It begins on television screens: banks of them, stacked up like a tower. The audience watches and waits, seeing scenes that are almost too intimate. We see members of Suspect Culture theatre company - actors, the musical director and artistic director - talking personally, sometimes awkwardly but always passionately, about songs that make them cry, and things they'd like to change about themselves and the world. They talk of what makes them mad: injustices, poverty, exploitation, the Guardian. They dream up alternative lifestyles, ludicrously utopian, knowing how silly they sound.
From this tangle of memory, anger and dream, the play - structured like a traditional Gaelic lament - unfolds. Just like the ancient songs, threading communities and families together in times of hardship and loss, this means phases of bleakness, elegy and celebration on stage, culminating in a shared moment of remembrance that may allow those lamenting to move on.
But it's also a play about growing up, about realising that you've lost the things that make you feel safe, so tender childhood memories collide with rants about Third World debt, and nostalgia for a place collides with adult desires for your own space. Through it all, in the shadow of Ground Zero, our loss of faith in religion, politics, history, and the possibility of change glowers. Smart enough not to fall into the trap of thinking our time is different from any other. Lament alludes to other unnamed catastrophes, losses and cruel, unnecessary deaths. The piece is strongest in the musical scenes and that opening sequence of videoed revelations. An extended, wordless lament at the end, in front of a raggedy, sentimental temporary shrine, is heartbreaking and cathartic in quick succession. Lament is another example of Suspect Culture's ability to discard many dramatic cliches to access a raw emotional landscape we rarely see in contemporary theatre.
The company deals with some targets less sharply than others: a media brainstorming session and Friends-like sitcom are nowhere near dark enough. Even though it's all done self-consciously, there are moments where you feel you might drown in thirtysomething liberal guilt, a luxury in itself. There's also one physical tic in the production, a maddening palm-to-forehead sign to signal things that are being forgotten with cultural change, through globalisation and the dissolving of community, which is overdone, almost comical and reminiscent of cheap sci-fi movies. That said, this remains extraordinary theatre - intimate and universal, local and global, and as indulgently heart-warming as the saddest song.
At the Tron tonight, then touring to Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (0131-228 1404) from April 10-14 and Paisley Arts Centre (0141- 248 8052) on April 24.
