Calixto Bieito is widely regarded as the bad boy of European theatre: in fact, he strikes me as a fierce Catalan moralist who cannot throw off his Jesuitical upbringing. And that certainly comes through in his wild, surreal staging, filled with a melancholic hedonism, of Fernando de Rojas's late 15th century tragi-comedy.
The work itself is problematic in that it is rather like Romeo and Juliet without the social pressure. Calisto yearns for Melibea and attains her with the aid of a wiley procuress, after which the lovers promptly die.
But, since we know little of their family history, it is hard to see either what keeps them apart or drives them to despair. De Rojas's real interest, you feel, lay in the play's titular bawd who has the voyeurism of Pandarus, the earthiness of the Wife of Bath and the mercenariness of Mother Courage.
Bieito intensifies the play's problems by setting the action in a louche modern bar where there seems to be a constant party in progress and the actors dance to the rumba Catalana: you wonder why Calisto doesn't just ring Melibea on her mobile rather than go to the expense of hiring a bawd. But it slowly dawned on me that Bieito sees the play as a Spanish Shopping and Fucking, and is using it to attack our own conspicuous consumption and reduction of sex to a commercial transaction.
Kathryn Hunter, in fact, plays Celestina as a ruthless pragmatist in sharp gangster suit who milks Calisto of every penny and even auctions off a bar-room simpleton to the highest bidder. It is a dangerously charismatic performance. But Bieito's production is at its best in the final stages when Laura Rogers's Melibea couples with Christopher Fox's Calisto and then asks who he is: the stage fills with a post-coital tristesse, as if Bieito is suggesting that our contemporary sexual obsession conceals a lack of human tenderness.
Although trimmed by John Clifford, the play doesn't grip for every second of its 135 minutes. But, co-presented with Birmingham Rep, it is far better than the Madrid version that visited Edinburgh in 1989. It proves that Bieito is much more than a Spanish shock-merchant: he has an awareness of the pain of love and the dissoluteness of pleasure that makes him the modern theatre's equivalent of Buñuel.
· Until August 24. Box office: 0131-473 2001.
