Memory Cells

How does drama deal with trauma? The ancient Greeks had it easy: set it in a mythological time, distant enough to soften the blow but familiar enough to make the point. When Euripides wanted to comment on his city's vicious imperialism, he used the Trojan War. Result: classic drama that can be restaged every time a democracy decides to have a little military adventure against nasty foreigners.

Memory Cells, despite some disingenious programme notes, looks at rape. Echoing the Josef Fritzl case, it pitches rapist and victim in an underground cellar. Relentlessly exposing the self-justifications and disorders in both characters, it denies any real hope of redemption, and its reversed time structure gradually leads back to the horror itself.

Director Sam Rowe blocks the dialogue as a series of almost iconic poses, while Tam Dean Burn slightly overplays the villainy, although this is made relevant as the action unfolds. This uncomfortable, surreal presentation collides with Colin O'Hara's naturalistic set and The Arches' dungeon atmosphere. It is disturbing and brutal, the easy assumption that theatre ought to be entertaining undermined by the savagery of the story.

Louise Welsh's script veers towards the poetic - Tam Dean Burn gets some nice lines about beauty in ugliness - but this is not always satisfying. That the tension between theatricality and the grim meathook reality of sexual assault remains unresolved is appropriate, yet Memory Cells feels restrained. It refuses either release or salvation, a deliberately dark and disturbing experience.