Theatre: Europe is all the grist Mills needs

WHEN Jonathan Mills arrived in Edinburgh from Australia 18 months ago, it was easy to assume that the new Festival director's first and most obvious contribution to the job would be a powerful network of contacts in the southern hemisphere, and a new sensitivity to the booming creative life of the Pacific region.

But that's not how it has worked out, for this most creative and intellectually curious of Festival directors. Instead, Mills has found himself amazed, shaken and inspired by the new Europe in which he finds himself, by the depth and pace of the change that has reshaped the continent since 1989, by the emergence of new nations and the death of old ones, and by the powerful questioning of identities that helps shape 21st-century political life both here in Scotland, and across Europe.

And nowhere is that obsession with borders, identities and competing histories more clearly articulated than in his thrilling theatre programme for the 2008 Festival, more than twice the size of the 2007 theatre series, and – for all the vividness and brilliance of last year's five shows – far more radical in conception and spirit.

So first, there is the impulse to explore the boundaries of Europe, the tensions that lie around its edges. There is the dialogue with the Islamic world, both internal and external. The National Theatre of Palestine presents Jidariyya, a beautiful poetic meditation on mortality and the richness of life; and there are two pieces from Iran, a rare and powerful piece of all-female theatre in the Bazi Theatre Company's Devil's Ship, and an installation-like encounter with the ancient Persian popular theatre tradition of Tazieh, created by Iran's leading film director, Abbas Kiarostami.

Then across the theatre and opera programmes, there is work from the eastern edge of the present European Union, and the still-debatable borderland of Polish and Russian culture. TR Warszawa, from the legendary old variety theatre in Warsaw reclaimed by artists after 1989, present their acclaimed production of the old Jewish legend The Dybbuk, which engages directly with the strain of anti-Semitism that runs like a scar across all European history.

From Belgium, the magnificently inventive Muziektheater Transparant approach the same holocaust material in their superb short piece Ruhe, which builds up tension between the perfect integrity of a series of Schubert lieder, and the sheer, crude banality of the self-justifications offered up by former SS supporters interviewed in the 1960s.

They also offer Wolpe, a fabulously full-on evening of 1920s German anti-fascist cabaret, starring the inimitable Tramway star Viviane De Muynck, and based on songs that make the political works of Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill look faint-hearted.

And from Sarajevo comes the East-West Theatre Company of Haris Pasovic, dedicated to working across the ethnic divisions that tore Bosnian society apart in the 1990s, and presenting a ferociously intense production of Nigel Williams's 1978 British radical classroom drama, Class Enemy.

And finally, there are a handful of shows which deal with the inner borderlands between hope and despair, life and death. Alongside The Dybbuk, TR Warszawa bring their intense production of Sarah Kane's final play 4:48 Psychosis, her famously complex, beautiful and harsh meditation on the moment, just before dawn, when the will to live reaches its lowest ebb.

Barrie Kosky – who thrilled last year with his Monteverdi-meets-Cole-Porter take on Poppea – brings a vivid music-driven version of Edgar Allan Poe's The Telltale Heart. And Heiner Goebbels, modernist master of avant-garde music theatre, offers the world premiere of his latest show, I Went To The House But Did Not Enter, based on works by TS Eliot, Maurice Blanchot and Beckett.

And finally, taking a big, bold risk, the National Theatre of Scotland – led by artistic director Vicky Featherstone – takes to the vast stage of the Playhouse with a new show by David Harrower called 365: One Night To Learn A Lifetime, about the terrifying journey across the border from childhood to adulthood made by vulnerable young people in care.

So will all of this Festival theatre be brilliant? Absolutely not – there's no point in taking risks where there's no chance of failure. But is it a privilege to live in or near a city where such a fantastic explosion of global creativity and high-powered debate takes centre stage every August? It certainly is. And this, of course, is only the official Festival, albeit one of the edgiest and most explicitly political for years; and with Fringe tickets becoming ever more expensive, the world-class programme Jonathan Mills announced this week is likely to be among the best theatrical bargains in town, come this August.

THREE TO SEE

RUHE
DON'T miss this deceptively simple but utterly haunting and brilliant piece of theatre, which delves deep into the culture and history of Europe by intercutting a heart-stoppingly beautiful performance of a Schubert lieder with a truly shocking display of genocidal evil at its most banal.
• The Hub, 21-24 August

CLASS ENEMY
DESCRIBED by the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodenje as "passionate, shocking, awakening", Haris Pasovic's intensely physical production of Nigel Williams's 1978 play Class Enemy represents a cry from the heart of the generation of young Bosnians whose lives were riven, reshaped and scarred by the ethnic wars of the 1990s.
• Royal Lyceum Theatre, 20-23 August

THE DYBBUK
BEGIN your Festival with TR Warszawa's beautiful, haunting and hard-edged version of the old Jewish legend about possession by the spirits of the dead. Krzysztof Warlikowski's production raises tough questions about 20th century Poland's relationship with its Jewish minority, and stars fabulous actors Magdalena Cielecka and Andrzej Chyra, recently seen in the Oscar-nominated film Katyn.
• King's Theatre, 9-11 August