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the tree of knowledge, traverse, edinburgh

ENLIGHTENMENT comes in many forms in Jo Clifford's parable-like fantasia, in which David Hume and Adam Smith wake up in the 21st century, where the results of their philosophies are in freefall.

Their world in Ben Harrison's wide-open production is designer Ali Maclaurin's brutalist breezeblock rotunda on which blueprints for assorted tomorrows are projected, artless and without centre.

Their guide is a working-class woman from Fife called Eve, who, arguably like all of us, began life with a false sense of optimism for a future that never quite became the brave new world it was supposed to. As Smith discovers when he embraces new social freedoms with the zeal of a convert, in a corupted free market economy, even sex is flogged off on the cheap, cold and loveless as it goes.