In my personal comedy firmament, Boyle’s role at the Festival has been to reconfirm that sometimes all you need to be happy is a man swearing and being abrasive into a microphone. Frankie Boyle’s career of late has been following a skyward direction. Already well-known to Scottish audiences from The Live Floor Show, he recently crossed the border with BBC2’s Mock The Week. To one patient who insists that they have previously met on the ward he corrects: “If you think you have seen me before dear, you are probably a racist.”To 28 August (0131-556 6550). “If an audience laughs more, a comedian will be funnier,” he contends. “If you don’t think the comedian is funny you have to reflect on your own performance.”Not that Brodkin needs to beg laughter for his first character, Chris Young, a dry holiday rep whose instructions are a stream of one-liners such as his informing that the company operates a family holiday: “which means that you will see both adults and children horrendously drunk.”The remaining three creations are all well drawn, but it’s Dr Omprakash who shines the most.

Brodkin was a doctor before comedy beckoned and it was doctor-turned-comic Harry Hill who helped bring his talent to light. Based on the evidence, Brodkin is just what the doctor ordered in both senses.
Between characters he muses on the nature of comedy. Simon Brodkin has a refreshing approach to his multi-character comedy show – he has just four alter egos. Where other acts might pack twice that number into some kind of showcase, he allows his creations to interact with the audience as if he were a freewheeling stand-up and his costume changes are part of his act. “We fought in the American War of Independence, against the Russians in Crimea, in the Boer War – which wasnae all that boring. We were sent to crush the Mau Mau in Kenya, to seize Jerusalem, to conquer Mesopotamia Mesopotamia – where have I heard that before? Oh aye Here we are.

Again.”The question hangs over the audience and over Edinburgh – is Iraq a rupture with this history, or a black, bleak continuation?’Girl Blog from Iraq: Baghdad Burning’, to 28 August (0131-556 6550); ‘Black Watch’, to 27 August (0131-228 1404). A suicide bombing is depicted with such megaton-force that several audience members looked like they were about to vomit.For me, the most startling sequence is where a soldier talks us through the history of the Black Watch as the rest of the cast lift and mould him with military precision, fitting the Watch’s uniforms over the centuries on to him.”We started before Culloden We’re used all over the world, mainly in tribal wars. We’re good at that – we’re a tribe ourselves,” he says as he’s lifted and dressed. John Tiffany’s production is littered with coups de th?re, where troops emerge from pool tables and an ancestral Black Watch soldier charges through bearing the sword of Robert the Bruce.

Black Watch is chaotic, without a clear narrative thrust – a perfect reflection of how the war seems to Our Boys, bewildered as to why they are in Iraq. At first, Iraqis greet them with flowers, kisses and cries of “David Beckham, David Beckham, you know David Beckham?” but within a year they are being mortared. The Iraqi people seem to them an amorphous, inexplicable mass, almost irrelevant to their daily work. As John Humphrys interviews Geoff Hoon on the Today programme about sending our troops into “the triangle of death” in central Iraq, we watch the troops land in the desert, insurgent fire cracking above them, and mutter: “This wasnae in the adverts, eh?”Soldiers are usually depicted in plays either as flat-stomached, flat-headed heroes or amoral thugs for hire, but Burke (from a military family himself) ditches these twin impostors for a blurred reality. But, instead, it takes their words and machine-guns them into an expressive, hellish stress-dream that takes its audience as close to the raw terror the troops feel in Iraq as any of us wants to go.

One soldier says: “Fuckin’ shite war to end wi’, eh?” but, unlike Baghdad Burning, this is a cruelly subtle work.As it opens, a researcher enters a Glasgow pub to talk to some soldiers about their experiences in Iraq, and for a moment it seems like Black Watch will turn out to be yet another turgid work of docu-theatre, passively recounting their stories. The Black Watch has been Scotland’s crack regiment for more than 300 years, but today – as it shoots through Iraq – it is facing death as an independent force, merged into a modernised Army. By presenting M as certain from the start that the fall of Saddam could only ever be a disaster, Kefgen makes her polemic sharper – but her art more blunt and stunted.Gregory Burke’s play Black Watch is the story of the war from the other side of the gun barrel. To dramatise this volatile agony would have been more representative of the Iraqi people and more theatrically powerful than Baghdad Burning, a play that is simply a straight line into the abyss.But that would require the adaptor-director Kefgen to give a different answer to the question: is this a work of art, with the subtleties and shades of bloody grey that requires, or a piece of political polemic? M’s potted lectures about the danger of reintroducing the draft or electing John Kerry seemed like an inauthentic distraction from her personal story. Like Moore, she presents Iraq before the war as if it were Sweden, a happy kite-flying land where Kurd and Sunni walked hand in hand through the unpoisoned marshlands.She even laments “the lost sovereignty,” as if the Iraqi people – rather than a fascist dictator they loathed – had been sovereign over Iraq. Why give the defenders of George Bush’s occupation such an easy excuse to ignore the essential criticisms contained in this play?There are many Iraqi blogs that have been terribly ambiguous journeys, where Iraqis find and lose hope on an almost daily basis, alternately giving the purple finger to the jihadists and then reeling from America’s weapons and “structural adjustment”.