Dark Matter

In a hidden garden in a non-descript street off Leith Walk, shadows flicker. Unearthly mist swirls around a knotted tree. Lights catch the undercarriage of plants, throwing dark shapes across the grass. A young girl enters wearing nothing but an oversized coat. She is here to meet her married lover. If the mise-en-scène doesn’t give it away, the portentous soundtrack confirms that all is not well in this patch of Edinburgh.

And for the first three quarters of this site-specific show, this is the most engaging thing about it. This one-woman show is big on atmosphere, small on plot.

There is little in the girl's story—her parents’ deaths, her mental breakdown, her relationship with a married man—to explain why the audience is sitting in someone’s back garden wearing headphones and jet black ponchos. Once the initial thrill of the space fades, the artfully elliptical script and impressive acting could easily have worked in a theatre. Is this theatre’s equivalent of 3D technology in cinema – shiny bells and whistles that add nothing to the storytelling?

And then the twist comes. The half-formed sentences and theatrical artifice become hauntingly concrete. Her story is not the kind we initially thought. Dark matters indeed.

The ultimate revelation just about justifies all that goes before it. It saves the show from the ignominy of being upstaged by swirling dry ice. In the end everything combines to create a spooky, spine-tingling confection of death, love and darkness that leaves you wary of shadows on the way home.