IN the mythology of the Ancient Greeks there is a woman, Cassandra, who has the dubious “gift” of being able to see into the future. Consequently, much like a climate scientist in the Trump White House, she is condemned to speak the truth of terrible forthcoming events, but not to be believed.

As the Cassandra myth proves, humanity has been gripped by the notion of calamity for millennia. Indeed, in modern times, many generations (be it those who witnessed the First World War, the 1918 influenza epidemic, the Nazi Holocaust or the nuclear arms race) have felt, entirely justifiably, that they had a unique claim to being the most endangered cohort of the human race.

Now it’s our turn. Climate chaos gathers at a frightening pace. Environmental campaign groups such as Friends of the Earth and even the original climate radicals Greenpeace have been superseded by the urgent, youth-led activism of Extinction Rebellion.

The far-right is taking power in nation after nation. This is disastrous for race relations, social cohesion and civil liberties, of course.

However, as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s accelerated destruction of the Amazon rainforest and Donald Trump’s blithe promotion of the fossil fuel industries attest, it also has terrible implications for climate change.

In such turbulent times it would be surprising if at least some of the work on show at Edinburgh’s world-famous festivals was not reflecting humanity’s darkest anxieties.

Indeed, the briefest of browses through the Edinburgh International Festival brochure suggests that the Festival’s director, Fergus Linehan, created this year’s programme with such concerns very much in mind.

Take, for example, the Canadian production Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools (The Studio, run ended). Staged by the pertinently named Buddies in Bad Times theatre company of Toronto, the piece brings together Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory (who belongs to the Kalaallit people; the largest group of the Greenlandic Inuit) and Evalyn Parry, a white Canadian, self-defined queer writer, performer and artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times.

The show, which is comprised of storytelling, song, performance and projected imagery, was inspired by an expedition into the Arctic homelands of the Kalaallit in northern Canada and Greenland, in which both Laakkuluk (as she is often known) and Parry were involved. The piece is a meditation on, simultaneously, the rapidly changing climate of the Arctic and the colonial history of Canada (including the genocide of the Aboriginal people, such as, of course, the Kalaallit).

Kiinalik (the word means “the knife is sharp” or “it has a face”) was originally designed to be performed for audiences in the predominantly Inuit community of Iqaluit, capital of the Nunavut territory of northern Canada, and at the Buddies in Bad Times theatre in Toronto.

The artists wanted to explore how their very different family histories might connect, and how those histories and their personal life stories might enable them to speak to each other’s communities.

Now, however, the show has become an international phenomenon. The reflections on the changing Arctic climate, and how that is impacting on the Kalaallit people’s way of life, are truly sobering.

So, too, are the accounts of frighteningly recent episodes in the attempted cultural genocide of aboriginal Canadians, by removing children from their families (accounts which will be all-too-familiar to aboriginal Australians).

One of the most startling moments in the show comes when Laakkuluk speaks about the terrible economic consequences for the Kalaallit people of campaigns by groups such as Greenpeace and animal rights advocates PETA.

These predominantly western organisations campaigned, not for sustainable hunting of fur-bearing animals in the Arctic (which accounted for a significant part of the economy for the Kalaallit and other Inuit people), but against the fur trade as a whole.

A fine singer-songwriter and performer though Parry is, it is inevitable that her story and her performance are eclipsed by those of Laakkuluk, whose story is both more urgent and more compelling. In an extraordinary moment towards the end of the piece, the Kalaallit performer uses face paints to create a black mask for herself.

SHE then proceeds to perform her own version of a traditional Kalaallit dance, which involves her climbing into the audience and encountering individual theatregoers in terms that are powerfully self-assertive, sexually expressive, anguished and angry. When, ultimately, Laakkuluk furiously clears the audience from their seats, it is as if she has become a one-woman embodiment of centuries of her people’s pain.

The terrible irony is that, having survived the genocide wrought by colonialism, Canada’s Inuit peoples now face a very definite threat to their way of life from climate change. That environmental chaos was, of course, created by a capitalism that was visited upon them as surely as was the “civilising” mission of “Christian” colonists.

Also on the International Festival programme is the intriguingly entitled Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (The Studio, until August 25). Written and, partly, performed by the brilliantly inventive English theatremaker Tim Crouch, the piece (which is co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland and a bunch of collaborators in the UK and Portugal) connects to both current and age-old human survival anxieties.

An audience of 70 people sits on chairs arranged in a circle. On each chair there is a book, which we, the audience, read along with the actors (who are, initially, Shyvonne Ahmmad and Susan Vidler). Occasionally, audience members are requested to read parts of the dialogue out loud. The book (which tells its story in both words and pictures), is, it becomes clear, simultaneously the script of the play and, if we are prepared to follow the conceit of the piece, the prophetic text of the sole leader of a pseudo-scientific millenarian cult.

This clever meta-theatrical device is typical of Crouch, whose past experiments in theatrical reinvention include such acclaimed works as An Oak Tree, ENGLAND and The Author. Here, however, the stakes seem higher.

Crouch’s audiences are often implicated in the action of his plays. Here, however, the action is a herd-like participation in a cult’s belief in the impending end of humanity, and their collective and exclusive salvation.

Interestingly, given the very real reasons to fear for the fate of humanity in 2019, the cult leader’s delusion seems to have been prompted, not by the towering ecological, economic or political crises of our age, but by personal catastrophe.

We find ourselves, according to his prophecy, minutes from the end, yet witnessing (in the characters played by Ahmmad and Vidler) an anguished family drama that has been distorted dreadfully through the prism of the cult.

When, finally, Crouch arrives onstage (in the role of the cult leader), the irresolvable contradiction between the desperately painful family relations and his seeming conviction in his own prophecy comes to a head. The conclusion (which it would be a crime to divulge) carries a heavy irony that is common in Crouch’s theatre-making.

The process of the piece is intriguing for us, the audience, and its themes (of belief in both human extinction and the false narratives of messianic leaders) are potently relevant to our times.

Somehow, however, it feels anti-climactic, as if its emotional impact should be much greater than it is. Then, one has a niggling doubt: perhaps, given the play’s subject matter, this sense of unfulfilled expectations is precisely what Crouch set out to achieve.

On the Fringe, and in a quite different vein of experimental theatre, Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran (Traverse Theatre, until August 25) takes the conspicuous consumption displayed on the Instagram site Rich Kids of Tehran (which is a thing) and a catastrophic car crash involving a child of the Iranian elite as metaphors for the global socio-political and ecological crises.

Having encouraged the audience to add the Instagram app to their phones, performers Peyvand Sadeghian and Javaad Alipoor take us on an impossibly diverse journey through political history, geology, climate science and contemporary geopolitics.

From the ecological impact of the smartphones in our hands, through the mineral-fuelled expansions of European colonialism to the extraordinary, seemingly nothing-to-lose recklessness of the kids of Iran’s theocratic leaders, the piece is one of the most compelling works of documentary theatre I have ever seen.

In addition to its clever use of technology (particularly the powerful machines most of us carry in our pockets) and its intelligently diverse script, the piece is smartly designed and engagingly performed. It was only as I left the theatre that I realised that what I had witnessed was, in effect, little more than a lecture.

Also on the Fringe, Quintessence (Sweet Novotel, until August 25) is a one-woman play written and performed by accomplished solo theatre-maker and actor Emily Carding.

Justifiably acclaimed for her excellent Richard III (A One-woman Show), Carding returns to Shakespeare, by way of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, in imagining a future dominated by Artificial Intelligence.

THE human race has long since died out, leaving behind AI humanoids that are programmed to try to revive humanity. In an experiment worthy of the 1970s radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (who considered the artificial womb the ultimate goal of women’s liberation), the humanoids have tried recreating humans in laboratories.

Unhappy with the results, they have finally succeeded in manufacturing, and implanting in themselves, human wombs. We, the audience, are Humanity Mark II, not Homo sapiens, but Homo superior.

Carding, dressed in a leotard and the kind of make-up preferred by Toyah Willcox in the 1980s, plays the humanoid who is welcoming us into the giant dome that the AI intend to share with us. Intriguingly (if somewhat bizarrely), the only basis the AI have for giving us a crash course in being human is the complete works of Shakespeare.

Carding cuts between a predictably robotic embodiment of the AI (although, in fairness, distinguishing, by theatrical means, between a humanoid machine and a real human is no easy matter) and performances of vignettes from the Bard’s plays. Wryly, the AI have found that Shakespeare’s insights into humanity suggest that our doom was written in our inherent nature.

This is, in narrative terms, a very ambitious project. However, performed as a low budget solo show, it doesn’t quite come off. Ironically, the piece is most interesting when Carding is performing longer excerpts from plays, such as Richard III and Hamlet, that she has draw upon in her past shows.

That said, one can’t help but feel that her sci-fi vision (complete with a feral humanity, the consequence of the AI’s previous, failed attempts at recreating Homo sapiens, roaming the devastated world beyond the dome) deserves a second shot at an artistic life.