It is a shame devised theatre gets such bad press, because, as companies like Complicite and Third Angel have shown, seeing material created and performed by the same people can be twice as arresting as watching people act out some old script in which they have nothing invested.
This is certainly the case with Suspect Culture, which comprises a director (Graham Eatough), a writer (David Greig), a musician (Nick Powell) and five performers. Their work has a level of discipline rare in devised theatre, particularly such contemplative devised work, which can slip into self-indulgent portentousness in seconds.
On a stage adorned with a ramp, three video screens and a display flashing share-price fluctuations, the performers flip between scenes of lamentation from cultures across the world. The most important thing in this show is that almost none of them are ostentatious; most are so self-effacing that the sadness reveals itself in layers. The only really lugubrious display of grief, tellingly, is at a British wake, where getting really pissed and wailing along to Nilsson's Without You is the way to show grief.
The piece is about loss, but it deftly sidesteps tedious romantic cliches. It would be easy to play for tears with 10 dead lovers and a sick hamster, but instead the company concern themselves principally with loss of "the future". By that, they mean the encroaching disenchantment that comes as the spirit of '68 is replaced by the need to earn a living, and the knowledge that we are doing so in almost all cases at the expense of someone we have never met in a country we have never heard of.
Thus, a show that started as a contemplation of responses to loss also becomes an investigation of a wider, cultural loss - and an indictment of the dominant, western culture that destroys all in its path. It is living proof that devised theatre need not be navel-gazing and obscure: a more urgent topicality is rare in the theatre, as is the ability to render world issues deeply human.
· At The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, tomorrow. Box office: 01224 642230.
