REVIEWS

VICTORY - CHOICES IN REACTION

Moray House Union (venue 168), 37 Holyrood Rd (0131-556 0102), 12.15pm; to 2 Sept

Jersey-based Carpace's production of Howard Barker's Victory captures the playwright's obscene ambivalence. His precise profanity and scatological imagery relies on gut reaction rather than intellectual response. The company prod their spectators around Barker's version of Charles II's Restoration, an amoral landscape governed by instant gratification. The characters humiliate themselves in a search for base truth. The result is a blood-bath, but one that ends in a type of tranquillity as babies are born and miscarried and human remains returned home to rest. Barker may be an acquired taste but this company doesn't flinch from its rotting core.

AT A REASONABLE HOUR