Edinburgh’s official festival opened its drama programme with just the kind of production it was designed to present — international, innovative and excitingly provocative.

Australia’s leading Back to Back Theatre company, made up of actors who are perceived to have intellectual disabilities, work with artistic director Bruce Gladwyn over months on group-improvised subjects and themes to present work “giving voice to social and political issues that speak to all people.”

The action centres on a wildly imaginative play-within-a-play in which Ganesh the Hindu elephant deity is sent to save the world from ever-increasing tyranny and threatened destruction by retrieving the swastika symbol from the nazis.

A visiting theatre director with a manic creative vision of what he intends to achieve is determined to organise a cast resistant to being manipulated. The rehearsal lurches from crisis to crisis as he cajoles and bullies, resulting in moments of high comedy and moving tension.

Inter-group conflicts merge into combined resentment at their treatment by their tutor. 

The production brings together the politics of power, both in personal relations and in world history, with the disturbing mix of reality and illusion that is the essence of theatre.

As the actors, at first appearing to be finding it difficult to understand what they are about, stop the action to question the ethics of treating the Holocaust as theatre — at one point Dr Mengele expresses his enthusiastic interest in experimenting on his elephant-headed prisoner — we realise that this apparent creative chaos has been meticulously honed.

At one point the director accuses an imaginary audience — that is in fact ourselves — with being present only to “see a freak show,” to indulge in a kind of social pornography. 

In fact this group of social outsiders bring a powerful independence to play, each drawing on aspects of their own disability to challenge their teacher and, in the process, their audience.

Gladwin claims: “We want to liberate people from conditioned response and from the familiar.”

We leave the theatre just as disillusioned as the director, but we will surely have had our eyes and minds opened.

Rating: 5/5