SINNER, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

The pub bomb that wrecked a gay-friendly bar in Soho in 1999 was not only a cowardly and tragic attack on social freedom, it exposed the weaknesses preyed upon and exploited by power-minded bigots. It would be easy to knock out an emotional piece of documentary theatre about such an event. Instead, Stan Won't Dance's Liam Steel and Rob Tannion have taken Ben Payne's already provocative script and turned it into an urgent and edgy whirligig of pleasure and pain.

Martin and Robert are two men who walk into a bar with one thing on their mind. As they lunge, recoil, pitch, thrust and parry about and around each other, their hidden yearnings — for intimacy, or even just to be noticed — give way to a mutual consent which consumes not just personal space but minds and bodies too.

Subtitled 'A Self-destructive Solo for Two Men', the sense of devil-and-angels dualities is at times reminiscent of Performance, Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg's post-modern film noir of similarly styled London outsiderdom, in which a gangster and a rock star adopt each other's personalities to the extent of eventually cancelling each other out. Here, though, a prevailing 21st century metrosexuality has, on the surface at least, moved out of shadows vividly realised by lighting designer Ian Scott.

Co-directed and performed by Steel and Tannion, if metaphors are over-egged with biblical significance as nails rain down upon the couple before tethering one to a makeshift crucifix, sartorially, at least, there's a tight T-shirted humour to the trio's Christ-like fixations in an otherwise bleak and oblique waltz-cum-cruise through the wreckage of the dark side of closing time.