Iona Firouzabadi
posted 23 August 2006

It's a dark, dark night somewhere in Northern Europe. A thunderstorm is brewing and three nuns are laying the table for their meagre dinner. But all is not well. The convent is not a picture of domestic bliss. In fact, it's more like a picture of the dysfunctional home-life of Shakespeare's Weird Sisters.

More gothic and twisted than a night out in Camden, this is a grim tale of self-interest, malice, false belief and murder. But it's also very funny. The players speak a crazy made-up language smattered with English and German words and Nordic inflections. But this Babel-speak is remarkable in expressing both sense and emotion, from the vivacious to the vicious.

As in last year's productions The Hospital and The Department, the Jo Stromgren Kompani makes institutionalised bullying the central theme of The Convent. The relationship between the three nuns is founded on fear and distrust. Before dinner has begun, each tries to secretly snaffle the bread that is meant for all. In this simple, mock-Biblical sequence the characters of the three religious sisters are sketched out like those of familial siblings. The oldest is akin to a concentration camp guard, the middle one is put upon and victimised and the youngest is manipulative. The physical humour is as witty as the portrait is unpleasant. But comedy and darkness grow in symbiotic relation as the night wears on. This is a play that makes stigmata amusing.

The cast perform a remarkable feat of mime through their physicality and nonsense language. Wearing make-up that even a mortician might think twice about, they convey malignancy and pathos with equal ability. The cast's polyphonic singing is expertly controlled, beautiful and vital to the creation of the archaic atmosphere of The Convent. Even though the nuns have their own radio, this is a place immersed in a gothic vision of the Dark Ages. One of many glorious moments that meld terror and hilarity comes when the oldest nun raises her arms in an appeal to God (or is it Satan?): lightening shudders the darkness and you really do expect Frankenstein's monster to awaken. The lighting design is almost a fourth character in the play. In an allusion to Trevor Nunn's 1976 Macbeth the play reaches its climax with the bold minimalism of a single light bulb illuminating the stage. By the time you emerge from St Stephen's you'll be startled to find an August afternoon sun shining over Edinburgh.

Till 28 August 2006.