Orpheus and Eurydice is a great story and great stories stand retelling. Which is just as well since this one has been told more than enough in this year’s festival, from Monteverdi’s opera to Stravinsky’s ballet score, to Trisha Brown’s Canto/Pianto. There were other versions on the Fringe, too. Even the Tiger Lillies had a go.

This version, from the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard, near Boston, is the most self-consciously modern. It repositions Orpheus as a present-day rock star (not, as they admit, an original idea but a perfectly sensible one) and Eurydice as a not very good poet. They meet when the taxi he is in runs her over. Part of the conceit is that Eurydice finds that, having got to the Underworld and realised just how uninspired her writing was, she does not actually want to return. She deliberately removes the blindfold Orpheus has put on to stop himself looking back.

But whereas the Mabou Mines Dollhouse production, also in Edinburgh this week, represents everything that is best about American avant-garde theatre — radical, brilliant and fearless — this represents everything that is worst: contrary, self-indulgent and narcissistic.

The tell-tale signs begin early; the pseudo-industrial set (a couple of heavy-looking steel beams and a scaffolding tower), the scratchy, meaningless video projections, the gratuitously naked female, the doubling of roles (the third of the three performers plays both Orpheus’s manager and Persephone, the Queen of the Dead without bothering to alter his costume or voice). But even before that you would think that someone might have paused before giving the role of Orpheus to a man whose singing voice might most kindly be described as loud. Surely, his whole schtick — guitar god or harp hero — is that his music is sweet enough to charm the birds from the trees.

Ah, but no, you see, because he is the composer as well, the one with the Orphic gift. Rinde Eckert has a big, prize-winning reputation in the US. You might have hoped, watching him constantly fiddling with his guitar, that he could have come up with some music beyond the flashes of noisy modernist rock, some vaguely minimalist bits of recitative and other borrowings that rarely rise above the level of the banal for the otherwise perfectly adequate onstage four-piece band.

The one moment where this travesty partially redeems itself is when Eurydice (played with great dignity but, one senses, also with long-suffering patience by Suzan Hanson) catches up with Orpheus and makes him look at her. The two hold the moment, in each others’ arms, for a long, long time in total (blissful) silence until they slowly, agonisingly but still silently, have to disengage. It is but a brief respite.

Box office 0131-473 2000. Final performance tonight