There is a moment near the beginning of this astonishing dance theatre piece from Czech company Farm in the Cave when you fear you're going to get 60 minutes of eastern European folksiness. But that fear is blown away in a show that is infused not just with the polyphonic music and ritual songs of the Slavic people, but also with their history and pain: our word "slave" comes from Sclavi, the Latin word for Slav. In fact, it's not folksy at all: it's downright brutal. It begins in clatter and cacophony and ends in silence. This is Beckett rendered into movement and song.
The song is that of the eternal outsider, the emigrant who dreams of a better life and seeks out a promised land. It is the story of thousands of years of migration told through a single individual: a man who, through choosing migration, becomes an exile to his own people, even to himself.
The piece has a strange hallucinatory quality. In the shadows, figures step in each other's footprints; fights break out as if in slow motion; rape is commonplace; everyone is jockeying for position, as if in some desperate game of musical chairs where nobody wants to be the one left without a safe place.
As befits a show about being an outsider, Sclavi is something shattered and fragmented, always happening on the jagged edges rather than in the centre.
· Until August 28. Box office: 0131-558 3853.
