The pleasure of the Wooster Group is in watching something completely fearless take place. Elizabeth LeCompte and her company have a healthy and brazen disregard for the boundaries between high and low art. They frequently take a sledgehammer to a classic and then rearrange the splinters. Wooster Group shows are often like gazing into the face of somebody you thought you knew well and discovering things you had just never noticed before.
La Didone is slightly different, although no less intriguing. As a starting point, LeCompte takes Francesco Cavalli's baroque opera about the sudden love of Dido for Aeaneas, who survives the destruction of Troy and is washed up on the shores of Africa by a storm. LeCompte splices the story with Planet of the Vampires, Mario Bava's 1965 sci-fi B-movie about two spaceships landing on the planet Aura after hearing a mysterious signal. Once you have got over the shock of baroque music being played (beautifully) by a band whose instruments include an accordion and an electric guitar, and the fact that everyone is dressed in silver spacesuits, it all makes a good deal of sense.
Both stories concern survival of the heart, survival of the species and the survival of new environments. The parallel worlds in which the stories take place leak into each other. The mysterious sounds heard by the spaceship's crew are not just Dido's cries of love, but also a 17th-century opera being sung to a 21st-century audience in a 19th-century theatre, using techniques that have been around for centuries alongside brand new technologies for sound and video. The easy comparison that springs to mind is the TV series Lost, but I am more inclined to think of the isle with its own sweet strange sounds in Shakespeare's The Tempest, the subject of its own B-movie spoof, Return to the Forbidden Planet.
Despite the odd, inevitable Dr Who moment, this evening largely works because it combines an often piercing sweetness with a dry sense of humour. The production also recognises its own absurdities (and the absurdity of helpless, head-over-heels love) without ever toppling into high camp.
The ensemble cast led by Hai-Ting Chinn's beautiful Dido, lost and trying to get her bearings in the scary new world of love, play it absolutely straight. The result is often unexpectedly moving and wistful - as if shadows and ghosts stalked the stage alongside the alien life forms. I've seen Wooster Group pieces that are far more radical, but few as tender.
· Until August 22. Box office: 0131-473 2000.
