Like a deadly danse macabre or a hellish fin de siècle party, Poland's Theatr Nowy return to the Fringe after a 15-year absence with a weirdly compelling, gaudy vision of Goethe's Faust. I say vision, not version, deliberately; it is unlike any version of the German playwright's telling of Faust's pact with the devil I have ever seen. A knowledge of Goethe may not be as much help as you would expect, and I suspect you would have to be fluent in Polish to have some chance of grasping exactly what is going on here. The programme is exceptionally cryptic - I'm still hopeful that the promised lemurs will one day turn up.
But even if specific meanings of scenes remain elusive there is no doubting the visual flair or the overall intention. Set in a godless world after the crucifixion and before the resurrection, director Janusz Wisniewski offers a vision of a Europe haunted by its own greed and twisted ugliness. The devil is on the loose playing all the best tunes and soon Faust - initially a grossly obese, white-faced clown - is soon dancing the devil's jig. Life tastes sweeter with Gretchen on his lips.
Full of Christian iconography and some strange oddities including the uncomfortable depiction of the devil as a hook-nosed Jew, Wisniewski's production plays out like some requiem for a 20th-century Europe where evil comes with many faces and in many guises. Here it is like a splinter of glass in the eye that makes the world look ugly.
The cast of 30 actors are like a chorus of misshapen puppets each with their own distinct tic, and within this grotesque cavalcade Mariusz Puchalski is desperately human and painfully tragic as the man who thinks he's got a bargain but ends up as a discarded piece of rubbish in a black bin liner.
· Until August 29. Box office: 0131-226 2428.
