On paper, it all looked so promising: Richard Wilson directing Told By an Idiot in a play by the Presnyakov brothers who wrote the sensational Terrorism. In practice, it turns out to be hard going, partly because of the play itself, and partly because the company's Gogolian style adds needless oddity to an already bizarre text.
The charm of the Presnyakovs' Terrorism was that the theme emerged from seemingly disparate narrative strands. Here the same basic idea is simply hammered into the ground.
The central conceit is that an alienated university dropout gets a job playing the victim in police crime reconstructions. So we see him as the stand-in for a crime passionel in a public toilet, an underwater swimming pool killing and a double murder in a Muscovite Japanese restaurant in which even the investigating cop dies from a poisoned fish.
The best one can say is that the format allows the Presnyakovs, in Sasha Dugdale's translation, to expose the manifold contradictions of Russian life: the mix of exotic theme restaurants with galloping xenophobia, the blend of obsessive hygiene with gastronomic and sanitary squalor, the willingness to go to any masochistic lengths to avoid real work. The hero's determination to vaccinate himself against death by becoming a substitute corpse may also be an oblique comment on the Russian character.
But none of this justifies the play's repetitive structure or the joke's surrender to the law of diminishing returns. And matters are not helped by Told By an Idiot's style of physical grotesquerie which compounds the play's self-conscious surreality instead of contradicting it. The notable exception is Andrew Scott who lends the professional victim exactly the right lugubrious gravity. But Paul Hunter as an over-zealous cop, Hayley Carmichael as a video-obsessed constable and Amanda Lawrence as a singing oriental waitress overplay their hand and even the wily Wilson is eventually defeated by a play that feels like Orton's Loot without the concomitant wit.
· Until August 23. Box office: 0131-228 1404.
