Everyone knows that Edinburgh winners often turn out to be London's also-rans.
That's not the case with this weird and beautiful 80-minute hybrid of cabaret, dance, performance and theatre, however. Based on the music and songs of Jacques Brel, the production may shine slightly less brightly without its brilliant choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui whose strange, jerky acrobatics were such a feature of the Edinburgh performances. Yet there is such depth to this evening and the songs are so bewitchingly delivered that it bears revisiting many times.
The triumph of the company is to have taken Brel's songs, so often rendered bland and innocuous in Anglo-Saxon assaults upon them, and to treat each one as a a series of interlinked fragments. The 19 songs take place within the larger framework of a suburban sitting room complete with four-seater brown sofa, lumpy armchair and standard lamp. But there is nothing in the least bit cosy about this milieu, however much the women chat and fuss with their hair and make-up. Beneath the facade of apparent bourgeois normality what you see played out is a drama of dislocation and alienation in which nobody ever quite connects. Madness, of one kind or another, is never far away. Violence bubbles just beneath the surface, rising in the sound of a gunshot.
Stylistically, the show has something in common with some of the crazed, fractured work of Forced Entertainment and the peripheral, edgy energy of Alain Platel's Let's Op Bach, but it owes most to the smoky traditions of 50s and 60s cabaret. It is a celebration of The Talk of the Town and all those now long-forgotten forms of bourgeois entertainment, but also a sharp critique of the cultural and social conditions that engendered them. Brel's sardonic humour becomes, in Andrew Wale's lethal English translations, sharper still, and the cast - who have voices like angels but behave like devils - cleverly juggle the constant changes of mood.
The evening does have its lighter moments and there is tenderness too. But the overall impression is of something beautiful and deadly. It suggests that there is no escape from the loneliness of ourselves: we are all dead men walking, even as we carouse amid family and friends.
Box office: 0181-741 2311. Until January 8
