The summer Irina and Alexander fall in love is the summer everything changes. Fear arrives with the soldiers and the couple flee to the city, cowering in a basement where snow and bombs fall and news comes from the countryside of unimaginable atrocities. Can love remain pure and untouched in such circumstances? Or does it become tainted by the violence that seeps through the cracks of the skeletal buildings and infects the air? Or perhaps the violence was always there in the relationship, lying dormant, just waiting for the right conditions in which to erupt.
Laboratorium-33's love story might so easily have been just another requiem for lost love. But it becomes urgently relevant in a production that has not only found the right space for its claustrophobic dissection of acts of love and war, but that also equates the colonisation of the body with the colonisation of a country. It dares to acknowledge the close relationship between sex and killing, and is all the more interesting for being set in the Scotland of here and now.
Beautiful, sexy and quite appalling to watch, this bravely acted production, which comes with a live DJ, is an intense and dense 70 minutes of gripping theatre that probes not just love and war, but the peace that you must try to make with yourself in the aftermath.
· Until August 23. Box office: 0131-556 3102.
