From Russia with farce

THEATRE REVIEW: Playing The Victim at the Traverse Theatre

There are no contemporary playwrights with a weirder take on life today than the two authors of Playing the Victim. But then the young Presnyakov Brothers were born in Siberia and beam an unsurprisingly disenchanted gaze upon a rickety Russia.

Their new, gripping black farce, which is rooted in the depressed and sometimes depressing world of Absurd Theatre, begins close to reality and spirals into exuberant fantasy as it describes a Russia thick with bureaucracy, corruption and dogged hopelessness. A state of absurdity reigns unchallenged and envelops the action like an old-fashioned fog. And Richard Wilson's beautiful production for the Royal Court and Told By An Idiot, with the smooth scene changes choreographed in stylised slow-motion, captures the right sense of strangeness.

The artful 30-year-old antihero, Valya, skilfully played by Andrew Scott with an unrelenting air of dead-pan neutrality that leaves his character shrouded in ambiguity, is a bright, university drop-out, living with his simple parents. As if to emphasise his alienation he has chosen a full-time career of playing the victim. This masochistic choice is not what it seems, since he is simply required to play the corpse in police video reconstructions of murders, with a conservative police inspector strutting his crooked stuff.

Valya, impersonating a young woman knifed in a riverside lavatory by her lover, a man who drowned his mistress in a swimming pool and one who slaughtered his old school friend in a Japanese restaurant, comes up against rigid, regimented Russians. These people, particularly Amanda Lawrence's wonderfully grotesque waitress in Japanese costume, teeter on the verge of the ridiculous but are still grounded in reality.

The darkly comic scenes reach an absurd climax when Paul Hunter's investigating inspector himself dies and Valya is required to impersonate two corpses at the same time. The denouement may slip too far into jocular ridiculousness. But the Presnyakov Brothers' capture a disturbing sense of Russia and Russians beset by anarchy and alienation.

Until 23 August. Box office: 0131 228 1404. Royal Court from 1 September to 4 October. Box office: 020 7565 5000.