Lyn Gardner 

Mainstream

We are all performers. We all put on a show. And we are all alone. The more information we have about each other in the global age, the less we seem to connect.
  
  


We are all performers. We all put on a show. And we are all alone. The more information we have about each other in the global age, the less we seem to connect.

Suspect Culture's latest show plays a clever game with theatre and convention. With the act of acting and the games we all play, with each other and ourselves.

Four performers play two people, an A&R scout for a record company and a personnel officer, who are marooned in a room in a remote hotel by the sea. There they reveal things and they hide them. David Greig's brilliant text plays as if it were on a continuous loop - like memory itself. We hear the same stories but with a different spin, from a different mouth, or sometimes the same one, only differently. The more we hear, the less we really know. The more they tell, the less they reveal.

This is a hard, cruel, beautiful show, almost mathematical in its precision. The coolness of the performance style is in perfect harmony with the piece's icy images: two almost-strangers in a hotel room, one watching the other, naked, making him or herself come; the faint sounds of life being emitted from a body buried for two days in a car deep within a snowdrift. Like a radio transmitter in space, faint and distant, but unmistakably saying, "I'm here." Here, but alone. Always alone and always just out of reach.

• Till August 30. Box office: 0131-226 2428.

 

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