EDINBURGH — The Edinburgh International Festival comes in many tongues this year, among them Dutch and the Aboriginal dialect Dharug. But no matter the language, one abiding impression after a whirlwind weekend of playgoing at the festival and its complementary Fringe event is of a world coming apart at the seams.

It’s all but impossible, for instance, to leave the director Neil Armfield’s stirring Sydney Theater Company production of “The Secret River” without a sense of lamentation . Premiered in Sydney in 2013, Andrew Bovell’s adaptation of a 2005 novel by Kate Grenville tells of an English convict named William Thornhill (Nathaniel Dean) who arrives with his wife and sons in New South Wales early in the 19th century.

Will finds land by the Hawkesbury River that he can claim as his own, well away from the slums of London’s East End. But his newfound sense of self brings Will into contact, and eventual conflict, with the Aboriginal community that calls the same river home.

A decent man enmeshed in a clash of cultures destined to end badly, Will prompts a re-evaluation of just who, exactly, are the “savages” referred to early in a story of colonial misrule that ripples well beyond the specific time and place. (Mr. Armfield shows several individuals cruelly bound together with ropes, calling to mind recent news reports in the United States of a black man, Donald Neely, being treated the same way.)