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.
Gerry Mulgrew's Hume and Neil McKinven's Smith first come to life on comfy chairs, as if beamed down to some celestial salon in Edinburgh New Town. Joanna Tope's Eve appears like a guru in a 1960s style chair suspended from the sky by an umbilical cord that connects her to the universe. Seemingly in purgatory, no-one is afraid to acknowledge the audience, who sit in judgment of a series of exchanges that move from accepted truisms to wise confessionals about the power that comes from people opening up to one another.
Arriving somewhat presciently during what looks dangerously like capitalism's last gasp, Clifford's meditation starts off with an irrepressable waggishness grabbed hold of by a pop-eyed McKinven. By the end, however, it's become a slow-burning totem of universal hope in a messed-up world.
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