Festival review: We Are Chechens!; Summerhall (Venue 26)

That the young performers are so thickly accented is as obstructive for a UK audience as the fact it’s performed in both English and Polish. This isn’t a problem; if anything it’s an advantage. The most telling aspects here are the physical ones, the intense, 12-strong tidal flurries of angry, fearful people who charge en masse around the stage or the sombre, haunting monologues which open a brief crack in the strata of Chechnyan national trauma.

It’s a meditation upon the universal language of suffering, beginning with a cacophonous lament of frenzied shouting, gunfire bangs, aggressive shoving and the pleading pulling of hair, the cast discarding their 1990s-vintage shell suit tops and trampling them into the ground as they might cast aside the clothes of the fallen. A boisterous wedding party of graceful, foot-stamping and mesmerising Baltic dancing is played out around a lone bride who collapses into tears. One man describes the slaughter of an entire town by Russian forces; a young woman powerfully describes her rape and her slight but important act of physical resistance to it.

Then there comes the period after war, the stabilisation, and that brings with it new trauma. Has Chechnya progressed? A visiting beauty pageant line-up thinks so; why, one of them saw a Starbucks in Grozny. “You’re really developing!” she gushes. Projected onto a screen of discarded white shirts nailed to the wall, the country’s notorious leader Ramzan Kadyrov dances joyously on the pitch at his football club Terek Grozny, and a young man intones the death mantra of a living people: “everyone who has lived before lives in me, lives through me... my life does not belong to me.” It’s an epitaph to an honest and deeply powerful piece of physical theatre.

Rating: ****

Until today, 7:15pm.