THE production of Frank Cottrell Boyce’s television play God On Trial (C nova) by Cambridge University students is a courageous production, in which a group of Auschwitz Jews awaiting extermination spend their final hours conducting a formal examination of whether God has broken the terms of his covenant with his chosen race.

It was momentous given the current holocaust. If, as Simon Wiesenthal reported, God was hanged on the gallows of Auschwitz, he has certainly been crucified in the streets of Gaza.

Written in response to the US Columbine school shooting, Johanna Adams’s Gideon’s Knot (Surgeons Hall) from the Quest Theatereworks Company presents an agonising confrontation between a 5th-grade teacher and an aggressively distraught mother.

They are desperately seeking answers as to why her son had been suspended from school, leading to his suicide and, in this tense confrontation, the play powerfully questions the role and creative limits of free expression in the education system.

Six Billion Suns (Zoo at Pleasance) from the Czech Theatre NoD deliberately confuses as it draws its audience into the experience of Alzheimer’s disease.

It seems that the five central figures, moving in their own lost worlds, are in some home for sufferers — or perhaps they are multiple aspects of the old lady we sit watching during an interminable opening while she fiddles hopelessly with her fingers.

It is painful to watch them being tested, as when asked to name the months of the year backwards. It is even more so when, at intervals, the company tests us. A worthy attempt through theatre to replace fear with understanding.

Cuckooed (The Traverse) provides mental relief. Mark Thomas’s one-man show takes on the arms trade in his personal account of betrayal.

He recounts the shock at finding one of his closest friends in the campaign against the arms trade had been all along an informer for the country’s largest arms company, BAE Systems. Thomas uses his comedic skill to convey his anger and distress, while exuberantly fighting back by duping the Establishment into providing inside information and allowing him to force the authorities to take action against these dealers in destruction.

Hilarious accounts of chaining himself to the axle of a bus taking international arms dealers to their conference hall, and conning an Indonesian military bigwig into admitting torture on video, works entertainingly as stand-up and informs as to the true nature of our constantly monitored society.

Two more shows at the Traverse tune into the fringe’s dominant themes, independence and war. In John McCann’s scintillating Spoiling it is post-referendum and the Yesses have won and Scotland’s newly appointed, pregnant, foreign minister is due to make a key speech before the British Establishment.

Even her own party — not independent but indentured — is anxious about this firebrand, who is determined that the achievement was never about establishing a “kilted fuckin’ caliphate.” A party official, ironically hailing from Northern Ireland, is sent to make sure she is kept in line, only to be educated in the process.

Belgium’s Valentjin Diaenen’s Small War is a telling tapestry of the rhetoric of history’s world leaders which has fuelled war fever among their peoples.

Here we hear the voices of the victims who did not give their lives for their countries but were sacrificed for the power and greed of their masters.

Using video projection and computerised imaging, Diaenen embodies the living spirits of a mutilated victim and in his prose-poem elegy, broken by savagely sentimental songs, captures the hell of war.

Finally in The Time of Our Lies (Gilded Balloon) the life and times of the US historian and political activist Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History Of The United States, is presented in Bianca Tourian’s startlingly innovative portrayal.

Using dance, rap and Zinn’s own words, this evocation of his life-long battle against a society built on exploitation and manipulation — “Every war we have ever gone to was based on a lie,” says Tourian — deserves wider exposure.

The title says it all.