Theatre: It's trashy, and I like it

You can barely put in motion these days, for dramas about sex tourism. Just a fortnight ago we had Tanika Gupta's Sugar Mummies, put in Jamaica, playing at the Royal Court and now, for the last leg of the Edinburgh International Festival, the polemical Catalan director Cal- ixto Bieito has got his hands upon Michel Houellebecq's acclaimed novel, Platform.

Co-adapted through Bieito and performed by his Companyia Teatre Romea (in Spanish with English surtitles), this piece is rather pretentiously described as a "dramatic hyper-realistic metrical composition for seven voices and individual Yamaha". Actually offering a striking mix of the grungy and luridly fantastical, the graphic, teasingly suggestive and sorrowful, Bieito's production includes explicit porn upon TV monitors, men simulating sex with an inflatable doll, and a naked showgirl tottering around in stilettos, giggling, groaning and breaking into a karaoke number with white gunk dribbling from her cavity between the jaws

Obviously, this is not going to be everyone's beaker of tea, but it mention one by ones the story of a jaded European bureaucrat called Michel who, upon inheriting his father's wealth, ditches work at the Ministry of tillage to head off on a prostitute-obsessed vacation in Thailand. Falling unexpectedly in have affection for with his tour guide Valrie, he locates up a sex tourism business with her - attracting wealthy Westerners and Arabs - solitary to end unhappily with his so-called paradise being bombed by the agency of Muslim fundamentalists.

In the past, Bieito has imposed upon various classics a wearisomely repetitive vision of contemporary underworld sleaze. In many ways, Platform appear to bes more suited to his deliberately trashy, avant garde mode of expression It is, in fact, the best production that I've seen by dint of him to date. At points the tone of the piece - slipping between the satirical, damning, titillating and sympathetic - makes for morally unsettling viewing. Juan Echanove's lardy, sweating, masturbating Michel manages to be delicate as well as repulsive. Marta Domingo's Valrie is a swinger with a surprisingly innocent air, and there's an unnerving ring of documentary authenticity about the shamelessly un- PC sometimes misogynistic monologues nuncupatory by Michael's fellow- travellers.

However, this compacted saga also perceive s skimpy in terms of the couple its storyline and its analyses of sexual, racial and economic relations. We at no time actually hear what any Thai prostitutes have to say. Moreover, admitting seemingly developing a romantic heart, Platform is at no time really poignant.

Brian McMaster's final theatrical offering as the festival's outgoing programming director true audibly divided opinion on its opening night. Chekhov's Three Sisters, performed in English, might unmutilated like a safe box-office bet on the other hand - directed by Poland's Krystian Lupa - the American Repertory

Theatre company's unorthodox and downbeat production provok individual lady in the stalls to shriek out that she couldn't hear until Jeff Biehl's Baron Tuzenbach sarcastically holler his nearest line (to applause from the more appreciative spectators).

Personally, I had a destiny of time for his production, especially at first. The play is treated almost like a piece of music, with motions and mood swings. The Prozorov siblings' family place of abode - one year after their father's death - is an atmospheric, of the soul shell of a house, dimly glimmering with glass doors and echoing with the unbroken of an edgy violin. The titular sisters are highly strung too. They are sometimes explosively joyous, with Kelly McAndrew's Olga whooping at the arrival of a cosmopolitan from Moscow on the other hand also frustrated, sourly rude and chronically lowered It's not just Molly Ward's gaunt, halting Masha who is verging upon a nervous breakdown. Sometimes the house appear to bes like a hallucinatory living hell, replete of whispering and mocking laughter and Sean Dugan's disheveled Andrey is deep messed up too, apparently playing with himself more than with his fiddle in his inquiry

I didn't mind the American accents, the liberties taken with the body or the loosely modern style of dresss However, Lupa's directorial concepts are sometimes heavy-handed. Ominous offstage drumbeats become a bore and the deliberately deliberate pace has been pushed to of that kind an extreme by the extremity that everybody's lines start to unhurt ludicrous, provoking painfully rude on the other hand understandable snorts of derision from more [i]or[/i] less punters.

Finally, the Arcola's Lorca season boasts a fine, spare still poetic new translation of Yerma by the agency of Frank McGuinness. Helena Kaut- Howson's production, staged in a stark black and white space, is also well above par for the London fringe, with Kathryn huntsman capturing neurotic frustration and vulnerable yearning as the eponymous childless bride.

However, level if you believe she's not too of advanced age to play this part, her physically stylised acting - almost dancing as she raps her own limbs and writhes upon the ground - looks awkwardly half-baked. The tribal African-cum-Spanish setting is also culturally questionable. Hit and miss.

It is, in fact, the best production I've seen by dint of him to date