By MARK FISHER

Published: 21/8/2010

If Henrik Ibsen had been alive in the era of Guantanamo, he'd surely have written a play every bit as scintillating as Lidless.

Like the Norwegian playwright, who explored the way events from the past have a nasty habit of catching up on the present, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, in a tremendously accomplished debut, considers the moral legacy of American foreign policy in the most emotionally devastating way. And, from Steven Atkinson's hot-house production, a superb play is given a stunningly good production.

Lidless is not the first play about 21st-century interrogation to appear on the Fringe. A couple of years ago, they were all the rage. But it goes one step further than, say, Judith Thompson's My Pyramids, which was about Private Lynndie England's escapades in Abu Ghraib, by bringing the trauma back home.

Penny Layden plays Alice, a former Guantanamo interrogator who, after taking the policy of "invasion of space by a female" to its ultimate conclusion, has opted for a quiet life as a florist in her native Texas. She and her husband, a former heroin user, have agreed never to talk about their old selves if, indeed, Alice can remember any of it.

Her memory blackouts are symbolic of society's collective amnesia, an amnesia no longer possible once Anthony Bunsee's Bashir, a Guantanamo inmate, shows up seeking not so much revenge as resolution.

In Greer Dale-Foulkes' 14-year-old Rhiannon, whose casual cruelty to orange-coloured goldfish recalls her mother's abuse of orange-clad prisoners, the playwright shows how even repressed violence is passed on to the next generation. The more the family try to keep the lid on their past, the more dysfunctional they become.

That Bashir appears to be in search of spiritual salvation, rather than a continuation of the conflict, makes their behaviour look only more neurotic.

Performed in a white box, as if we too are an interrogation cell, the production by High Tide is fluent, gripping and immediate. The acting is uniformly excellent, notable especially because of Cowhig's portrayal of women, not men, as the ferocious ones. Reframing global politics on a domestic scale, she turns headline news into a modern-day tragedy.

© The Scotsman 2010