The winner of this week's Bank of Scotland Herald Archangel award for a sustained contribution to Edinburgh's Festivals is actor and director Andy Manley, whose shows in August have been garlanded with prizes and glowing reviews, but whose work is also usually an essential part of the Imaginate Festival of work for young people earlier in the year.

Manley is one of leading lights of Scotland's acclaimed children's theatre sector. He was a founding member of Visible Fictions 20 years ago, is an associate artist with Catherine Wheels and has worked with Starcatchers at North Edinburgh Arts Centre, and with Shona Reppe. He co-devised Martha, a show that took Scottish work for children around the world, and White, which was a sensation of the Fringe in 2010, winning a Herald Angel, and is still touring the world. This year he steals the show in the Rob Evans-scripted The Ballad of Pondlife McGurk, directed by Catherine Wheels' Gill Robertson, a story of life's hard lessons that tugs at the heart-strings of those far beyond its nine-and-over target age group.

The International Festival programme this week brought a visit from the Suzuki Company of Toga, the ensemble led by the director, designer and deviser of the Suzuki method of performance, Tadashi Suzuki. His Waiting for Orestes: Electra takes the classical story, as told by Euripides and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and applies traditional Japanese theatre techniques of Noh and Kyogen as well as contemporary Western performance methods. His remarkable company treated us to a totally original version of classic drama and is the first of this week's Bank of Scotland Herald Angel winners.

Also from Japan are LaN-T003, a quartet of contemporary dancers, whose show at Zoo Southside, Jishin, is a response to the 2011 earthquake in their homeland. The message is that when disaster strikes, the only sensible response is to take joy in your friends and your pets – and your ability to execute complex dance routines at dazzling speed, if that is a skill you possess.

The Summerhall venue, which made a distinct mark on the Fringe as soon as it opened last year, has two of this week's Angel winners. Poland's Teatr Zar's Caesarian Section – Essays on Suicide is a performative exploration of what drives people to take their own life and how the deed may be done, covering the playing area in shattered glass and spilled wine. Alongside the expert edgy vocabulary of movement is a score of polyphonic singing, drawn from Corsica and elsewhere, in a compelling production.

Scottish company Stellar Quines' show The List is a solo turn by the consistently excellent Maureen Beattie and part of the company's continuing fruitful relationship with Quebecois writers. Jennifer Tremblay's The List is also about life and death, and about a woman's difficulty in adjusting to the isolation of rural life. It will be seen elsewhere in Scotland after its Fringe run.

The Traverse has a habit of programming a Fringe season of instant theatre that means an early start for Herald theatre critic Neil Cooper. This year Emma Callendar and Sarah Brocklehurst have curated a season of short pieces under the Theatre Uncut banner, targetting Government funding cuts. With some very well-known performers on board and a mix of writers with track records and the less well-known producing work sometimes overnight, Cooper has been discovering a feast of breakfast-time talent.

Since he established chamber ensemble Ludus Baroque in 1997, its director Richard Neville-Towle has assiduously courted the interest of The Herald's music critics, and we were not always uncritical. The group has developed over those 15 years, however, so that now its Canongate Kirk concerts of Handel and Bach were many people's flying start to this year's music programme.

As Conrad Wilson wrote: "These 19 young choristers, an expert team of period instrumentalists, a brilliant bunch of soloists, inspiringly conducted by Richard Neville Towle, have become a small Edinburgh Festival in themselves."

The week's Little Devil award neatly echoes the tale Neil Cooper told in Thursday's paper of actor Maurice Roeves, who is back in Edinburgh with his wife Vanessa Rawlings-Jackson and a show, Just A Gigolo, a decade after the couple were married at The Traverse at the end of his run in Herald Angel-winning Gagarin Way, Gregory Burke's debut play.

Musicians Nick Pynn and Kate Daisy Grant have back-to-back gigs at Inlingua in Shandwick Place. He brings his multi-instrumental talents to her folk pop at 8.15pm and she adds her vocal and instrumental support to his electro-acoustic music from 9.45pm.

They are on every day from August 2 to August 26, except Monday, when the couple will be getting married, since it is their day off. No honeymoon though, because on Tuesday the show must go on.

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