To say my memory of Eugénie Grandet was hazy when I saw a dramatisation of the novel listed in the Fringe programme would be to endow it with a clarity it didn't have, but I knew I'd enjoyed the novel so I put the play on my list.

I'm so glad I did.  The director admits that you can't hope to fit the whole book into 80 minutes but this is a production that flows smoothly through the story, necessarily leaping over great chunks of time, but nonetheless giving space for characters to develop, in particular for Eugénie's growth from naive innocent girl to strong independent woman.

This is accomplished ensemble acting and sensitive direction.  An entire chapter of the novel is expressed in one over the shoulder look from Nanon the servant.

I loved the staging and its elegant transitions from one scene to the next. For example Grandet père is leaving the stage.  He stops, turns and looks back contemplating the action just completed.  His shoulders droop.  He clutches his chest. Nanon steps into the scene and without pause as she passes a walking stick appears in Grandet's hand, he has a blanket over his shoulders and is painfully moving forward to where she is already busy at the table; now an old man.

Teatro Máquina from Brazil present another 19th century piece but in an altogether radically different style.  It's Georg Büchner's play Leonce and Lena which they perform highly energetically.  They run.  They leap. They make wonderful noises.  They do marvels with bubble wrap.  They throw confetti.  Music pounds. They laugh.  They weep.

It's absurd.  It's great.  Only seven of us had the good fortune to be there.  That's a shame.

Beijing People's Art Theatre on the other hand more or less filled the Playhouse with their version of Coriolanus.  OK it has the prestige of being in the International Festival rather than the Fringe and it's a big scale show with vast crowd scenes and it's the mighty Shakespeare and maybe it was declaiming not shouting and maybe if there had been only one heavy metal band not two and maybe if I hadn't had to keep taking my eyes off the action to read the translation to right and left of the stage and maybe ...... but truth to tell for half the price I got twice the enjoyment from the Brazilians.