Fourth Monkey's Grimm Tales: Hansel and Gretel

There are few tautologies as infuriating as 'dark fairytale'. All fairytales are dark. They deal in witches, chopped off toes and century-long comas. They're meant to deliver a bedtime shiver to keep kids quiet, reminding them of the far darker horrors that lurk beyond early nights and unwanted baths. But the Grimm horrors of Hansel and Gretel aren't enough for director and writer Toby Clarke, who's coated the tale in a liquorice-sticky smear of Tim Burton stylings and mindless provocation.

Twin narrators, tittering in gothic Lolita garb, tell us that they've spiced up the story to make it less boring. This much is true. Bafflingly, Clarke has decided to shoehorn in vignettes from radical drama theorist Antonin Artaud's time in an asylum. He screams and raves in a blood spattered straitjacket, in a blindingly dated image of mental illness.

They might drag Artaud into it, but the company's attempt to shock is incoherent, rather than avantgarde. The huge cast of drama students gurn and hiss in an unsophisticated story theatre approach. Several spend the entire performance clutching branches to impersonate a forest, in what can't be an entirely fulfilling Edinburgh Fringe experience.

The tortuous thicket of a plot also makes the witch into a lesbian paedophile who keeps Gretel as a sex slave. Clarke's attempt to crowbar in a link between a sweetie-house dwelling hag and the Dolphin Square child abuse scandal is especially foul, but it's not the only part of this sickly production that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.