A delight for classic lovers

Sophocles's Oedipus Rex has been described as the most perfectly structured play ever written, yet it is worth - once in a while - asking exactly what the modern world can take from this story about a man who unwittingly kills his father and sleeps with his mother.

For the ancient Greeks, obsessed with logic and the power of rationality, it was a potent investigation of how Fate could smash through humans' attempts to control the world around them - and Liz Lochhead brings such preoccupations bang up to date with a trilogy that emphasises how political leaders can shake nations with their self-destructive tendencies.

Thebans - carefully sculpted with material taken from Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus - tells the story of Oedipus, Jocasta, and Antigone, in a production which has military resonances from the start. Director Graham McLaren has decked the chorus out in masks to emphasise the risk not only of moral, but chemical, contamination, and when Peter Collins's Blair-like Oedipus enters, he wears a white military-style jacket and a gun.

The beauty of Thebans is its ability to take scenes that theatregoers will have witnessed, and reinvest them with a freshness that allows their emotions to leap off the stage. Collins's Oedipus is as authoritative and rational as he has been in any stage incarnation, but what

is so striking is the way in which his benevolence erupts into violent impatience as he questions an elderly Tiresias or a shepherd withholding information that will damn his king.

Here, it is those twitches of despotism, as much as his honesty and rationality, that condemn him - and to emphasise the unproductivity of authoritarian violence, the second part of the trilogy, dealing with his sons Polyneikes and Eteokles, sees Polyneikes dressed as a Palestinian forced off his land by a dictatorial brother. Jennifer Black's spikily distraught Jokasta, who, contrary to Sophocles, lives beyond Oedipus's blinding, tellingly agonises over how individuals she loves could cause the death of thousands.

Lucianne McEvoy's passionate Antigone brings a humanitarian end to this fascinating reinterpretation. A classics-lovers' treat.

Until 24 August. Box office: 0131 226 2428.