LAST CALL FOR FINAL CURTAIN

In translation: Fringe First winner Do We Look Like Refugees?! revisits the trauma of Russia's invasion of South Ossetia. Below: Marianne Oldham is The Girl In The Yellow Dress

THIS week, a round-up of good things you can still see in the final two days of the Fringe. First, though, a quick mention of the high-profile international shows that have recently been and gone.

Last weekend, the Edinburgh International Festival banked three of its weightiest theatre offerings. As well as the National Theatre of Scotland's Caledonia (reviewed last Sunday), there was the Wooster Group's Vieux Carr and Lee Breuer and Bob Telson's The Gospel At Colonus, each in their own distinctive way looking at the North American experience.

In its patent mix-and-match style, the Wooster Group made the connection between Vieux Carr, Tennessee Williams' reflections of a seedy boarding house in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1938-39, and Paul Morrissey's experimental Warhol-style films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. With one eye always on the onstage monitors, Elizabeth LeCompte's actors performed the Williams' script while mirroring the gestures, clothes and body language of Morrissey's actors.

In this way, the hi-tech production encapsulated two eras of sexual licentiousness, projecting a picture of America's underbelly that conflicts with the apple-pie image favoured by the mainstream. As the Writer, powering everything into life through his computer keyboard, Ari Fliakos gave a fantastic performance as a dreamy, detached narrator dealing with his unhinged landlady and her predatory lodgers. For the first half, it was fascinating stuff, but the journey from disreputable to dissolute is a short one and the production had too little variation in tone to justify its two-hour length.

With a far more wholesome view of American life, The Gospel At Colonus was as much church service as Greek tragedy, the Playhouse stage filled with a real gospel chorus plus sundry soul survivors including the Blind Boys of Alabama. For fans of Sophocles, it worked best when the Rev Dr Earl F Miller explained the story in pulpit-thumping style, making the unexpected - and revelatory - connection between Greek oratory and modern-day preaching. For fans of the music, there was no shortage of clap-along highlights. In the collision of the two, however, the music overwhelmed the play as often as it illuminated it, leaving us with an odd but entertaining hybrid.

There again, if it's oddness you're after, not even these two shows could match Era Schaeffera for eccentricity. Playing for just four performances and making use of the Polish Radio Chamber Orchestra Amadeus, the remarkable avant garde vocalist Urszula Dudziak, a handful of actors, plus live and recorded video projections, this tribute to octogenarian polymath Boguslaw Schaeffer was a Fringe show worthy of the International Festival. Ranging from atonal new music to something close to melody, it was witty, playful and adventurous and showed a liberating disregard for the rules.

So much for what you've missed. If the loose talk is true and the Fringe really is about to call an end to hostilities, then you have two days to get down to the frontline for some great theatre. Here are some hour-by-hour recommendations of shows running today and tomorrow (unless otherwise stated).

If you're fast off the mark this morning, you have one last chance to see The Girl In The Yellow Dress at 10.15am before it tours to the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow. Craig Higginson's play is the least spectacular and perhaps most conventional of this year's Traverse line-up and, as a result, has slipped a little under the radar, but it is a compellingly written two-hander with excellent performances by Marianne Oldham and Nat Ramabulana. Behind the pupil-student love story lies a thorny drama about escaping our emotional and cultural histories to become the people we really want to be without prejudice or neurosis.

The theme of people struggling to find their identity away from home crops up again at 11.35am in Do We Look Like Refugees?! In the Fringe First-winning production, the authoritative Georgian cast listen to headphones and give word-for-word and, indeed, hesitation-for-hesitation reproductions of interviews conducted with people displaced by the Russian invasion of South Ossetia. You'd expect it to be a play full of political rage; in fact it offers something more subtle, a vision of the inconvenience, frustration and uncertainty of human beings - with all their vanity and eccentricity - pulling together in the face of adversity.

When it comes to adversity, few people have seen more of it - and overcome it so successfully - than Noel Tovey. At midday in Little Black Bastard, the Australian actor gives a level-headed, moving and distressing account of his childhood years. Hardly a sentence passes without another revelation of sexual abuse, racism, imprisonment and more, yet there is something cathartic for both performer and audience in the way he works through these ugly details, knowing that, despite it all, he would become a successful choreographer, director and human rights campaigner.

More campaigning at 2.30pm when David Benson gives a performance of irresistible seriousness in Lockerbie: Unfinished Business. To say he "plays" Jim Swire, the father of one of the victims of the Lockerbie bomb, would be too frivolous. Better to say he embodies him. Giving a straight explanation of the bereaved doctor's belief that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was not the bomber, Benson performs with the fact-heavy urgency of the politically incensed. Like all good polemical theatre, it sends an audience out demanding answers.

I, Claudia at 3.40pm and Hot Mess at 6pm are two plays that are thoroughly entertaining, even if they don't linger for long in the mind. From Canada's Crow's Theatre, I, Claudia is a lovingly observed study of a teenage girl coping with the aftermath of her parents' divorce and the awkward business of being unpopular at school. It's familiar coming-of-age territory and never flourishes into a full-blown drama, but performer Kristen Thomson does a touching job at creating the girl's lonely universe and, thanks to masks and rather slow costume changes, some of the well-meaning adults in her life too.

Hot Mess is the latest play written and directed by Ella Hickson, author of the Fringe First-winning Eight. This time, she's in personal mode as four twentysomethings - the monogamous Twitch, her asexual twin brother Polo, the sexually voracious Jax and the free-floating Billy - hit the town on their island home and try to reconcile their different attitudes to love, happiness and commitment.

It's imaginatively staged (with added guitar), strongly acted and lyrically written, and captures the anxiety of young people trying to choose a path in life. With greater character development, it might have been as moving as it is entertaining. v

Vieux Carr, Royal Lyceum, run ended; The Gospel At Colonus, Edinburgh Playhouse, run ended; Era Schaeffera, EICC, run ended; The Girl In The Yellow Dress, Traverse, until today, 10.15am; Do We Look Like Refugees?!, Assembly@George Street, until tomorrow, 11.35am; Little Black Bastard, Gilded Balloon Teviot, until tomorrow, midday; Lockerbie: Unfinished Business, Gilded Balloon Teviot, until tomorrow, 2.30pm; I, Claudia, Assembly Rooms, until tomorrow, 3.40pm; Hot Mess, Hawke + Hunter, until tomorrow, 6pm

• This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday on August 29, 2010