When fauna fights back

Enter an albino raccoon, a prairie dog, a rooster and a weasel followed by a ram and a deer. By the time a big, black grizzly lumbers into view, you realise that Shakespeare's most famous stage direction, "Exit, pursued by a bear," has nothing on this menacing menagerie, for this is where the wild things are.

We are defintely not on the coast of Bohemia, for instance, in some apocalyptic take on A Winter's Tale. Instead, we're in the dystopian corporate world of Convenience Foods, where there are Post-Its, desks, filing cabinets, a photocopier, a microwave and a couple of wage slaves. It's a human jungle that's been invaded by lots of critters, not to mention rudely rampant plantlife. Nature's biting back.

This is the setting for the weird and wonderful Doomsday clown show, Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, which has its European premiere as part of the Traverse programme at St Stephen's, the erstwhile Aurora Nova venue. Staged by Geoff Sobelle - who brought the 2005 Fringe First-winning, hot-ticket show All Wear Bowlers to Edinburgh - and Charlotte Ford, Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl is an extraordinary physical, feral piece, which I saw being workshopped recently at Philadelphia's Swarthmore College.

Ford and Sobelle - life partners as well as professional collaborators - are Philadelphia-based actors, stalwarts of the Pig Iron company, and have won acclaim for the "inspired lunacy" of their craft as clowns, which one American critic noted has audiences "both helpless with laughter and totally unnerved". Sobelle, a muscular version of Buster Keaton, got the idea for the piece, which had a brief site-specific run in an abandoned pharmacy at Philadelphia's Live Arts Festival last September, when he went camping alone in Colorado three years ago. There, he heard the call of the wild.

"I saw this deer -- not that exact deer," he laughs, pointing to a stuffed beast in the rehearsal room, which seems oddly real but fake, dead but alive. "This buck I saw was at the other end of a meadow. There I was, surrounded by stuff, all the equipment that we take to survive in the wilderness. It seemed ridiculous to bring our 'civilisation' into the natural world. That buck was so peaceful. At that moment, I thought, 'Wow, it's like seeing the hand of God!'

"I couldn't stop thinking how myopic we are, how we're always so busy and completely forget that mountains and valleys are forming, tectonic plates shifting very, very slowly. Yet in a heartbeat, we'll be gone. It also made me think how narcissistic the environmental movement is, because what we're really worrying about is ourselves, not the Earth, which is actually going to be fine."

Ford, from a family of hunters, with a father who shoots animals then eats every bit of them, already knew nature is red in tooth and claw. She's long had a fascination with stories of humans being attacked by wild animals in urban settings. In the play she tells the ghastly story of a Californian family who raised a chimpanzee instead of a son.

"Everything was fine; then something strange and utterly horrifying happened, though not what you might think. It truly is the worst story I ever heard," she shudders.

True stories of tigers prowling into Manhattan apartments, or of the boy who climbed into the polar bear enclosure at the Bronx Zoo and was eaten, haunt her. "They show how stupid humans can be," she sighs. "Then we started investigating what's happened at Chernobyl, where they've found that humans, because of their long lifespan, eventually develop tumours. But if you've a shorter lifespan, you're fine. So all these animals that had been virtually extinct have come back and flourished, despite radiation.

"Now, it's this gorgeous wilderness like Angkor Wat (a temple complex in Cambodia] and the ruins of civilisation. A new Eden, but one that's tainted and toxic. We set the show in a food company that's hijacked by the natural world to show that eventually the animals will come back to devour us, so I guess it's a Kafkaesque tale of human extinction," she explains.

Sobelle interjects: "Suddenly, though, in light of the BP oil spill, the show's become even more timely."

Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl may be a two-hander but it has a large cast of stuffed animals, birds and fish. Originally the couple wanted to use puppetry, but on holiday they discovered, via craigslist, an eccentric couple in Miami, who were selling up their collection of taxidermy at "bargain basement prices".

"They had so much! Animals four deep against every wall in their house," marvels Ford.

"Like a full-size bison!" says Sobelle.

"We didn't notice the stuffed lion or the four ferocious, half-wolf dogs that were real and roaming around the house, until our fourth visit," Ford says. For less than $1,000 they got a ram, a deer, several birds, half an antelope, an albino raccoon, a bobcat, a beaver, a prairie dog, a few rabbits and a "homemade" cat, some 17 pieces in all.

"We also bought more taxidermy on eBay," says Ford. "We've become emotionally attached to all of them. They've names like Ramikins and Peter Rabbit. Some are totally moth-infested - disgusting!" In performance, the beasts are on remote control cars and whizz around, giving a terrifying illusion of vigour, while there's a sensational finale with a spectacular coup de thtre. "There are some very big effects in this show, although it's all done with string and lots of threads. It's poor theatre in every sense, not CGI," says Sobelle, who was once a magician. "I'm used to pulling rabbits out of hats and sawing ladies in half, although getting them back together again wasn't always easy. "So, yeah, it's all done with mirrors - then we send in the clowns."

• Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl is at Traverse @ St Stephen's, Edinburgh, 7pm, until 28 August.