Life's simple pleasures

The Traverse Theatre has launched this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a play that presses all the buttons of contemporary political obsession, from Islamic terrorists and disaffected working-class youth through to political spin and corrupt coke-snorting policemen.

Yet Henry Adam's drama is no earnest diatribe, wearing its relevance like an albatross, but a subtly delineated and irreverent comedy about an idiot savant called Nigel, who thinks that September 11th involved a nasty collision with the Empire State Building.

Adam - whose last play, Among Unbroken Hearts, shared the 2002 Meyer Whitworth Award with Gregory Burke's Gagarin Way - has declared: "If Snoop Dogg ever wrote an Ealing Comedy, this might be it." It makes one reflect that while Ealing legend Alastair Sim might well have recognised - and perhaps played - Mrs Mac, the tough old lady who lives in the council flat upstairs from Nigel, and chatters incessantly to her dead husband's photo, he would have been at a loss when it came to decoding the mentally ill Nigel, whose rapper-style delivery, enjoyment of Class A drugs, and child-like absorption in TV culture makes him very much a creature of the 21st century.

The fact that Nigel comes across as a fully rounded and believable character, rather than some Ali G-style rip-off, is due in no small part to Fraser Ayres's comically affecting performance. This play deals with issues of power through the prism of a man who is completely powerless, and Ayres maintains the essential balance between humour and credibility, whether he is dealing with Joe Duttine's sadistic target-hungry police officer, or investigating the disappearance of his Pakistani halfbrother to Yemen.

On balance this play may seem too lightweight to qualify as a major new work. Nonetheless, Roxana Silbert's fine production introduces a star in Ayres.

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