"Plague - Dundee": as diary entries go, it's not the most promising prospect. But John Retallack's adaptation of Camus' novel, La Peste, is a darkly gorgeous thing. Like a Hopper painting brought to choreographed life, pestilence never looked so lovely.
In the novel, plague has gripped a city, which becomes a major character. The challenge for Retallack was to give a sense of this while making his drama an engaging story of individuals. This he has achieved through the use of music (Bach, Brel, Messiaen) and dance as a symbolic backdrop. The company, representing the city, moves in line, using jerky movements to suggest the monotony of life before the plague, the horror when it has a hold over them. They swoop to the city's gates as they close, shutting them in; they swarm through the streets, like the rats spreading disease underground.
Against this, a battle wages between the plague (played with vampy spirit by Irene Macdougall) and a doctor (Richard Conlon), struggling to come to terms with the horror he encounters without religion to sustain him. Partly a metaphor for war (La Peste was written in 1947), the novel and this intelligent adaptation ask difficult questions about collective responsibility. Plague still has resonance: it made tough viewing as the Middle East conflict escalated.
With these issues hovering, this poetic, symbolic production is an intense, bleak drama. But it is about life as much as death, how it goes on, and there are lighter edges to the drama. An aspiring writer, author of just one cliched line, grandly burns his complete works, mistakenly thinking he is dying. A journalist visiting the city gets trapped and is frantic to leave; during the year in which the city is closed he decides he has to stay.
As well as handling the big ideas well, this production also attends to the tiny details. The boy, forbidden by his father from talking at the dinner table, screams in death; the table becomes an operating table, and finally the mortuary slab. Plague looks on, her lips twisted, the colour of blood.
Until October 28. Box office: 01382 223530.
