Carthage must be destroyed, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

If international politics were run by more drunkards, as one character in Alan Wilkins' new play suggests, war would not be necessary. This is one of a whole stream of epigrams punched out of the mouths of Rome's most powerful men in a bloodily intelligent piece of imagined history. Using the real-life backdrop of Rome's third assault on Carthage between 149 and 146BC, its obvious metaphor for contemporary war-mongering becomes a serious exploration of the eroticism of power, the like of which hasn't been seen since Howard Barker's grander works.