Julie. She is apparently taking care of me. We are in a hotel room. There is a conference speech to be written urgently. An ornament is broken – I was dozing but the crash woke me up. Julie is arguing with someone about me. I’m taken into a lift, where she apparently has to bribe the lift operator. Now I’m in a car. The goalposts keep changing. More noises. Other voices, engines running, crunching footsteps, the patter of rain. The rain stops, but the windscreen wipers carry on, regardless. We cut from one place to another. Indoors morphs into outdoors with no clear logic. It’s a film script. It’s a dream.

The thing this show most reminds me of is the experimental drama slot on Radio 3 on Sunday evenings, listened to under the covers. Radio, as we know, is a highly visual medium. The power of words whispered in your ear to conjure images, this is what’s at work here. Sometimes it goes beyond the radio effect, becomes a whole-body visceral experience as the room itself shakes and shudders.

Writer Glen Neath and director David Rosenberg are upfront in their objective to induce a state of shared dreaming in the audience. They stand on the shoulders of many other writers and directors who explore a dream-state of heightened reality chock full of puzzling non-sequiturs. Lynch. Saramago. Kafka. Murakami. Add a dash of Film Noir and French Nouvelle Vague into the mix. Or Nouvelle Vague Film Noir, even. Alphaville, especially. To steal a line from Murakami, Fiction takes us to edge of Kafka’s shore, and leaves us there, pondering. What does it all mean? Everything and nothing.

Fiction is one of a number of theatre-in-the-dark productions at the Edinburgh Fringe – Daniel Clark’s Earfilms is also playing as part of the British Council Showcase, for example. I’d say it’s a growing trend – but then I remember that BAC programmed a whole season of (literally) dark theatre at least a decade ago, possibly two. It’s an ongoing trend – and the advances in technology make for evermore sophisticated manifestations. Rosenberg seems to be making works using binaural headphones his thing. And more than that, his fascination with the Peeping Tom / Rear Window and other voyeuristic / pulp fiction cinematic motifs goes right back to his earlier work with Shunt in shows such as Amato Saltone.

Not for the feint-hearted. Or the claustrophobic.. Someone had to be taken out by an usher with a torch at the show I was in., which was a nice moment of unplanned theatre. Or maybe it always happens, who knows.

A rollercoaster ride of Artaudian theatre of the senses for those who dare.

Goodnight. Sleep tight.

Fiction by David Rosenberg and Glen Neath is presented by Fuel at the British Council Edinburgh Showcase 2015.

‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure’ is the tag line for Souvenirs. There’s a pile of boxes and shelves at the rear of the performance space, boasting a hotch-potch of everyday objects and ornaments, looking very much like a display in any one of the many Edinburgh charity shops just five minutes walk away on Nicholson Street. There are also old newspapers in the space, and three people sat in child-like (or teddy-bear, perhaps) poses, with roughly decorated cardboard boxes on their heads. They burst out and name themselves: One, Two, Three. They dash around in high spirits, playing games of various sorts, a nice evocation of the golden years of mid-childhood – those years when your old enough to be allowed outside for long spells, building camps and forming gangs.

There’s a new girl on the block, they name her Four, but she’s not sure she wants to take on the tag. She does, though, want to be one of the gang – but to be accepted she has to fulfil a dare. Break into the Birdman’s house and steal a jammy dodger.

She does – and she finds a lonely single man with stories to tell. His memories are evoked by the ensemble, who have now become (variously) his legendary journalist grandfather, his new-age poet mother, and his boyhood best friend turned lover.

It’s a story that has precedents – literature is full of these odd-bod adult/child confessional relationships, from Pip and Mrs Haversham onwards. Which is no bad thing – it’s an eternally interesting theme. I don’t have any gripe with the essential story, although feel it needs work. The key dramaturgical problem is the age of the child bearing witness – the tone of the game-playing, and the jittery physicality of the mock-children, has set up the suggestion that she is around 7 or 8 years old, perhaps 9 tops – but once in the company of the Birdman, she becomes someone far older, offering reflections and words of wisdom that would be pretty grown-up even for a teenager.

The writing is rather erratic – and it is thus not a surprise to see four writers (none of them the performers) credited on the play, along with a director and two producers. For this is a play, developed in association with Freshblood New Writing – despite its listing in the Dance and Physical Theatre sections of both the Edinburgh Fringe brochure and Zoo’s own marketing. It is a piece of new writing delivered by a young ensemble, who use add-on physical/visual theatre tricks as illustration of the text, rather than as the means to tell the tale. The promised object play is pretty old-school physical theatre – newspapers becoming masks or fluttering bird-like around; lengths of cloths becoming wings etc – although done well, and I do enjoy this aspect better than the poorly executed sections of early Complicite style hero-chorus movement work (slo mo movement across the stage; bodies lifted aloft – you know the sort of thing). No one on stage seems to have any particular aptitude for movement work, and there seems to be a mistaken belief that physical theatre is all about running around a lot, rather than it being what emerges from a performer trained in the use of their body as the storytelling medium.

The six onstage performers tear around the space morphing from one character to another, or providing ensemble support to other character’s stories. I do wish, though, that they had been discouraged from their terribly actor-ly acting. Their voices boom and project out into a small space that really doesn’t need this, and despite their proximity to us in this small space, with no divide between performers and audiences, our existence is never acknowledged. There are a couple of sections of monologue where the text is delivered over our heads into the void beyond. I suppose that’s what they teach you at acting school. It might work on a massive stage, but here it is just plain weird.

Apart from feeling strangely ignored as an audience member, fourth wall firmly intact, I also feel the whole show is just so busy that I’m starting to feel giddy and over-stimulated. So much needs cutting down, refining, carving into something more cohesive. It’s a text-based piece, and finding ways to deliver that text in a more cohesive, less shouty, and less busy way within the interesting scenographic context (the junk aesthetic, which I like a lot) would be the way forward, I feel.

To end on a positive note: the live music is good – always great to see live music in theatre and our multi-instrumental here works it well, with a mix of keyboards, recorder, guitar and floor tom, sometimes pure and simple, and sometimes looped. And the ensemble have to be commended for their physical energy and commitment.