Fringe theatre

Baxter Theatre and South African State Theatre present Mies Julie, which places Strindberg's psycho-sexual pot-boiler in their post-apartheid homeland. The result in Canadian Yael Farber's version, set in a farm in the remote Eastern Cape Karoo, is a devastating reinvention that mixes racial taboos with cross-class shenanigans and self-destructive power games.

Here Julie is a white young woman, a troubled wild child who's been dumped by her fiance and is drunk after gate-crashing the black servants' party. The object of her affections, John, is a black servant who cleans her father's boots, and whose mother works on chores throughout. As the simmering sexual tension between Julie and John boils over, the electronic pulse, which has throbbed throughout the play, rises and falls with increasing intensity.

Farber has concocted an electric piece of theatre, the sensual heat of which more resembles something by Tennessee Williams than Strindberg. Hila Cronje's Julie is an emotional mess even before she eggs Bongile Mantsai's John into brutal, animalistic sex which provides both a form of rebellion and a father figure. When the pair comes together, it's as if the shackles of centuries of repression have been smashed. Yet, even when John stands defiant with rifle and blood-dripping sickle after Julie takes self-harm to symbolic extremes, it's still John's mother who washes away the mess.

Until August 27th

Woza Albert!

Assembly Hall

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Also in the South African Season is the Market Theatre of Johannesburg's revival of Woza Albert!, the apartheid-era satire by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon that brought black South African theatre to the world in the early 1980s. More than 30 years on, the trio's yarn about what happens when a reborn Christ turns up in the townships remains a vibrant document of its time that channels a panoply of South African street-life on to the stage in a raw and urgent fashion.

Now, as with the original production, two actors play a roll-call of prisoners, shop-keepers and presidents. Mincedisi Baldwin Shabangu and Peter Mashigo switch between these with little more than a couple of pairs of glasses and the odd robe pulled from a hung floor-board that acts as a coat-rail. Prince Ramla's production sticks to the poor theatre techniques of old, which both men seize with physical abandon.

Until August 27th.

The People Show 121 – The Detective Show

Assembly George Square

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The People Show were similarly pioneering when the company, now regarded as the UK's first experimental theatre troupe, first appeared in 1966. The People Show 121 – The Detective Show continues the company's English strain of surrealism in a self-referential investigation that throws Agatha Christie, Hedy Lamarr, Bob Dylan and Adolf Hitler's sperm into a big, daft post-modern whodunnit designed for ageing hippies everywhere.

Gareth Brierley, Fiona Creese and Mark Long play-act a series of Life on Mars-style coppers circa 1976, an effete Christie's expert and a feckless wannabe actor called Gareth, played by his real-life namesake. There's true-love and antagonism in equal measure in a riot of free-associative pop cultural silliness on show here. This set the template for Edinburgh, and, just as The People Show got their first, they'll probably be the last men and women standing.

But the real mystery of The Detective Show is what became of Sadie Cook, the seemingly absent cast member advertised on the show's flyer. A red herring or a puzzle worth solving?

Until August 27th.