Siren, Out of the Blue Drill Hall
Star rating: *****

It is like it ought to be, Pleasance Above
Star rating: *****

Scottish Dance Theatre, Zoo Southside
Star rating: ****

Bean Bar Zambuka, Augustine's
Star rating: ***

Desert Island Dances, Theatre Workshop
Star rating: ***

Callate!, Assembly Rooms
Star rating: **

An Audience with Adrienne, Traverse 5
Star rating: *****

Siren - okay, let's deal with the hardware first. Walk into Ray Lee's installation and you'll see a carefully ordered layout of metal tripods, ranging in size but all topped with motorised rotor arms bearing speakers at each end.

Pathways are - for our own safety - edged with barrier wires. When the calm, dark-suited performers make the necessary connections, the reasons for keeping your distance become clear: the arms whirl round at dazzling speed, and as they do, the air fills with wonderful spirals and eddies of sound that build in tonal textures as more and more tripods come on-stream.

Lights dim right down, so as the darkness is ultimately sparked by whizzing trails of tiny red fireflies - the "on" lights of the speakers. But by then, the hardware has become the handmaiden to your own journey through a thrumming, choral soundscape that alters with every step you take.

Bees buzzed, church bells chimed and the rumoured harmonies of cosmic spheres lapped round my meanderings. But who knows what others heard as they drifted past the oscillating "voices", or lapsed into meditative stillness against walls where reflections of the speeding lights traced lines, like night-streams of traffic on nameless autobahns.

It all falls silent on Saturday - immerse yourself in it while you can.

It is like it ought to be, devised and performed by Uninvited Guests, is one of those quirky, rather droll then distinctly dark pieces that burrows into the idyllic fabric of nostalgia - and our yen for rural enclaves of slow-browsing calm - to look for what we feel has been lost. If, of course, it ever existed beyond our needy imaginings.

There's a roister-doister gusto to the opening moments - a set awash with folksy artefacts, a genial welcome that evokes a Hardy-esque village camraderie. But as the piece progresses, the innocent charm of the countryside is undercut by a doom-laden sense of insecurity: what lies beyond the precious, perfect valley? The real world, and the 21st century which has no time to stop and stare, but never mind - hand-held recorders can bring the sounds of farm animals to you (without the smell, or the mess). You can picnic and play act among jumping, squeaking toy rabbits, pretend that traditions are still alive in a pastoral paradise within commuting distance of factory or office.

What really impresses here is the way that Uninvited Guests contrive to make us wistful for this pastoral fantasy while reminding us that it isn't like we think it ought to be. Possibly never was. A rich collage of music, rituals, inspired daftness and inventive staging, coupled with strong performances from a cast of five, leave you thinking this is what a Fringe show ought to be like in terms of flair and quality - but mostly, like their song says, it is not.

Vanessa Haska's Sorry for the Missiles!, performed by Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT), takes its imagery and traumatised emotions from the divisive conflicts in her native Cyprus but what she depicts has true universality.

The opening sequence, with a tight-knit community singing and dancing in party-happy mode, is disrupted by sounds of war. A quick-fire series of brief vignettes shows lives fragmenting: people dying, the living scavenging, distraught and dehumanised, neighbours turning on neighbours before the shell-shocked survivors come together again in a hollow attempt to reclaim the (unrecoverable) past. It's the kind of intense, dramatically nuanced dance-theatre that SDT excel in bringing alive, with a sincere expressiveness that is matched by their dancing. Everyone puts honest energy into both happiness and horror, but the anguish that wrenches through Michal Zahora's solo is quite unnerving at close quarters - and here, you can get thrillingly close to this accomplished company.

In Bean Bar Zambuka, getting close to stories - maybe, indeed, real-life stories - about a Canadian paratrooper, a cowboy in a mid-western diner, a remittance man and a hip-hop wannabe, means watching Ron Stewart going solo in what was, apparently, an ensemble piece by the five strong Mascali Dance company. Stewart is a hugely engaging performer. Formidably toned, agile and energetic with it, he is nonetheless undermined - especially in the opening section - by the need to deliver a densely worded narrative (about the cowboy in the diner) while doing all the "personality movement motifs" for the various other characters. It leaves him breathless, and us wondering nervously if this frenetic combination of text'n'action is "it" for the rest of the show. Well, not quite. And when Stewart gets a chance to dance out, lithe and speechless, he's truly watchable.

Wendy Houstoun is another performer given to mixing words and movement, which means that Desert Island Dances - in which she freely associates memories, metaphysical musings and snatches of physical theatre/ dance - is, like Houstoun herself, uncompromisingly idiosyncratic and not easily niched.

Not, I know, to everyone's taste. Her monologues, complete with daffy asides and qualifying comments, veer off the radar, as do her seemingly abstracted forays into a movement vocabulary full of jerks, twitches, falls and stretches. But as her tangential reflections on knowing where you are, on surviving (even your worst-case scenarios) and on living in, and consciously absorbing, each moment all start to twine together, Houstoun's skittish insouciance takes on something vulnerable and valiant. Not mainstream, but a rather vital (con)tributory stream of consciousness, I reckon.

Callate!, described as a "new clown show direct from Mexico" and directed by Cal McCrystal (of Spymonkey, Boosh and Peepolykus renown) - hurtles around, casting jokey aspersions on how the Spanish land-owning classes treated the "poor, stupid Indians" who were their servants while also spoofing the mad, bad lady of the hacienda who has the hots for the mustachioed revolutionary stopping over to rest his horse. He, in the interests of plot twists and dastardly machinations, falls in love with the naive peasant girl and not her wily flouncing mistress.

It's a cheerful gather-up of typical McCrystal set-pieces, played out with OTT oomph, some mugging and mis- pronounciations, by a Mexican threesome who contrive to squeeze a fair degree of silly fun and comedy from some overly predictable material.

Predictability is never on the cards when you have An Audience with Adrienne. Adrian Howells's alter ego may look like a drag queen, in a teensy terry towelling play-suit, but as visitors sit on the squashy sofas, exchanging anecdotes and listening to stories from Howells's personal experiences, what emerges is a tour-de-force of shared humanity. And when Howells strips off Adrienne's full-on make-up and glitzy outfit, choosing to be himself before we leave, it is profoundly moving in the way that kindness between strangers can, for a time anyway, make the world seem a better place.

It's an oasis on the Fringe.