Camille: La Fille Du Cirque, The Spiegel Garden, Edinburgh

"Don't be frightened, it's only a song," breathes Camille O'Sullivan, the former Dublin architect turned cabaret chanteuse, with an inscrutable smile playing across her vermilion lips and a sultry look that could burn toast from 50 paces.

The flustered middle-aged man in the front row of a packed, steamy Spiegeltent is not so sure. From the moment she enters, sinuously draping herself around him while singing Nick Cave's bitter, scarifying "God Is in the House", it's immediately obvious that she treats every song as an intense emotional journey.

Of Irish and French descent, Camille inhabits the emotive, romantic end of cabaret's spectrum. She begins, cool and composed in a black cocktail dress with blood-red sash around her waist, and ends, as she puts it, as if she's been dragged through a hedge backwards, dishevelled and wild-eyed, a bottle of red wine downed, her make-up streaked with genuine tears.

Cabaret is all about light and shade, and Camille's vocals range from a bluesy sandpaper rasp to a soaring purity. A highly emotional artist, she moves from insouciance to anguish with such an outpouring of passion you can't resist being drawn into her web.

Singing in French and English, her version of Brel's "Chanson des Vieux Amants", about ageing lovers, is as touching as I have heard, and her ragged vocal attack in Brel's brutal "Next" is close to Alex Harvey's unassailable rock adaptation.

Contemporary cabaret and burlesque are becoming a tired cliché, but Camille's impassioned delivery distils all its transgressive sexual nature. A cabaret classicist, she wears the regulation fishnets and, midway through, a flaming red dress, singing songs of seduction and tearful vengeance with a purring laugh and shots of sly Irish humour.

But her impressively eclectic choice of songs allows quiet ballads to mix with howling abandon. Standing stock still, her take on "Are You The One?", Cave's yearning prayer to an imaginary love, has a stark spectral beauty .

The only misjudged moment is an encore of Brel's anti-war song "Marique", one of the emotional highlights of a highly charged set almost drowned out by the late night hordes in the Spiegel Garden's adjacent alfresco bar.

As she leads her band out to a standing ovation, we are released from her spell. But with this hypnotic opening, Camille has already staked her claim as the dark queen of the long, wine soaked Edinburgh nights.

To 27 August, not tonight or 21 (0131-667 8940)