Theatre reviews: The Sun Also Rises | Teenage Riot | Decky Does a Bronco | Sub Rosa | Cargo | Bette | Cavette

To say the answer provided by New York's Elevator Repair Service was unconventional is an understatement. Having no interest in staging a regular adaptation of The Sun Also Rises, director John Collins challenged himself to use every last word of Ernest Hemingway's breakthrough novel, plus selected passages of first-person narration from Jake Barnes, a war-wounded US foreign correspondent in Paris.

There's no question the result tested the audience's patience. With a running time close to four hours, it was not a play for anyone with a short attention span. Even those who were warm to it - and I include myself in this - had to admit it went on a bit.

I suspect the production might have been better appreciated if we had seen the company's last two shows, a word-for-word staging of The Great Gatsby (running at nearly seven hours) and a similar treatment of the first chapter of The Sound And The Fury. Seeing The Sun Also Rises in isolation, it was too easy to wonder why Collins had set himself - and his audience - the curious challenge of treating a whole book as if it were a play. It might have made more sense if we'd seen it as part of a continuing experiment.

Much like the experience of reading the novel, however, the experiment justified itself the longer it went on. The more we were immersed in this world of decadent and directionless expats drinking their way through Europe, from the wine bars of Paris to the fiesta in Pamplona, the more we became caught up in their empty, narcissistic lives and the more plangent seemed the impossible love affair between Barnes and the papery beauty Lady Brett Astley.

Even so, the production was at its best when it broke free of the straight dialogue - superbly acted though it was - and found more dynamic ways to deal with the material. There was a great hip-swivelling dance to a piece of 1960s French pop, a monologue delivered like a stand-up comedy routine and a description of a bull fight treated like a radio sports commentary. Towards the end, when the tables that had supported the endless bottles and glasses turned into charging bulls, Collins seemed to suggest these characters had been living in their own kind of bull ring. My disappointment was that there weren't more such moments.

When it comes to telling stories in unusual ways, Belgium's Ontroerend Goed is ahead of the pack. This is the company that caused a sensation last year with Internal, a piece of theatrical speed-dating that got right under your skin.

The year before that, it gave us Once And For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen, a piece of deconstructed youth theatre that joyously celebrated the energy of adolescence. Now with Teenage Riot, a sequel to that play, it reinvents the wheel once more by placing the adolescent actors in a large box and getting them to communicate with us by means of video projections broadcast from inside.

What follows is not a conventional narrative, but a collage of hormone-fuelled jokes, commentaries, fights, confessions and flights of fancy that approximate the angsty side of teenage experience. It's all acne, insecurity, sexuality and bravado, eventually bursting forth on to the stage to confront the adult audience with a bolshie tirade about compromise and complacency. You probably won't feel guilty as charged, but you might well feel discomfited by the frankness and exuberance of an extraordinary show.

Looking across the range of Scottish theatre companies on the Fringe, out again in impressive numbers thanks to the Scottish government's Expo Fund, what is striking is not just the overall high quality of work, but also the breadth of storytelling techniques being put to use. This week, I met a German student who was trying to come to terms with what she regarded as the boring naturalism of London theatre compared with the more stylised productions she was used to seeing at home. I don't think she'd have that problem with any of the Scottish plays on show.

That is most obviously the case in three non-theatre shows. In Decky Does A Bronco - now on tour in England - Grid Iron presents Douglas Maxwell's play outdoors in a real playpark with a set of swings acting as the symbolic centre of the characters' worlds. Compared with this wise and funny vision of peer pressure among young boys, Iron Oxide's Cargo, which finished its run last night, is a narratively slight piece of street theatre that tells you nothing about its supposed theme of migration, but Douglas Irvine's outdoor production compensates with striking images of rippling ocean waves and a barricaded island state, not to mention some fabulous live music.

Indoors, but wandering all over the Masonic rooms of Hill Street Theatre, David Leddy's Sub Rosa has proved itself a resilient enough piece of writing to flourish in Edinburgh almost as effectively as it did on its first appearance in the backstage crannies of Glasgow's Citizens Theatre. Here the individual rooms are less resonant - although they have a secretive character of their own - but that is to the advantage of Leddy's script, an unpleasant gothic tale of sexual abuse in a Victorian music-hall troupe, which gains in poetic intensity and in the sense of us eavesdropping on confidential and incriminating truths that the characters would have been wiser to keep to themselves.

There's surely no creepier show on the Fringe.

Different again is Bette/Cavette which, by rights, shouldn't qualify as a play at all, certainly not one that holds the attention as powerfully as it does. Grant Smeaton's two-hander is a word-for-word reproduction - complete with ad breaks - of an interview between Dick Cavette, an American TV chat show host, and a 63-year-old Bette Davis, played by a cross-dressing Smeaton with all the Hollywood charisma he can muster. Somehow the combination of star personality, eager-to-please host and period detail gives the small-screen encounter its own kind of theatricality.

Vox Motus is a company that has theatricality at its core but sometimes at the expense of having anything substantial to say. The enjoyment of The Not So Fatal Death Of Grandpa Fredo lies not particularly in its true-life tale of a resident who scandalises his backwater American town by freezing his grandfather's corpse. This is a mildly amusing story, but it has no wider implications, no metaphorical dimension, nothing to tell us about life as it is lived today.

Rather, the pleasure is in the clever techniques the company uses to tell the tale, whether it is the live video projections, the comic songs or the multi-purpose box of delights that forms the set. The result is a show that is both entertaining and empty, that flashes brightly but fades fast. As with Slick, the company's last Fringe hit, the show gets an enthusiastic audience response, but I'm looking forward to Vox Motus applying the same skilful techniques to more resonant material. v

The Sun Also Rises, Royal Lyceum, run ended; Teenage Riot, Traverse, until Saturday; Decky Does A Bronco, Traverse at Scotland Yard, run ended; David Leddy's Sub Rosa, Hill Street Theatre, until 30 August (not Tuesday); Cargo, Leith Links, until today, 9.15pm; Bette/Cavette, Zoo Roxy, until 30 August; The Not So Fatal Death of Grandpa Fredo, Traverse, until 29 August (not Wednesday)

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, 22 August, 2010

Theatre reviews: The Sun Also Rises | Teenage Riot | Decky Does a Bronco | Sub Rosa | Cargo | Bette | Cavette | The Not So Fatal Death Of Grandpa Fredo