Business pressures rule the Edinburgh Fringe more than ever before, especially in these economically straitened times. Increasingly, for instance, a production’s Edinburgh run is either a showcase for a subsequent transfer or tour, or is capitalising on such a prior outing. The Radicalisation Of Bradley Manning toured Wales during the spring, and that country’s National Theatre has now brought Tim Price’s play (under the aegis of the Pleasance) to a similarly unorthodox venue here, St Thomas of Aquin’s High School. Many of the Welsh tour venues were also school halls, since Price’s play deals in part with Manning’s teenage years in Haverfordwest, before he returned to America, the military and informational notoriety. We see some of the seeds of Manning’s confusion being sown by a teacher who inspired her students by encouraging them to enact historical episodes of rebellion but hypocritically crushed such values of independence when asserted by students against her. Price’s script (he also wrote I’m With The Band, which I reviewed at the Traverse) this month won the inaugural James Tait Black Prize for Drama.

Branding is another useful strategy. Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s Northern Stage is once more running St Stephen’s, a venue with a long and honourable left-field Fringe tradition. This year’s presentations include There Has Possibly Been An Incident, in which a trio of performers consider crucial events such as the Tiananmen Square protests in terms of individual characteristics rather than the supposed big picture, and one of the Fringe’s most intimate events this year, Cape Wrath, in which Alexander Kelly recounts retracing a journey made by his grandfather to 14 people at a time in a minibus parked just outside the venue. The pick of the St Stephen’s shows for me has been How To Occupy An Oil Rig, which reproduces Daniel Bye’s strategy with his The Price Of Everything last year, but this time as a trio rather than a solo. Once again an air of charming whimsy hangs over the proceedings (as we enter we are invited to make miniature avatars of ourselves out of Plasticine), but little by little it becomes impossible to ignore the seriousness of issues of environmental protest and its suppression which the three performers recount.

Co-productions may be as crucial to Fringe financing as to larger-scale tours. Stuart: A Life Backwards comes to the Underbelly courtesy of Sheffield Theatres and the Hightide Festival. Jack Thorne’s adaptation of Alexander Masters’ book is flexible and engaging as it follows Masters’ attempts to piece together the life of an eccentric homeless man and former career criminal whom he met when protesting against the imprisonment of two charity workers. Will Adamsdale and Fraser Ayres as Masters and Stuart Shorter respectively exert a discreet command.

Sometimes, however, larger structures fall away and a single person makes the deepest impression. Ben Moor started out 20 or so years ago as a deliciously clever, geeky teller of surreal tales. The conceptual wackiness has remained but has come, with maturity, to be counterbalanced by a simple yet indefatigable romanticism. In Each Of Us (Pleasance Courtyard), Moor’s protagonist tells of small-scale yet extraordinary love affairs and friendships, and arrives almost inadvertently at a philosophy for life, of which the Fringegoing experience may be a perfect analogue. A guaranteed cure for all forms of disillusionment.

Written for the Financial Times.