Torben Betts makes his audience work. Happily, he makes work seem like fun. So when his characters spew out their dense and intense dialogue, he makes us sit forward and pay attention. There is something arresting and exhilarating about his language, which ranges from the profane to the choral, juxtaposing the bombastic with the banal in a way that is funny and provocative.
The setting of The Unconquered is a suburban house in some parallel UK, where a people's revolt is in full flow and the old order is being upturned. The teenage daughter of the family (Pauline Turner) is an overly earnest leftwinger who ticks all the correct smash-the-system boxes, from vegetarianism to feminism, yet is oddly disconnected from the real revolution taking place on the streets. Her parents (Jane Guernier and Kevin McMonagle) are instinctive conservatives, and just as incapable of engaging with the upheaval outside. When a rapacious soldier (Nigel Barrett) storms in to their house, he brings the violence indoors, though his subsequent reinvention as a go-getting capitalist is arguably more violent still.
Muriel Romanes' production, a premiere for her Stellar Quines company, is performed with a blink- and-you'll-miss-it ferocity. The cast's cartoon-like directness finds a physical parallel in Keith McIntyre's two-dimensional black-and-white set, all bold pencil lines, cardboard props and distorted angles. Together, they create a surreal world of heightened poetry and raw emotion.
It is exactly the kind of demanding, theatrical and adventurous show you'd want to see on a UK tour. Yet for all its sense of urgency, Betts' play seems less than the sum of its parts. It is partly that the fearless energy of his language deserves a more challenging satirical target than bourgeois complacency; and partly that, for a political play, it's too easy to imagine that these grotesque characters have nothing to do with us.
· On tour until March 31. Box office: 0131-248 4847
