Birdie, The Studio, Edinburgh ****

Ferguson & Barton, The Studio, Edinburgh ****

Arthropoda, Traverse, Edinburgh ****

Moc, Summerhall, Edinburgh ****

The films of Alfred Hitchcock loom large over Edinburgh’s cutting-edge theatre scene, as 2023 dawns. Last weekend, Edinburgh’s Magnetic North company touched on Hitchcock’s Rear Window as one of the inspirations for their show We Shall Hear The Angels; and now, the first weekend of Manipulate 2023 – Edinburgh’s international festival of visual theatre and animation – featured two shows powerfully shaped by Alfred Hitchcock’s vision.

Birdie, by the Señor Serrano company of Barcelona, is a piece of “micro-cinema” theatre featuring live screen images of a tiny world created on stage by Alex Serrano, Pau Palacios, David Muniz and their team. Its theme is ever-increasing flows of migration, and the terror they produce in “host” communities.

The first half of the one-hour show is driven by many images on invasion and terror from Hitchcock’s The Birds, but the company are also drawn to the other meaning of “birdie” – a one-below-par score in golf. They tell the story of Melilla, an exquisite heritage city on the Moroccan coast that remains Spanish territory, and of a beautiful green golf course built there to attract tourists, surrounded by a huge fence against desperate migrants.

Add a mounting series of almost biblical images of an army of living creatures – polar bears, lions, even human babies – swarming across the green acres in flight from environmental catastrophe, and you have a superb short piece of theatre for this moment in time, full of political intelligence, and a deep, searching humanity.

Shotput Theatre’s Ferguson And Barton, first seen back in pre-lockdown times, is a more direct retelling of Hitchcock’s mighty masterpiece Vertigo, inspired by the fact that different people – like co-creators and performers Lucy Ireland and Jim Manganello – might watch a film together, and see totally different things.

There’s a jokey, light-touch quality about Shotput’s response to the film that sometimes seems to short-change both the intensity of Hitchcock’s tragic story, and the creative complexity of their own choreography, which emerges in short, compelling episodes of brilliantly inventive movement; yet this remains a hugely entertaining and creative response to a great work of art.

The theme of romantic love, and when it becomes destructive obsession, is also present in Sarah Holmes’s Arthropoda, the latest show from international aerial theatre company Paper Doll Militia. American Daisy and Briton Callum literally bump into one another in an airport, and their whirlwind romance seems at first like a dream come true – but his inner demons of aggression, and rage soon make her life a misery.

Daisy faces desperate questions not only about how to escape, but also about when loving support for a partner with mental health problems becomes self-destruction. Performers Constance Ruff and Lee Partridge show huge physical and emotional athleticism, evoking the thrilling highs and hellish lows of a dream relationship turned to nightmare.

As for the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre’s Moc, fans of brilliant European visual theatre could do no better than to grab a ticket for this stunning, witty and superbly resonant one-hour meditation on power. In a meticulously darkened room, a regal female figure (the wonderful Martina Mauric Lazar) sits in a huge crinoline, reluctantly waving an elegant hand, while a male courtier (co-creator Jiri Zeman) tries to photograph her.

The session ends; and she gradually becomes haunted by small puppet figures, some grotesque little gargoyle faces hewn from clay, some tinkling glass figures who might – or might not – represent the fragile children she has borne, but has not been allowed to love. Either way, the spectacle is utterly riveting and enthralling, a magical hour of imagery that speaks volumes about the grotesque suffering of the powerless, and the alienated misery of the powerful; see it, think, and marvel.

Birdie, Ferguson & Barton and Arthropoda, runs completed. Moc is at Summerhall, until 6 February. The Manipulate festival runs until 12 February, https://www.manipulatefestival.org/

Manipulate reviews: Birdie | Ferguson & Barton | Anthropoda | MOC