Bima and Bramati, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Characters lost in a tangle of endless chat

To read that the playwright Tord Akerbaek has a degree in human-machine communication is no surprise. In his latest work, Bima and Bramati, there are just two humans, inseparable from a supporting cast of medical machinery of dialysis, oxygen, iron lung, etc.

To read that the playwright Tord Akerbaek has a degree in human-machine communication is no surprise. In his latest work, Bima and Bramati, there are just two humans, inseparable from a supporting cast of medical machinery of dialysis, oxygen, iron lung, etc.

With a Spaghetti Junction of tubes and cables contained in mermaid-like tails conjoined at a fuse-box, Bima and Bramati hover helplessly on wooden swings, fellow amputees thrust together for company and survival. The bullying Bima (Nicholas Hope) and the querulous Bramati (Maureen Allan) pass the time with verbal jousting, alienated in this clinical no man's land with no sense of time or place, pondering the possibility that the world has come to an end.

We know nothing of their previous lives, but we do know that the future looks decidedly grey. As bleak as Beckett, in fact, but with fewer interesting layers. They embark on an existential journey and Hope and Allan invest every detail of preparation - squirrelling away sugar lumps, protection from frostbite, scaling the heights of the threshold to the corridor outside - with a touching, excited eagerness and trepidation.

Presented at the Traverse by Det Apne Teatre in Oslo, in a translation by Grace Barnes, it is a radio play, not theatre. As Bima puts it: "For someone with so little to say, you manage to talk endlessly."