Theatre

Nearly half of the politically themed theatre at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe was about war. Performers dressed as US soldiers handed out leaflets urging people to come to Melancholia, an anti-war play from the Los Angeles Latino Theatre Company.

Aaron Garcia, its assistant director, explained, "A large proportion of troops fighting in Iraq are the Latino or African American poor who are little more than mercenaries misled into the forces on the promise of an education or a job."

It's not often that you want to shoot one of the main characters five minutes after they've appeared on stage, but it's an urge that's hard to resist when watching Gaslight.

It's not the actor's fault; Andrew Woodall does a great job playing an unlikable husband in Patrick Hamilton's 1938 thriller. But Woodall's character, Mr Manningham, is the personification of a vile Victorian patriarch whose only purpose in life appears to be to degrade the women in his household - routinely and indiscriminately.

Vassily is a self-made man, ignorant, anti-Semitic and fearful of change. He has paid for the education of his son Pyotr and daughter Tanya, but instead of becoming contented bourgeois people they rejected him and his values. Pyotr returns home from university, where he was studying to become a lawyer, suspended after involvement in a radical demo. Tanya can find no goal in life when the only aim of middle class women is to marry: halfway through the play she tries to kill herself.

As Dwight D Eisenhower prepared to leave office in 1961, he warned the country about the power of the military-industrial complex. "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience," he said. "We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes."

Originally written in 1997, Attempts on her Life is being given its first major production in Britain this March. The play is a series of 17 scenes or "attempts", trying to discover who Anne or Annie is. In the end she seems to be more of a "guide or pivot" around which the story is told than a character in her own right.

"I have two ways of writing," playwright Martin Crimp said. "I do still write what you would call conventional plays. But ever since I discovered this alternative way of writing with Attempts on her Life it has continued to fascinate me."

When Edinburgh's Theatre Workshop began planning their programme for this year's Edinburgh Festival, the war in Iraq came top of the agenda. Robert Rae, the artistic director, explained, "We had been working with the local community on the show Babylon Burning (Another Lovely War) and we decided to open up the research involved to everyone." As a result the venue's entire programme was crammed with war related exhibitions, plays, speakers from the Stop the War Coalition, and debates.

The Exonerated
Director: Bob Balaban
Riverside Studios, London

"It took 13 and a half minutes for Jesse to die. Three jolts of electricity that lasted 55 seconds each... until finally flames shot out from his head, and smoke came from his ears." Jesse was innocent.

In Ohio, Scotsman Kenny Richey has been waiting to die for 19 years. He has repeatedly protested his innocence. Thirteen times he has been told to prepare to face the same fate as Jesse.

I went to Palestine to work with the theatre company Al-Hara (the neighbourhood) in Beit Jala, Bethlehem. It was during the end of Ramadan, and my first day was spent on the back of a truck, watching the company perform a children's play at eight different locations throughout Bethlehem. These included two refugee camps, one of them with a high proportion of children whose parents have been imprisoned in Israeli jails.

The recent events in Birmingham and Paris have renewed debates about issues of 'culture clashes', racism and integration. Translations takes up these issues within the context of a Gaelic-speaking village in 1833, during the Ordnance Survey to map out Ireland and just before the establishment of a state education system.

In the late 1950s a new wave of young, radical dramatists took British theatre by storm, challenging the conventional, complacent type of drama that dominated the stage with plays that explored at a deeper level the distortion of human relationships by our society, and confronting head-on the key political issues of the day. This group of dramatists included John Arden, John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker.