This year, the International Festival's terrific website includes a Try Before You Buy feature with 23 festival videos to sample. Here are some of the 2009 highlights:
- St. Kilda, Island of the Birdmen, A joint French and Gaelic multi-media production combining music, theatre, dance, modern and vintage film, about the westernmost Scottish Isle, where a 3,000-year-old lifestyle ended with a 1930 evacuation when the island could no longer support its small population.
- A season of Brian Friel plays at the King's Theatre, performed by Dublin's Gate Theatre company, including Faith Healer, Afterplay and The Yalta Game.
- The Last Witch Scotland's Traverse Theatre performs the world premier of a work by leading Scottish playwright Rona Munro, about the last woman executed for witchcraft in Scotland.
- The Testament of Cresseid A 15th century Scottish version of an unfinished work by Chaucer, translated into English by Elizabeth Elliot, adapted for the stage and directed by David Levin and featuring Scottish film actor Jimmy Yuill. Described as an epic work.
- Peter and Wendy New York experimental theatre company, Mabou Mines, reinterprets J. M. Barrie's classic story of Peter Pan through puppetry, music and performance art. This is one for grown ups.
- Two interpretations of Ulysses homecoming, both a bit off the wall. South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company and the Ricercar Consort of Belgium bring together opera singers, half life-sized wooden puppets, musicans and animated film for an unusual retelling of Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria. And Christian Spuck choreographs The Royal Ballet of Flanders in a modern version of The Return of Ulysses, full of humour and weirdness, combining the music of Henry Purcell with popular songs of the 1940s and 50s.
- Diaspora by Ong Ken Sen, uses theatre, multi-media and music to explore memory, migration and assimilation stories. Based on the real-life stories of Vietnamese Americans, Indonesian Chinese, Indians in South East Asia, Orang Laut (or sea nomads) and Scottish Muslims, the work features 2,000 years of Chinese music. A collaborative effort of Theatreworks and the Singapore Chinese Orchestra, this is a European premier.
- Admeto, King of Thessaly A fully-staged opera production of Handel's work, re-imagined by Japanese company as a Samurai story. Sung in Italian with supertitles in English.
- A series of concert performances of operatic works, by a variety of international and Scottish companies, in Usher Hall, including Verdi's Macbeth, Handel's Rinaldo, Acis and Galatea, Wagner's The Flying Dutchman and Purcell's The Fairy Queen .
