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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Lyn Gardner

Bima and Bramati

Bima and Bramati, Edinburgh festival 04

Oh dear; someone has been watching too much Beckett, and thought they would have a go themselves. In an unspecified, possibly post-apocalyptic world, two bubble-wrapped amputees, Bima and Bramati, sit in a hospital hooked up to machines that keep them alive. Life passes slowly for them - and even more slowly for the audience - as they question the nature of each other's existence, indulge in games drawn largely from film imagery, and plot their escape into the hospital corridor, a place that may, of course, simply be a figment of their imaginations.

Like The Great Escape crossed with Endgame, but not as interesting as either, this is a futile and pointless theatrical exercise. If you like sterile intellectual games, don't subscribe to the idea that, with a few honourable exceptions, the absurdist movement of European theatre is a very bad joke, and prefer your theatre entirely static, then you might find something in these existential musings to enjoy. I didn't. "For someone with so little to say, you manage to speak endlessly," Bima tells Bramati. So does the playwright.

Bima and Bramati may not make you question your own existence, but it is the kind of play that makes you wonder about the point of theatre.

· Until August 26. Box office: 0131-228 1404.

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