You can see why Calixto Bieito is drawn to the work of Michel Houellebecq. Both are closet moralists with a reputation for controversy. But the Catalan director's production and adaptation (with Marc Rosich) of Platform for Barcelona's Teatre Romea, being premiered in Edinburgh, is no cheapjack sensation. For all its use of sexually explicit video, it turns out to be a serious, troubling and finely staged meditation on the decline of civilisation.
The show is billed as a "dramatic hyper-realistic poem for seven voices and one Yamaha". What we see is a dream-like reconstruction of Houellebecq's novel about the life-changing experiences of a Parisian cultural bureaucrat called Michel. An ineffable solitary, he joins a Thai package tour where he shyly falls for a fellow traveller, Valerie. Back in Paris they enjoy a mutually fulfilling affair. Valerie works in the travel business, and Michel suggests the industry's future lies in sex tourism: an idea she and her business partner enthusiastically and disastrously prosecute.
This, however, is only the bare bones of the experience. Bieito and his designer, Alfons Flores, create a stunning image of the corrupt tackiness of our commerce-driven world. We are confronted by a revolving metallic structure filled with peep-show cabinets dispensing porn. A vast ocelot-skin piano dominates the stage, symbolising an all-pervading cosmetic vulgarity. In addition to the seven performers, one of whom is a naked woman, there is an inflatable rubber doll that comes into constant service.
What are we to make of this? Some may see it as an embodiment of Houellebecq's alleged misogyny. Others may seize indignantly on Michel's climactic expression of his Islamophobia. To me, the production, like a more poetic Shopping and Fucking, is an attack on a culture that devalues relationships and reduces sex to a commercial transaction. Far from endorsing sex tourism, it suggests it is the brutal logic of a capitalist principle that argues, "If you don't move forward, you're dead."
Bieito brilliantly creates a world of melancholy decadence. If I have any qualm, it is that his production is almost too moralistic. Even the brief redemptive interlude of romantic happiness that Michel and Valerie enjoy is used to demonstrate their isolation: she writhes alone in a leather chair while he copulates with the rubber doll. But what Bieito and his wonderful actors - led by Juan Echanove as Michel and Marta Domingo as Valerie - evoke is a sad world in which even lust is subject to market forces. I cannot share Houellebecq's blanket pessimism. But it is expertly realised by Bieito and his team, who offer a haunting elegy for the spiritual bankruptcy of our consumerist culture.
· Until September 2. Box office: 0131-473 2000
