Edinburgh festival: The best of this year�s festival and fringe performers are given due recognition.

The first week of the fourteenth year of The Herald Angel awards - given for excellence in any field demonstrated during Edinburgh's festival season - again illustrates the diversity of culture experience to be found in Scotland's capital during the month of August. Sponsored by the Bank of Scotland, the awards are deliberated upon by The Herald's esteemed team each week and presented at the Festival Theatre on Saturday morning.

This first week is the one in which the fringe has things pretty much its own way, before the opening of the Edinburgh International Festival itself and the the Edinburgh International Book Festival today. So it is appropriate that the first recipient of this year's Archangels, a single award each week to someone who has made a sustained contribution to the arts in festive Edinburgh, goes to playwright and director Enda Walsh. Druid are presenting his latest work, The New Electric Ballroom, at the Traverse, where a Walsh play has been a dependable highlight of the programme since his explosive debut with Disco Pigs in 1997. One of a powerful generation of Irish theatre-makers that also includes actor Cillian Murphy, Walsh's other successes at the Traverse have included Bedbound and, last year, The Walworth Farce. In a production distinguished by "a quartet of relentlessly precise performances", as our critic Neil Cooper put it, he has brought us another fine show.

That venue's new artistic director, Dominic Hill, has continued with the standard of his predecessor with a quality festival programme, of which Sherman Cymru's Deep Cut has made the most immediate impact and is the first of this year's Bank of Scotland Herald Angel winners. Philip Ralph's verbatim theatre staging of the story of the young recruits who died at the Deepcut Barracks focuses on Cheryl James, the Welsh 18-year-old who died in 1995. Mick Gordon's production presents a "gracefully understated rebuttal of the army's findings", as Cooper wrote.

Comparable in terms of the honest humanity of its performance, Adam Rapp's play Nocturne is given a compelling reading by Peter McDonald at the Traverse. The story of a young runaway's return, haunted by the memory of the sister he killed accidentally, it says something much wider about grief, loss and healing, and Peter McDonald wins a Herald Angel.

Another show that's had plenty of press attention is Enclosure 44 - Humans, the offsite project from Dance Base that has put dancers in Edinburgh Zoo. Choreographer Janis Claxton, her company of dancers and Angus Balbernie as their informative keeper, raise questions about privacy at a time when that topic has been much in the news. There is more to it than that, however, and the achievement of the performers, with their "humanimal" behaviour, has been matched by some of their audience, who have found people-watching to be an activity that mesmerises for hours.

Dance of a more commercially marketable kind is taking the Assembly Hall by storm, where Brazil's Bale de Rua have taken up residence. With steps culled from hip hop and breakdancing as well as samba and capoeira, the dozen or so male dancers and drummers and a single female dancer tell a story about their country. There are lessons not just about emancipation from slavery but also commentary about sexual stereotyping, and it is all wrapped up in a glorious Technicolor experience that is sure to become a hot fringe ticket.

There are more drums and dancing in Dream of Cat from Korean troupe Drum Cat, who have so many instruments some of them have to sit outside their C venue at St Columba's By The Castle until needed. "Visually stunning and sexily balletic," said Rob Adams, who marvelled at the choreography and stick-wielding dexterity in such a confined space. "Synchronised heavy-metal disco thunder," wrote a well-impressed Adams.

Launching the Edinburgh Art Festival in fine style - and notably attracting the attention of a certain Tracey Emin - was the exhibition at Inverleith House by veteran British "pop" artist Richard Hamilton. A retrospective of a truly remarkable artist, whose work encompasses painting, print-making, photography installation and collage, it gathers in one room his image of nuclear proliferator Hugh Gaitskell alongside a new devastating portrait of Tony Blair. Protest Pictures maintains that standard throughout the building, with Northern Ireland and Margaret Thatcher also coming under his forensic gaze.

Hamilton's superb exhibition completes this week's list of Bank of Scotland Herald Angel winners. This morning, Real Circumstance are, however, this year's first winner of a Little Devil Award, given for overcoming the slings and arrows of misfortune to demonstrate their conviction that the show must go on. The company are presenting two interwoven plays at the Underbelly, under the title Lough/Rain, which was only asking for trouble. They were early victims of the weather, when their venue was flooded, the lighting desk soaked and the stage awash. Prompt action by the technical staff at the venue ensured that only a single show had to be cancelled. There is no truth in the rumour that they are now giving training to First ScotRail.