Edinburgh Festival 97 / The Cocktail Party King's Theatre

International festival

Philip Franks has set himself a challenge with his revival of The Cocktail Party for the Royal Lyceum Company. By any standards, TS Eliot's 1949 verse drama (premiered at the third Edinburgh Festival) is an eccentric mix: Forties drawing-room comedy, veiled Greek myth, High Anglican mysticism, and masochistic expiations of guilt. With its portrait of a crumbling marriage and its supernatural stranger who turns up at a party uninvited to shake up everybody's lives, The Cocktail Party glances back to the plays of JB Priestley and forward to those of Harold Pinter. Yet it has never achieved the popularity of either. Audiences long ago embraced Pinter as the acceptable face of modernism, while Stephen Daldry's money-spinning production of An Inspector Calls has proved that Priestley's brand of pessimistic humanism still has appeal. By contrast, bits of The Cocktail Party appear as remote and strange as an Inca incantation.

Well, if the play is a test of a director's powers of reinvention, Franks passes with flying colours. At 195 minutes, this is a long evening in the theatre, but it really feels like one hour. Franks teases the humour out of the text, assisted by an outstanding central performance from David Bamber as Edward Chamberlayne, the barrister who descends into a personal hell as his marriage falls apart.

A natural comedian, Bamber (the oily Mr Collins in BBCtv's Pride and Prejudice) brings an uncustomary lightness to the role while never losing sight of his character's self-obsession. Of all the cast, he's the one who copes best with Eliot's verse, effortlessly disguising its slippery rhythms, making the artifice of the language apparent only when he wants to hammer home a point. When he spars with his wife Lavinia (the excellent Suzanne Burden) there's a terrible rawness to their conversation.

That is the greatest strength of this staging: it sidelines Eliot's off- putting metaphysics (Edward's lover, Cynthia, achieved a state of grace by being crucified on an ant hill) to bring out the play's human side. Edward and Lavinia's marriage becomes a real marriage, with real suffering, not just a theoretical testing ground for Eliot's speculations about salvation and redemption.

To Saturday. Booking: 0131-220 4349

Adrian Turpin