Torque of the town

Of all the theatrical thrills at this year's Festival Fringe, perhaps the most scintillating was seen by just 84 people. Italian playwright Renato Gabrielli's Mobile Thriller, at the Traverse Theatre, was performed in a car rather than on a stage and involved a mysterious drive through the city at dusk.

The main 'actor' was a besuited stranger in the front passenger seat who talked incessantly into a mobile phone, the main plot was presented down a shadowy lane and the audience was made up of just three people in the back of the car.

Seasoned critics and theatre-goers who managed to get a ticket were shaken and stirred by this unorthodox experience; sadly there are currently no plans to bring it to London.

Fear not, however, because the second big show of the Fringe - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - starts previewing at the Gielgud on September 3. Having gone through three directors, with its main star Christian Slater laid up during rehearsals with chickenpox, the show was barely expected to make it on stage at all, let alone obtain respectable reviews. In fact most people bent over backwards to praise an average production of a dated play but at least the technical problems should be resolved by the time Slater and co-stars Francis Barber, Mackenzie Crook and Owen O'Neill tread the London boards.

Transgressive sex has been a major theme: from Dirty Fan Male (based on real-life letters written to glamour models) to the Tiger Lillies's Punch and Judy, which featured blow-up dolls, via the execrable porn fest XXX. No one could match the outrage sparked by former Puppetry Of The Penis man Tim Fountain however: Sex Addict features Fountain going online each night to arrange a one-night stand.

Unfortunately, the website Gaydar blocked his details and threatened to sue; Fountain was later forced to admit the men he contacted didn't exist. Still, Fountain so impressed Ian Rickson, artistic director of the Royal Court, that Rickson arranged a London transfer - it should be appearing at the Royal Court Upstairs early next year.

Thom Pain, (Based On Nothing), at the Pleasance, was another hot ticket, with performer James Urbaniak dividing audiences and critics with his deconstruction of stand-up. It comes to Soho Theatre in September.

On a similar theme, Nick Grosso's new play Killing Paul McCartney reversed the trend for comedians in plays by casting the actor, Jake Wood, as a stand-up. The result was a coruscating parody of lowest common denominator comedy.

Mike McShane's appearance in John Clancy's Fatboy at the Assembly

Rooms, meanwhile, was one of the most awaited performances; the play (an update of Albert Jarry's modernist satire Ubu Roi) is a crude yet successful attack on the Bush administration.

American theatre companies proved a force to be reckoned with, too: the Red Chair Players followed last year's smash hit the Laramie Project with Bang Bang You're Dead, loosely based on the Columbine murders, and 78th Street Theatre Lab returned with the excellent Kenneth What Is The Frequency? - an absurdist fantasy set in a New York newsroom.