The Container

The Psychic Detective

Parked on the southern edge of the Spiegel Garden, the wildly popular festival watering hole at the centre of the University of Edinburgh, are the back ends of two lorries.

One is the venue for The Psychic Detective and the other for Clare Bayley’s play, The Container, in which one lorry becomes the very vehicle in which a group of refugees are attempting to get to the UK. The necessarily small audience is cooped up in there with them.

As site-specific theatre goes, it doesn’t get much more real than this. It is dark, cold, uncomfortable, claustrophobic and, with the rain lashing down outside on the day I went, implacably hostile. And that’s just for 55 minutes, without the smell and other privations with which the thousands who try to get into the country this way spend days, even weeks.

Bayley’s simple but effective play goes more or less where you would expect it to. The disparate group — African, Turks, Afghans — have nothing in common and do not trust each other. Some may be asylum seekers; others just determined economic migrants. They are at the mercy of the unscrupulous “agent” who appears to demand more money, which some of them simply do not have. Will they help each other?

Lit entirely by torches, and brilliantly performed, it could have been even more disturbing if the production team had reinforced the sense of being on the road with more sound effects and more unexplained noises and activity outside.

About the only thing the two lorries have in common is that the audience is approximately the same size. But in The Psychic Detective the truck has been tricked out into a tiny auditorium with tiered seating, The “proscenium” takes the fourth wall conceit literally; we see the action through a window, complete with Venetian blind.

The blind is important because no film noir would be complete without one; all those slats of light. And a film noir, perfect in almost every detail, is what is played out. The psychic bit comes from the idea that the film is the fantasy of a drowning contemporary detective thrown into the harbour of a small town in Scotland.

Benchtours, the company behind this, have created their theatre truck to enable them to tour their technically sophisticated work. Playing with film and live action is a regular feature and this is undeniably brilliantly done. But the idea at the centre of it is really quite small. Whereas, in Container, a far less sophisticated presentation packs a far harder punch.

— Both until August 27; Box office 0870745 3083. The Psychic Detective tours to London and Scotland until the end of September.