LAST year’s Edinburgh Festival bonanza was played out against the background excitement of the upcoming referendum.

This year’s scarcity of political theatre may reflect the general despondency over the national result.

Among its major dramatic offerings, the main festival plays safe by importing the Belgian director Ivo van Hove’s updated production of Sophocles’s Antigone, starring Juliette Binoche, from the Barbican in London.

There’s likely, however, to be more excitement generated by Simon McBurney’s Theatre Complicite production of The Encounter. This treatment of Petro Popescu’s intriguing story of National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre’s journey into the depths of the Amazonian jungle to engage with a lost tribe surely lends itself to Complicite’s innovative theatre. 

Scotland’s own notable contribution is the Glasgow Citizen’s Theatre dramatisation of Alisdair Gray’s novel Lanark.

Adapted by David Greig, this production of Gray’s modern classic — a journey through life and the city combining realism and surrealist fantasy —celebrates both the writer’s 80th year and the Citizen’s 70th anniversary but, above all, Glasgow itself.

On the ever-burgeoning fringe, the vast choice of shows of all descriptions is always bewildering. The Traverse, with its own festival, offers the usual mix of home-grown productions with international visitors. Swallow by Stef Smith promises an enigmatic treatment of self-destruction which sounds as if it might find uncomfortable echoes in Andy Duffy’s Crash, dealing with the world-destructive activities of the financial markets.

Ireland’s acclaimed Corn Exchange Theatre bring Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Aoife Duffin’s one-woman performance of an Irish girl’s struggles to survive the traumas of a fractured upbringing. The intriguingly titled Pardon/In Cuffs, a conceptual dramatic creation from Belgian performer Valentijn Dhaemens, promises a study of the legal war between judge and judged, the individual against the system.

What should offer lighter fare, A Gambler’s Guide to Dying from Gary McNair and Gareth Nicholls, is described as “an intergenerational tale of what we live for and what we leave behind.” Ndebele Funeral at Summerhall, set in a Soweto shack, is a moving study of health, poverty, aspirations and loss and The 56 at Assembly, a drama-documentary on the 30th anniversary of the Bradford City fire, examines the tragedy behind the beautiful game.

Cinema, also at Summerhall, focuses on a 1978 terrorist fire in Iran that killed 420 film-goers and sparked a revolution and it is one of the relatively serious political dramas that catch the eye, along with Denial at Central Hall, a disturbing study of Holocaust denial set in Auschwitz. Advice to first-time festival punters — just take a deep breath and dive in.