Fringe: Theatre: Seizer

Edinburgh Festival 97

Theatre Seizer

At last, a show that's louder, bolder and nastier than its flyer claims and, unsurprisingly, it comes from Boilerhouse, who last year brought us the Irvine Welsh collaboration, Headstate. A brazenly slick rendering of Spencer Hazel's Mad Max-meets-Kilroy script, Seizer offers an epic 21st-century son et lumiere: careering spotlights, armoured cars, video projections and techno music pound the senses in an 18th-century quad. Tam Dean Burn's Seizer has accidentally bumped off the "guests" of his Oprah-style show, so he turns his attentions to revealing his Gladiator- like assistants' darkest secrets for our delectation. There's evidently an angry intelligence at work here. Hazel's Roman Circus idiom neatly caricatures the decadence of tabloid TV, while the faces of humiliated subjects shown on a 30ft-high screen question the voyeurism demanded by the medium. It may line up a sitting target, but Seizer delivers its coup de grace with a gratifying, state-of-the-art relish.

To Aug 25 (not 15,16,23). The Quad, Venue 192. (0131-220 5606) Mike Higgins