Interiors

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ***** Dinner-party hell has long been the stuff of dramatic dissection. All those social niceties and trying too hard with intimates and strangers alike; all that anticipation, expectation and inevitable anticlimax it can only end in everyday disaster. Vanishing Point's latest dark imagining may take a peek into the uneasy warmth of such a scenario, but Matthew Lenton's production takes it somewhere altogether more loving.

Maurice Maeterlinck's 1894 play Interior was the starting point of this major international co-production with the Traverse and Napoli Teatro Festival. Reimagined as a contemporary soiree in a bleak Nordic mid-winter, the occasion becomes a matter of life and death in a tender and haunting elegy sprinkled with sly impressionistic wit.

The trick here is that, while the audience spies on the party-pieces through the large windows of the house, all the audience hears (other than a cheesy mix-tape) is the voice of a young woman commenting on the action from outside (a little like the dead narrator of Desperate Housewives).

From the young girl beautifying herself before the mirror to her grandfather playing host, the glimmer of community that comes with each guest's unspoken anxieties is a tragi-comic glimpse into the absurd minutiae of lives foretold by Elicia Daley's little-match-girl-like chronicler.

Lenton's Scots/Italian ensembles of eight actors offer an exquisite fusion of heightened behaviour married to a gorgeously languid atmosphere of sanctuary created by Finn Ross's projections, Kai Fischer's lighting and Alasdair Macrae's melancholy piano score. Combined, a poignantly beautiful thumbnail sketch of human lives in motion is the result. As the lights dim once the party's over, the world outside remains cruel enough - so the only thing to do is dream on.