When the Smiths released Paint a Vulgar Picture , the obligatory rock-band moan about the music business, Morrissey came up with a characteristically waspish one-liner. It was the fate of every singer doing the media round, he protested, to “please the press in Belgium”. Behind the joke is the idea of the pop star having to kowtow to a country of no significance.

It’s a stereotype Nele Van den Broeck has no appetite to dispel. When her Belgian band breaks up in Nele Needs a Holiday: The Musical, she makes the impulse decision to flee to London. That, as everyone knows, is the only place to make it in the music business. Belgium, she accepts with an ironic twinkle, does not figure in the international awareness stakes. Even her boyfriend seems to think she comes from France.



Consequently, the idea of being part of Big in Belgium, the annual showcase of left-field theatre at Summerhall in Edinburgh, amuses her enough to incorporate the phrase into one of her songs. Who’d aspire to being big in Belgium? Perhaps the kind of person who would aspire to tell a musical life story that begins and ends in the Low Countries, with a sorry tale of UK failure sandwiched in between. Step forward Nele, with a self-deprecating rags-to-even-more-rags ramble into a fame machine that gets no more glamorous than a 2am pub gig in front of an empty house.

Ironic twinkle … Nele Needs a Holiday. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

It’s an oddly deflating trajectory for a musical, and that’s part of its offbeat appeal. With Anna Soden and Hannah Davis supporting on drums, guitar and keyboards, and all three in spangly jumpsuits, it’s a wry tale of deluded ego. Van den Broeck’s show is at once self-obsessed and self-aware. Satirising posh flatmates, possessive boyfriends and loudmouth agents, it survives on strong musical arrangements, good humour and quirky charm. Don’t expect to see it in the West End any time soon, but it entertains for a daft hour of late-night whimsy.

Marieke Dermul’s European Citizen Popsong has a similarly homemade feel and the same idiosyncratic appeal. Her idea is that in these turbulent times, we need to find a way of expressing common European values. And how better to do that than in a Eurovision-style song? Having recruited a makeshift band from the audience, she plays a series of videos in which she meets Eurovision experts, international musicians and passersby who stop to hear her songs (sample lyric: “We share some values / We feel stronger”). There’s a poem by Herman Van Rompuy, the former president of the European council, and an endorsement from SuRie, Britain’s contestant in Eurovision 2018.

You assume Dermul is being ironic but, with her wide-eyed enthusiasm, she might just be in earnest and, although this one-woman show could have developed its theme further, it’s a likable alternative to the many Europe-in-crisis dramas elsewhere.

Idiosyncratic appeal … European Citizen Popsong. Photograph: Bart Grietens

Compared with previous programmes, it’s not a vintage year for Big in Belgium (no Ontroerend Goed here for a start), although Valentijn Dhaenens’ Unsung is worth catching for its familiar but pertinent portrait of political hot air and spin. And it wouldn’t be a Belgian season without a show that charged headlong into territory that makes UK audiences squirm. This time, that show is Bastiaan Vandendriessche’s De Fuut, which has a lot in common with Adam Lazarus’s Daughter, around the corner at Canada Hub. Both one-man shows deal with sordid subject matter (paedophilia here, a desensitised pornographic culture there), both assume a false complicity with the audience and go out of their way to make you feel grimly uncomfortable. In the last respect, they succeed. But to what end?

Vandendriessche plays a character who wants you to know he’s a reasonable man. He is cultured and articulate, and his volunteering as a leader with the Sea Scouts is, at least in part, an act of altruism. He likes the young generation and wants to help them grow up happy. But something is amiss. Although he condemns another leader for openly grooming and sexually abusing the children, he does so in such matter-of-fact terms that it sounds like a minor transgression, not a criminal act.

Going on to describe his relationship with two 13-year-old girls, his language is a mixture of self-deception, distortion and warped justification, all designed to make his abuse seem other than what it is. You could argue that his attempt to make the audience complicit in this, reaching out a hand of friendship to the front row, is itself an abuse of power. Either way, it is dispiriting to wallow so unremittingly in this territory without the conflict and release that fully-fledged drama provides.