Edinburgh, Scotland — It’s late and it’s dark. We are in a grand neo-classical quadrangle, the heart of the university of Edinburgh. Imposing flights of stairs lead up to the balustrades over which audience members lean. Domes loom against the night sky. A veiled human figure who must be more than 20 feet tall stalks into the center of the space, black robes swirling, clutching a flaring torch with which he/she/it sets the tree trunks standing upright in the courtyard’s center ablaze. This is the beginning of the Polish company Biuro Podrózy’s version of “Macbeth,” a piece of theater so spectacular it could make its effect anywhere, but which will surely never again find such an austerely beautiful setting.

There are nearly 2,000 shows appearing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year, and many of the best of them are more or less wordless. This is a forum where Anglophone audiences can see work from elsewhere in the world, and the performances that travel best are those, like this one, that do not rely on language.

Biuro Podrózy use snatches of Shakespearean text, declaimed rather than spoken, as part of the wall of sound backing their nightmarish tableaux. The visual style is that of Mad Max crossed with Pieter Breughel. Battles are fought on heavy and very noisy motorbikes. On the scaffolding that rises almost to the college’s rooftops, a shrouded soprano wails a dirge (the words are from “The Waste Land”). A castle, lit by naked flames, is built of rusty metal. A naked prisoner is carted on in a cage (many of these images, timelessly symbolic of the disasters of war though they may be, have a horribly contemporary urgency). The three stilt-walking witches, inescapable with their grotesquely elongated legs, run down Macbeth with a gigantic iron-mesh roller inside which skulls are tumbling. it’s an image of pursuit likely to follow anyone through their dreams.

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In an elegant octagonal church over in the new Town (in Edinburgh, “new” means 18th-century), a very different kind of visual theater is enacted. “Anatomy of insects” is ultra-modern, coolly technophile, and devoid of any recognizable human emotion, but so eerily beautiful as to work on the audience like a hallucinogen.

The russian blackSKYwhite company performs in a thicket, not of tree trunks, but of glass pillars within which colored fluorescent light pulses along with the syncopated electronic music. The performers wear costumes that create extraordinary illusions of scale and distance. Can that tiny round crinolined creature, and the armadillo-shaped being beside it, and the elongated form with white flipper feet that is apparently three times either one’s height, all be costumed actors? in the dim, staccato light, nothing seems certain.

The performers’ movements are jerky, like scenes from the first era of the cinema. “Anatomy of insects” recalls a time when filmmakers played rapturously with the magical illusions the new form could generate, ignoring narrative, but producing images of exquisite weirdness.

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British performers, of course, can use words. The Fruitmarket gallery is showing Alex hartley’s large, disconcertingly unfocused photographs of interiors. hartley’s work gives us plenty to look at, while Tim Crouch, the writer of “England,” specifically to be performed here, simply delivers his words, alternating with co-performer hannah ringman, with barely a gesture, only a peculiarly rigid smile. Smiles and words pass between them. This isn’t dialogue but a monologue for two voices. The speaker — most of the time — is someone who is about to receive, or later who has received, a heart transplant. The text, light-toned and colloquially phrased, touches on — and then draws back from — large, dark themes, as though Mr. Crouch were politely embarrassed at having, perhaps, upset us. “England” is about the comparative values of art, health, and money, and whether beauty and life can, or should, be up for sale. It makes its points with great subtlety.

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“The Walworth Farce,” meanwhile, is all showmanship — a brilliantly accomplished, angry play by Enda Walsh about the uses to which illusion can be put. A realistic set — of the kind so old-fashioned as to seem bizarre — shows us three squalid rooms crammed with gaudily colored trash. A syrupy irish folk song is on the radio and three actors, all male, are donning and doffing wigs, aprons, and chiffon frocks, and scampering from room to room. The talk is as fast and funny as the action. Mikel Murfi, the director for the druid Theatre of galway, gets prodigious performances from his actors. gradually it becomes clear that these men are an unemployed Irish immigrant and his two sons. Deranged for reasons we will discover, the father has kept his boys imprisoned indoors for years, endlessly playing out a version of their collective history that transforms unbearable facts, quite literally, into farce. Farceurs from Molière to Joe Orton have known that there’s something hectically cruel about the form, but it’s seldom been as desperate or as harrowing as this.

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The plays above are all staged by experienced performers working within well-respected institutions. But it’s by going into the scuzzy spaces of the smaller venues that you get the feel of what the Fringe means to most of its participants. Here is my pick of the student productions I’ve seen: There was the adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s “gormenghast” performed over six different stages, with violin-playing cats, new romantic-styled ancient retainers, and a chorus line of green-lit kitchen slaves. Journalistic decorum prevents me from commenting on that one, since the director, Mary Franklin, is my daughter. There was “Apocryphal Tales Told in the dark,” a witty sequence of scenes from modern life by Orlando Reade. There was “Tomas Pape,” a haunting circus-inspired fable about forests, memory, and shifting identity written and directed by Martin bonger. There was a “The return of Aeneas Faversham,” an eccentric and extremely funny performance by the Penny Dreadfuls, a comedy team that dresses as Victorian dandies and but makes sharply modern fun of the less desirable Victorian attitudes. The crowds of absolute beginners like these are the ones that throng the streets all day and all night, handing out flyers for their own shows or hurrying to see their friends’, and making the Edinburgh Festival one the biggest parties on earth.

Ms. Hughes-Hallett is the author of “Heroes: A History of Hero-Worship” (Knopf).