TGSTAN'S appearance at the 2004 Edinburgh International Festival introduced audiences to a casual, close-up and personal aesthetic this Flemish company had fashioned in an image of pared-down super-realism that featured wryly knowing-nods to those watching.
For Lucia Melts, the new piece they performed then, with its flip, throwaway cheek, worked a treat.
Applying such methods to a seventeenth-century French classic by Racine, as they have done here, is a different matter.
Based on real-life events which occurred in the Roman empire, both Emperor Titus and his Black Sea ally, Antiochus, have fallen for the exotic charms of Judean queen Berenice. When in Rome, alas, affairs of state dictate that marriage to a foreigner is a no no. Far from doing an Edward and Mrs Simpson, Titus is all too prepared to martyr himself to public duty over personal happiness.
Antiochus, too, forsakes passion for macho pride, leaving Berenice in a strong enough position to wash her hands of them both.
In other hands, such an affair might have ended up an overblown piece of emotional hysteria.
With the audience perched on stools in Tramway's otherwise bare, strip-lit interior, with the company's four actors moving between them, TG Stan's low-key intimacy gives a power and a weight to what follows.
Sporadic, almost imperceptible glances to the audience seek approval, confirmation or conspiracy. It is like being a best friend sitting in on an argument between intimates in public. All the accompanying walkouts, backtracking and scene-making cannot help but make one feel inadvertently complicit with the consequences of other people's actions.
There are times when such a juxtaposition between this cruel post-modern style and Racine's heightened language jars. But this can be forgiven for the sheer thrilling intensity of watching two people break up less than two inches away from your nose.
Cathy Naden and Frank Vercruyssen as Berenice and Titus are frighteningly intense in a piece that screams commitment on every level.
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