This festival, the main house at the Traverse is home to five plays. Three of them are thematically and literally very, very dark. They deal with violent deaths and share a penchant for the kind of dim, sinister mood lighting usually seen in a psychopath’s basement. Terminus, Fall and Pornography - the titles alone are gloomy.  And yet in the darkest of the three, there is the greatest persistence of vivid life.

Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus is stitched of three interlaced monologues, set in a vast shattered mirror, it involves several bloody ends and a pact with the devil. It’s a remarkable story of paradise lost and regained, told (appropriately) in verse. Each of the three narrators is marooned on a large shard of glass, and as they tell their stories they stand illuminated in a pool of light. At the start the tales are mundane. The first narrator is working for the Samaritans, the second is getting ready for a night out, the third is picking up a girl in a club.  But they soon soar to operatic levels of violence and fantasy, encompassing abortion, murder, demons and angels.

While the picture-frame set is stunning, and the sound effects that bookend the play are tremendously eerie, this is more a piece of storytelling than theatrical drama, and the real pictures are painted not on the stage but in the voices and the words. Karl Shiels excels in his understated evocation of a latter-day, Faustian Jack the Ripper, while Eileen Walsh’s voice and physicality are utterly imbued with the story she tells, rising and falling like the slow beat of wings. Dublin - laid out beneath construction cranes and the flight of demons - appears both as it really is, and as a city from the book of Revelation. Yet emerging from the graphic, horrific violence of this story is a poignant, strange and strong sense of hope. The idea is that beyond everything, beyond even the extinction of memory, life will reawaken.

Fall is a tragedy about a puppet leader, manipulated by an advisor. Its backdrop is an unspecified European country - bankrupt of morality, blind and brutal, it is emerging from civil war, and is hungry for revenge, not redemption. This is a country where - in Greek tragic style - an unseen, baying mob comes to threaten the gates of the prime-ministerial palace, and where heroes are drowned in their baths. It’s a place where the old guard dons a new mask and retains power, a state where appearance is greater than truth – a nation reminiscent of modern Russia.

The play hinges on the morality of how a society deals with its worst: should we execute the perpetrators of war crimes, or in executing them do we stain ourselves with blood? It’s a topical question, particularly so given the recent capture of Radovan Karadzic. But the more interesting question the play asks is, who will take responsibility? Sadly in exploring both these questions the script lacks the ability to raise them into visceral life. It’s a little too slow to carry its length (two hours, thirty minutes), and the good production and performances never really lift the text off the ground. Ultimately its structure hobbles its movement. This is most notable in a weak final scene, which in Shakespearean tradition offers a glimmer of hope after the tragedy, but which then takes the punch out of what should have been the ending. All of this is disappointing given that it’s by Zinnie Harris – a writer better known for her poetic style than the prosaic. 

Pornography is a play filled with fractured characters and written for a variety of voices. In its multiple and apparently disconnected narratives, and its focus on race, it might remind you of the controversial film Crash. Set in the days leading up to 7 July 2005, in the after hum of Live 8, the play is about a moment of history, a moment of change, a city, a nation, and a handful of stories in that fragment of time. In its themes of Islamism, terrorism and that date - 7/7 – it sounds perilously like a creative writing exercise. It’s far from that – it’s beautifully written, and beautifully produced. A stripped out set looks like the echo of a tube tunnel, with cables, wires and fluorescent lights strung out over the audience – these intestines link us with the stage and create a sense of stretched time, distance and connection.

The show opens crisply with a strange redheaded schoolboy (Billy Seymour), acting out his parents’ relationship. He’s a damaged teenager, lonely within his own family and dangerously righteous. Writer Simon Stephens and director Sean Holmes have infused all the voices in Pornography with a neurotic, edgy quality – the kind of restlessness you feel on a stormy day. From our schoolboy, who turns out to be a vehement racist; to the retired, widowed academic who watches porn on her computer; to the Asian boy from the North who’s a terrorist - every one is broken and ultimately each of them is alone.

Yet this isn’t a humourless play – Sheila Reid’s academic is acerbically comic, while also tremendously sad. Neither is this one of the several verbatim pieces on the fringe, the characters here are fictional and mutable – the play is written for an undefined number of actors. The characters in this play are explicitly defined by their actions - they are particles - as they collide with each other reactions are generated, from incest to explosions. Stephens’ fractured and atomised people make this play as much about the cracks beneath the surface of a nation as about 7/7.

Pornography does present us with a heightened moment in the summer of 2005 when everything in the media was about unity – Britain coming together for the Olympic bid, the world coming together for Live 8 - a unity that may have been false and which was certainly about to be blown apart.  But what the play makes clear is that this moment is not unique - Pornography manages to skirt clear of portentousness by having a sense of history. The capital is a silent but omnipresent character. It is described as a ‘city of ghosts’, a city that is ‘always on fire’, and a city ‘cut out in bomb blasts’. Stephen’s London is an ancient place that can absorb death and any single event, however scarring.