Theatre

This collaboration between Glaswegian company Vanishing Point and a seven-piece Kosovan band is a tremendous, thrilling fusion of differences –  theatre and music, northern and eastern European attitudes. The show is a ‘dystopian musical adventure’ set in Scotland ten years from now. The country has become a paradise for the rich, safe in their gated communities, and a hell for the poor. When Patrick Doogan, a young member of the ‘underemployed’, returns to his home town of Edinburgh, he doesn’t like what he finds – wholesale gentrification of Leith Walk, his dad’s old watering hole selling smoothies to suits, the King William V Memorial Super Hospital running a lottery for the sick and uninsured to gain admission.

The narrative that follows –  with its revolutionary movement headed by Patrick’s dad –  is succinct, but isn’t going to lose JG Ballard any sleep, for all its grim vision of the future. There are jokes, too, to lighten the noir-ish mood (‘Clooney was a pish actor. Great president, though’; and check the name of that hospital again).

But what makes the show so gripping and, eventually, rewarding, is the care and skill with which the music and the drama have been worked together, for which director Matthew Lenton, designer Kai Fischer and musical director Alasdair Macrae can take equal credit.

The band, made up of amplified acoustic instruments – guitar, violin, cello, drums and tarabuks (African drums) – plus electric bass and keyboard, provide gentle ambient backing, building to some wonderfully wrenching, reeling folk music. The two actors, Sandy Grierson (as Patrick) and Rosalind Sydney (as old Mr Doogan and various others), are equally excellent, Grierson’s easy intimacy with the audience contrasting amusingly with the impassive faces of the band behind him. Best of all, the ending cleverly converts the rather portentous plot into a sly two-fingered salute to the smoking ban, and a father-son reconciliation that, what with all that emotion-drenched music, moved me more than I ever could have expected.