Terminus
****

New Electric Ballroom
**

Traverse
Edinburgh Festival

There's a strong strand of Irish writing in this year's Traverse programme, with new work from two of that country's best contemporary dramatists. Yet whereas Enda Walsh in The New Electric Ballroom takes us back to the sort of meagre village set-up we have seen many times before and have no particular desire to revisit, Mark O'Rowe's Terminus sends us swooping and soaring around contemporary Dublin.

I'm not usually one for fantastical tales of bodies falling from cranes being saved by flying souls that have been sold to the Devil but O'Rowe's trick is to ground his supernatural twists and turns in a story that is gratifyingly human and quotidian.

Three lonely people - lost souls, in every sense - use interlinking monologues to recount the extraordinary, overlapping events of one never-to-be-repeated night of passion, murder, retribution and, just possibly, as dawn creeps over the horizon, reconciliation.

Far too many monologues are moribund efforts that should be consumed - if at all - in book form but Terminus, directed by O'Rowe, is compellingly, deliciously theatrical. His free-rhyming verse is the ideal form for conveying this heightened sense of reality and he takes us off on some lovely flights of words.

Occasionally he trips himself up with an awkward phrase - "bitter titter" won't ever work - but the trio of actors move easily on to better lines. Eileen Walsh is especially fine as a young woman who thinks dropping her microwave meal on the floor is as messy as the evening is going to get.

Enda Walsh has far less success directing his own piece but he's given himself much less to work with. Three isolated sisters - one 20 years younger than the others, hinting at dark secrets in a Catholic shame culture - endlessly relive their tales of teenage dreams shattered long ago, backstage at the eponymous pleasure palace. It all looks intriguing, with an institutional grey set lightened only by a pink cake on the table and pink shoes on a shelf, but isn't.

The touches of the surreal sit awkwardly and the lengthy, repetitive speeches are alienating. It seems as though there might be a glimmer of hope for youngest sister Ada (ethereal Catherine Walsh) but then Enda Walsh dashes even this in a crushingly miserable ending. Skip this stop and head straight for the Terminus instead.

Both until 24 August (0131 228 1404, www.traverse.co.uk).