Fringe favourites and new discoveries….

The Traverse was still in tiny premises in the Grassmarket, not its purpose-built splendour today, but the Assembly Rooms was the only real “megavenue”, housing shows through the day and into the night in its five main rooms, the Music Hall, Ballroom, Wildman Room, Edinburgh Suite and Supper Room. They’re still restricted by the physical dimensions of the building, but they’ve shipped the “brand” around town, taking over the Assembly Hall on the Mound a few years ago (truly one of the worst venues to see a show in Edinburgh), and this year setting up a Spiegeltent in Princes Street Gardens, which replaces St George’s Church West which they also previously ran.

Across town, the Pleasance Courtyard was just starting to establish a presence, and in those days there were only about four or five rooms in use across the complex. Now there are 15 there alone, spreading into the sports halls next door and behind the complex; and they’ve also colonised what used to be the Chaplaincy Centre in Bristo Square, adding six venues at what is called the Pleasure Dome. This year, too, they’ve taken charge of a Gothic-like hall above the Ghillie Dhu bar at the west end of Princes Street.

Meanwhile, also in Bristo Square, the Gilded Balloon have long ago taken over what used to be the Fringe Club and turned it into a megavenue of its own, in which every cubby hole seems to now be a venue; and the Underbelly, a more recent addition that spreads out over multiple floors of a dank series of vault-like rooms, has also stretched its reach into Bristo Square, first with the annual erection of the purple cow (that also visits the South Bank earlier in the summer every year now), and this year saw them also taking over the grand McEwan’s Hall as a full-time venue (and which, in a rare departure for the fringe, actually offers reserved seating).

These venues are like old friends now — sometimes annoying ones whose quirks you grudgingly accept — or in some cases, are like bad enemies, where your fury and bile rises up the moment you see them, as when you enter one an insufferably overheated room, especially at the Gilded Balloon, and remember the last time you sweated through a show there.

But the increasing theatre fashion in Edinburgh, of course, is to eschew traditional venues entirely, and only use them as a meeting point before being whisked elsewhere. Presented under the umbrella of Hill Street Theatre, you are summonsed to the Freemasons Hall on George Street to meet for David Leddy’s Sub Rosa, before being taken to a private Masonic lodge in Hill Street for a series of monologues (and one duologue) that take place in different rooms on its various floors. The Traverse’s Roadkill starts with a bus journey from the Traverse, from where audiences are taken to a private flat where sex is being trafficked. The streets themselves become a playground for En Route, in which you are equipped with an iPod and sent texts on your mobile to discover, in the words of the publicity, “the choreography of Edinburgh as streetscapes become the set and passers-by performers.”

Clearly, all the world’s a stage - and in Edinburgh, every stage can become its own world, too. I can also measure my life in Edinburgh discoveries. It’s here where I first saw Fascinating Aida and John Godber’s Up ‘n’ Under — both of them now a quarter of a century old, and both back yet again in Edinburgh this year. (I saw the latter for nostalgic reasons on Sunday afternoon, and was surprised to find that barely 50 people shared my curiosity in Assembly’s largest room, the Music Hall, in which we rattled around nearly as much as Godber’s script felt addled). It’s also in Edinburgh that I first saw Black Watch (now on yet another tour, and en route back to the Barbican), Graham Norton in a tiny upstairs room at the Pleasance, and the Mighty Boosh in a slightly bigger one there.

Of course, having made a discovery at the fringe, you find yourself having to follow their progress in subsequent years. Ever since David Benson first moved and astonished us with his uncannily accurate impression of Kenneth Williams but also personalised it by telling us how important Williams had been to him, I have seen him again and again at Edinburgh, but never to quite the same effect. Until yesterday, when he brought a quietly devastating authority and sense of outrage to Lockerbie: Unfinished Business, a documentary recreation of one tireless man’s campaign to find out who was responsible for the terrorist outrage that fateful December night that claimed the life of his young daughter. And by the end of this show, you know for certain that it wasn’t Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of the crime but released last year to return to Libya to die of the cancer that he is suffering from. Benson’s performance is the best I expect to see in Edinburgh this year, and perhaps all year.

Meanwhile, Richard Fry - a writer/actor who was the discovery of my last two fringe two years ago with a one-man play of his own called Bully — is back with two very different shows this year, Homo Asbo (in which he provides a funny, abrasive portrait of a type of gay man not usually represented in the media, though there are entire porn sites devoted to them, namely scally-boy thugs) and Smiler, the moving story of a friendship between a carer and his severely disabled charge. Fry’s writing is as clever and pointed as his performances are beautifully nuanced in both, but I’d like to see him work on a bigger canvas now than the Edinburgh self-limiting one-hour, one-man show.

Then there are the performers who become like old friends, or indeed now are old friends. Barb Jungr, whose praises I have often sung here, was back on the fringe again, but with only four evening slots to fill, I hope she forgives me that I didn’t use one of them to see her! On the other hand, it was a pleasure to catch up with the ceaselessly inventive Linda Marlowe, who has established a huge repertoire of one-woman shows and this year has brought a virtuosic personal response to Hamlet to Edinburgh, which she enacts with the help of five puppeteers. Another fringe veteran Jack Klaff - who recently starred in the play Shrunk that I produced at London’s Cock Tavern - is also back in Edinburgh, with Jack the Knife, a slightly ragged but nevertheless riveting anecdotal journey around his maverick mind that clutches ideas from everywhere. And gorgeous Frances Ruffelle - the songbird who first came to fame twenty five years ago, too, as the original Eponine in Les Miserables and whose daughter, Eliza Doolittle, is now shooting up the pop charts herself - is in town doing a risky, risqué concert set at the Pleasance’s Ghillie Dhu that is wonderfully edgy and never obvious.

You always want the best for your friends, and fortunately none of these disappointed. But one of the performers I was most looking forward to went down like a lead balloon at Assembly: Jennifer Coolidge, so brilliant in Christopher Guest’s Best in Show as a blonde bimbo with massive lips and tits who is married to a 95-year-old man, is trying out a stand-up show this year for the first time, but this brand of personal confessional comedy needs a lot more fine-tuning if isn’t to come across as simultaneously bitter, sour and self-obsessed, as it does here. What you don’t want to question is the accuracy of her own stories, since they’re about her life; but when she told us with an open sense of outrage about being asked to audition to appear in the West End production of the musical version of Legally Blonde — whose original film and its sequel she had both appeared in - you have to wonder who she actually met when she told us of going to meet its English director, who told her baldly she “can’t sing” (She mimics his accent, pronouncing can’t as cunt, and then tells us she didn’t realise that that’s where she was supposed to be producing her voice from). But since Jerry Mitchell, the show’s original Broadway director/choreographer, recreated his work here, can it be that she was despatched to meet someone even lower on the food chain? That would, at least, have meant that her outrage was well-placed.

One of the biggest hits on the fringe this year is Celebrity Autobiography, a series of readings of extracts from that subgenre; but here’s a whole subgenre of theatre in which sometime movie actors try to cash in on their fleeting fame there. Last year Carrie Fisher combined the two, bringing her own memoir, Wishful Drinking, to the Broadway stage, but she actually had a story to tell; Coolidge’s own mostly feeble ramblings lack punch and point.