Theatre review: THEATREExcessC nova (Venue 145)

IN A FLAT in Dublin, a well-spoken but oddly manic young woman called Isla rails at vengeful length about a well-known budget airline and the indignities they’ve just heaped upon her.

RATING: * * * *

Her brother Joe listens with an amused smile and then tells her he’s in the process of becoming a woman. Where their parents are accepting of Joe’s choice, she just can’t reconcile this revelation. “They don’t even have abortions in Ireland,” she protests.

While not quite as singularly stunning as Crypted, the other of two plays writer and director Freddy Syborn’s Negative Capability company has brought to Edinburgh this year, Excess is still a commanding and unexpected piece from a truly gifted young theatremaker. It takes on a tricky subject and invests it with not just living, breathing humanity, but also an innate sense of the inexplicable contradictions people represent.

While Isla seeks to define what Joe is and should be for herself, she’s the one who enjoys brutal sado-masochistic sex with a man in a rubber gimp mask (performed by puppets, thankfully). Yet she cries when her plummy friends chat about how wonderful their babies are. At every turn Syborn, the writing partner of comedian Jack Whitehall, refuses his characters easy pigeonholing.

The play is dark and intelligently amusing, and filled with excellent performances: from Ollie Smith as down-to-earth Joe, “the only MC at Eton”; from Florence Keith-Roach as Isla, filled with just enough hyperactive energy to suggest bipolarity; and from Syborn himself as Joe’s drag queen partner Samantha Carnage, another character whose actions defy appearance or expectation.

Until 26 August. Today 5:25pm.