Northern lights | 4 August 2012

No one knows quite why we go. It’s not for the whisky (which is like drinking liquefied peppercorns), or for the shortbread (like eating undercooked biscuit-mix), or for the weather (like walking through a car-wash). Nor does the moaning falsetto of the bagpipes draw us north. But every year, without fail, the London media colony sets off for the Scottish capital to watch a gang of wackos and wannabes (mostly from the London media colony) making a bid for fame and glory. This is my tenth visit and here are my tips for maximising the fun.

Big question first. How to avoid being engulfed in an avalanche of pretentious tripe put on by waffling preeners and self-adoring garbage-smiths? That’s easy. Don’t see anything at the International Festival (9 August to 2 September). It came as a shock to me to discover that Edinburgh, along with other cultural fiestas, supports a deluxe caravan of theatrical fakers who enjoy a limitless remit to tour, and bore, the planet with laborious drivel. Scotland is just one stop-off on their endless mission to persecute the earth’s play-goers with highbrow tosh.

Here are some of this year’s highlights. Gulliver’s Travels in Romanian. Waiting for Orestes: Electra, by Euripides and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (who was Richard Strauss’s librettist, as you knew already), performed in Korean and Japanese. Meine faire Dame — ein Sprachlabor turns out to be My Fair Lady in German set in a language laboratory. There’s a Russian version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (curiously subtitled As You Like It, which is a different play), produced by Dmitry Krymov and his ‘Laboratory School of Dramatic Art Theatre Production’. There’s a version of Beckett’s novel Watt, which, in a rare lapse into intelligibility, is being performed in English. And Théâtre du Soleil has devised The Castaways of the Fol Espoir (Sunrises), which is ‘loosely based on a mysterious posthumous novel by Jules Verne’ and is ‘half-written by Hélène Cixous’.