One Two, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Mark Fischer
Friday 08 August 2003 19:00 EDT
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Theatre has a long history of muscling in on rock'n'roll territory. Think David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel (still working with Robert Lepage) and, most recently, the Flaming Lips. But it rarely happens the other way around. Rock'n'roll intrudes on theatre only in the most insipid musical tribute vehicles. Which is what makes Suspect Culture's One Two such a novel and vibrant experiment.

What we get are 10 instrumentals by Nick Powell, performed on guitar, keyboards and double bass: hypnotic loops of sound, something like a more rocky Penguin Café Orchestra. Director Graham Eatough overlays and intersperses this with the musings of two typically undemonstrative actors (Sharon Smith and Faroque Khan), telling number-related stories about bingo, aliens and computers. The mathematical principles governing musical form spill out into the elliptical text.

Like all theatrical rock, it's a little bit pretentious and, like much free form-devised drama, it runs out of ideas three-quarters of the way through. But the music is mesmeric and the event as a whole is exactly the kind of adventurous overturning of form that we should be seeing at this theatre.

Venue 15, 10.15pm (1hr 30mins) to 23 Aug, not today and 18 August (0131-228 1404)

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