As the Edinburgh Festival opened, so did the heavens. Torrents of rain swept over the city's famous stonescape, scattering the families who had been enjoying Sunday-afternoon street clowning and face-painting and battering the folk who were carefully picking their well-shod way towards the first-night concert performance of Berlioz's opera Les Troyens: Part One at the Usher Hall.
But from the opening chords of this stunning picture of battle in the Balkans, with Donald Runnicles conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, it was obvious that if ever there was a concert worth getting drenched for, here it was.
So intense was the hall's identification with the trials of the people of Troy that when, towards the end of the piece, a Greek soldier appeared on stage, you expected the audience to yell: "Yah! Boo! Hiss!"
They didn't, of course. Instead they lavished applause on the young German mezzo Petra Lang, who has been hailed - rightly, if this performance was anything to go by - as opera's next big thing. Her pale but determined Cassandra was thrilling, compelling and - a rare one, this, in mega opera - extremely beautiful.
For an Irish visitor, there was quiet satisfaction to be had from seeing Gerard O'Connor acquit himself admirably as King Priam, but on the whole the rewards of Les Troyens are large ones. The scale of the thing is jaw-dropping, and as a celebration of the inspirational power of art - which is what the festival is supposed to be about - this performance was well-nigh perfect.
It was also somewhat worrying. Would everything else at Edinburgh be an anticlimax? From the gilded splendour of the Usher Hall to the scruffy amiability of the Pleasance Dome might seem a large step, but it was no fall. Theatre de l'Ange Fou's Entangled Lives was a warm, witty, gently surreal meditation on gender wars and identity crises.
Seven actors - dancers? - executed a series of dazzlingly choreographed slow-motion tableaux, punctuated by a soft cacophony of comments in French, English, Italian and Spanish and accompanied by a soundtrack that moved from birdsong through dissonant cello to Dixieland jazz. It was like being immersed in warm seaweed for 45 minutes, words and images bubbling to the surface of a luminous dream.
In its blurring of the borders between dance, theatre, mime and just about any other performance-art form you might think of, Entangled Lives was also, as it were, the shape of things to come. Again and again during the week, pieces that were listed under "theatre" in the Fringe Festival's awe-inspiring 176-page programme turned out not to be, well, strictly ballroom.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Kneehigh Theatre went the whole hog with its mad version of the children's classic The Red Shoes. Four shaven-headed figures dressed in vests and underpants and carrying suitcases wandered into the theatre, glancing uneasily at the audience as they passed through, like so many wary ravens.
Once on stage, they were swiftly cast, and dressed, by their "mistress of ceremonies", a drag-queen dead ringer for Cruella de Vil.
Evocations of silent films, vaudeville, magic shows and tap combined with an inspired soundtrack, an eloquent set, an apparently endless supply of clever visual gags and five superb all-round actors to get the audience gasping, applauding and - oh no, he's going to cut off her feet! - covering their faces as the story whirled to its grisly ending.
The Big Picture Company blended tablas and flamenco to potent effect in its reinvention of Federico Garc∅a Lorca's Blood Wedding, with the doomed couple recast as a pair of ambitious young Asian lawyers in a stylish show that some readers might have caught during its short run at the Pavilion Theatre in D·n Laoghaire earlier this month.
And here was another recurring theme, for many of this year's most highly praised performances have come from Asian companies, some British-based, some visiting. An Indian mini festival organised by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations included dance, workshops, some excellent concerts - fusion merchants Indian Ocean brought the house down at Komedia Southside with their rendition of an 1,800-year-old Syrian Catholic hymn of praise, sung in Aramaic, no less - and an extraordinary show entitled At The Fringe: A Beggar's Opera, written and directed by Royston Abel, whose 1999 Othello won him all sorts of Fringe plaudits.
A dozen street performers from Delhi, none of whom had ever worked from a script, swirled into action in a dazzling display of sleight of hand - literal and theatrical - that not only was delightful entertainment, but also raised serious questions about cultural cross-currents in a vivid and moving way.
It was particularly good to see at a time when Scottish society is in shock over the murder of a young Kurdish asylum seeker on a Glasgow housing estate.
But the essence of the Fringe is, of course, the one-man show. Stick a pin in the day's listings and you may well end up watching - as one delightful snatch of overheard conversation last week had it - "a man dressed as a squid tap-dancing on a table".
One-man, and -woman, shows have come in all shapes and sizes this year, from the genial Didn't You Used To Be R.D. Laing, a ruefully affectionate stream-of-anecdote portrait of the prickly psychotherapist backed by a mellow accompaniment of live jazz piano, to the sassy Canadian Lambton Kent at the Traverse Theatre. With a finely tuned script by Trinidad-born AndrΘ Alexis, whose debut novel shared a prize with Alice Munro, and razor-sharp delivery by the Jamaican-born actress Yanna McIntosh, this was Canada black, in every sense.
As an African anthropologist addressing the members of the Nigerian Geographical Society (a.k.a. us, the audience), the effervescent McIntosh delivered the results of her research to the strange, exotic, Scottish Presbyterian "natives" of south-west Ontario - a refreshing, wry satire that, unlike many Fringe offerings of new writing, was mercifully free of urban alienation and adolescent angst.
But the one-man show to end all one-man shows was to be found at the main festival. The elusive, evocative Novecento, written by the novelist Alessandro Baricco, author of Silk, and directed by Franτois Girard (who made the films The Red Violin and Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould), told the tale of the eponymous jazz pianist who, abandoned as a baby on an ocean liner, never set foot on dry land.
Everything about this production from Theatre de Quat'Sous, Montreal, was unforgettable: the monochrome lighting, the transformation of the stage into a ship's engine room, complete with throbbing soundtrack with, perversely, an occasional single piano note, the perfectly pitched performance of Tom McCamus as the narrator.
Novecento proved, if proof were needed, that even in this brave new age of mixing, matching and fusing, straight theatre still has a few tricks up its sleeve.
But on the whole, the straight productions were somewhat disappointing, notably Gilded Balloon's dark but dreary A&R, a voyage into the heartless soul of the record industry, and the Royal Lyceum Theatre's new production of Tom Murphy's 1989 play Too Late For Logic, which sent several of my first-night neighbours at the King's Theatre into a sound sleep. And, in truth, apart from its cool visual elegance and the measured intensity of Jennifer Black as Patricia, there was little to get excited about in this somewhat bloodless evening of theatre.
On the other hand, a packed and sweaty C+2 paid rapt attention to a late-night Fringe play on a similar theme. From Ibiza To The Norfolk Broads features an anorexic teenager who, unable to cope with his father's suicide and his mother's drinking, retreats into a world dominated by the music of David Bowie.
Bowie's songs glittered undimmed from the speakers, to the delight of us unreconstituted Bowie fans, but ultimately it was the tension created by Tiny Dynamite and the Bull Theatre's fine ensemble cast that set the tone of the evening.
Mozart fans were well served by the main festival programme, which had concert performances of Idomeneo and Cos∞ Fan Tutte - and a gorgeous, starlit, blue, silver and gold production of Die Zauberfl÷te, which arrived at the equally gorgeous Festival Theatre by way of OpΘra National de Lyon and Aix-en-Provence. A handsome young cast skipped through a deliciously simple interpretation, the whole Masonic muddle being interpreted as Tamino's dream, with the hero in his pyjamas throughout. There was a good deal of fun with his bed, a video bank provided some highly effective imaging, but apart from the young French baritone StΘphane Degout as a creamy-toned, charming Papageno - and not a feather in sight - the singing, as often with Mozart, did not live up to the staging.
One of the two big talking points of the festival's second week was the dance show PASTForward, in which Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project presented a demanding programme of New York's most radical experimental dance pieces. Demanding for the audience, that is - unlike most dance shows, which demand only that the audience shows up and feels good.
In Lucinda Childs's Carnation, part of the PASTForward programme, a woman sat at a low table, placed a wire colander on her head and - very slowly - placed a number of foam hair curlers in its wire frame before filling her mouth with scouring pads. In David Gordon's Overture To The Matter, a selection of non-dancers drawn from a community group walked - very slowly - across the stage to the instantly recognisable strains of the Entrance Of The Shades from La BayadΦre, one of classical ballet's musical icons, while a boiler-suited Baryshnikov assembled a display of backstage objects centre stage. Weird? Definitely. Wonderful? Hmm . . . sometimes.
The flying finale, Childs's joyous Concerto, to music by Henryk G≤recki, was sublime, a pounding "disco" encore, complete with break-dancing, and "cool dude" Baryshnikov boogieing on down with the community of boppers on stage, simply ridiculous.
Reaction to PASTForward was split between those who loved it and those who hated it, but everybody, it seemed, loved Gagarin Way, the debut play of Gregory Burke, a former factory worker, who had written a black comedy with a socialist conscience and a 10-minute joke about Jean-Paul Sartre. They loved it so much that The Irish Times couldn't get hold of a ticket - which was depressing, until Burke confessed to Scotland On Sunday that he couldn't get one, either. "I've got to go and watch in the box," he said, "because there's no tickets, even for me. At 8.10 this morning there was people sitting at the box office with flasks of coffee waiting for returns. It was like Wimbledon."
He might have been talking about the entire festival. For a first-timer, Edinburgh at festival time is as thrilling a spectacle as anything Centre Court has ever had to offer.
You find yourself exchanging impromptu reviews with total strangers. You meet the oddest people, walking casually along the street: a Japanese actor wearing a bowler hat and carrying a bus stop, say. You think you're hallucinating when you see the windows of Jenners department store all done up for Christmas, until you read the cheeky banners - "Festival? We thought you said 'Festive'!"
And I haven't told you the half of it. I was mesmerised by Eva Merz's black-and-white (but mostly black) portraits of exiled Greenlanders at the Danish Institute, entranced by the unearthliness of Serizawa Keisuke's textile designs at the Royal Museum, so good I saw them twice.
I took photographs of St Leonard's cop shop, home of Detective Inspector Rebus of the Midland and Lothian police, and climbed to Arthur's Seat, site of one of his most famous cases. I also won the ultimate Edinburgh accolade. A fleeting hour of sunshine induced me to wear a pair of baggy shorts to an afternoon show at the Pleasance Courtyard, where I was informed: "yar troosers lewk gre', hen." At least, I think that was what he said.
