Finally, no round-up of show choices would be complete without a nod to the Festival's stranger side - that special blend of thespian energy and away-with-the-fairies imagination which you can only find on the Fringe. Year after year, Edinburgh throws up an array of performances which are innovative, distinctive, or just plain weird.

There's good weird and bad weird, of course, and it's not always easy to tell the difference in advance. Either way, though, you're at least guaranteed an experience - and with luck, a few anecdotes to take home.

Weird venues

Unusual venues

No arts festival these days is complete without an event in a toilet, and Edinburgh never disappoints when it comes to finding even stranger places to present a play

An earlier fad for theatre in moving vehicles appears to have passed, but walking shows are as popular as ever - with Frantic Redhead's production of Macbeth (see "Elsewhere on the web", below) still setting the standard. Perhaps the most bizarre example of a travelling performance came in 2005, when audiences for one show were "abducted", blindfolded, and transported in a blacked-out van to a secret venue.

The grown-up version of all these antics is the site-specific performance, where a (relatively) serious piece of theatre is written to fit around a particular location. As well as being often very entertaining, site-specific performances sometimes offer a rare opportunity to see inside a building normally closed to the public.

Done well, a show in an unusual venue of any kind can make a memorable highlight for anyone's Fringe. The danger, of course, is that more attention has been paid to the location than to the performance - and more than one vaunted site-specific performance has turned out to be a disappointing, plotless, insubstantial wisp of a play. Check reviews, as always.

Weird shows

Even within the confines of a "normal" theatre, the Fringe offers the ideal environment for adventurous (and publicity-seeking) theatrical companies to give vent to their most fanciful concepts.

Unusual shows

There's plenty of mildly unusual fare on offer from highly professional companies, where a striking and memorable experience is all but guaranteed

Shying away from the outright weird, there's plenty of mildly unusual fare on offer from highly professional companies, where a striking and memorable experience is all but guaranteed. A lot of it happens outdoors: city-centre Old College Quad has a strong reputation for hosting shows with spectacular staging, while the Royal Botanic Garden and other gardens around Edinburgh open up for often-magical twilight performances.