Subtitled Four tragedies and Roy Keane, these five monologues, written by Irish playwright Colin Teevan, are performed by Greg Hicks, who is more often found at the RSC than in a small backroom off Princes Street. We are talking quality here, and quality is in pretty short supply on the Fringe.
Teevan takes five stories of modern life and gives them a Greek twist. The Bull sees a son entering the labyrinth of his childhood to do battle with the father who abused him; the story of Ajax becomes entwined in a modern-day tale of an Irish Republican warrior having to face up to the new political realities.
In the show's only comic segment, Roy Keane, who walked out on his team at the last World Cup, is cast as an Achilles dawdling in his tent and sitting out the campaign when his comrades need him. It is never all Greek, but sometimes the marrying of ancient and modern seems a little forced.
At others they fit like hand in glove: the best writing and acting are in The Last Word, an inversion of the Medea story, with a father taking his revenge on his former wife who always wants the final say. Devastatingly spare in every respect, Hicks delivers it with such restrained despair that it is like a quiet, lethal explosion somewhere in the very heart of you.
But the hour cannot sustain itself at this level of intensity and it tries far too hard to do so. The result is a lack of variety, a feeling of something overwrought, at times even overwritten and overacted. Even the design screeches rather than unobtrusively doing its job. The result is an hour that gives you something to get your teeth into, but which is solid rather than genuinely thrilling.
· Until August 29. Box office: 0131-226 2428.
