Where to start? This production by the Shanghai Peking Opera Troupe, performing what is essentially Hamlet in traditional Jingju style, initially intrigues then becomes breathtaking, deeply moving and well deserving of its audience’s standing ovation.

Mark Fisher takes a look at the opera programme at this year's International Festival

George Gershwin’s classic Porgy and Bess is finding new life with a French opera company introducing film and dance to create a visual feast.

It has been called the first American folk opera, and it’s as rooted in the Deep South as soul food and Mardi Gras. So for George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess to be staged by – whisper it – a French opera company is a challenge to convention.

Even more of a challenge is that the creative team behind it – directors José Montalvo and Dominique Hervieu – have built their reputation not with musicals or operas, but as choreographers who routinely set their dancers in front of exuberant large-scale video projections. It was their production of On Danse that provided the Edinburgh International Festival with its much-used image of an elephant on a flying carpet in 2007.

Greyfriars Kirk
2 September, 17.45

We tend to associate Bach primarily with his sacred works. By the 1920s the Swedish theologian Nathan Söderblom regarded him as the ‘Fifth Evangelist.’

Festival Theatre
28, 29 and 31 August, 19.15

Any doubts about the cosmopolitan nature of the International Festival should be dispelled through a quick synopsis of this production.

The return of the king

Updating the story of Ulysses to a South African hospital ward populated by puppets has been a real labour of love.