Edinburgh Festival '99: Fringe Theatre - Cooking With Elvis

Assembly Rooms, Venue 3, 4.30pm, 0131-226 2428, to 30 Aug

THE SEDUCTION scene could have come straight out of Blue Peter. Stuart stands there, with nothing between him and his deflowering but a pair of grey underpants and a tortoise held up in a passively defiant protection of his manhood. The woman is Barbie-doll blonde - mutton dressed as a toy-marketing phenomenon - enjoying his unease as she ogles him with a look she has prepared earlier.

The atmosphere is typical of the mixture of false innocence and dark farce that permeate Lee Hall's play. Kitsch here is not merely a jaunt down a post-modern memory lane, it becomes a way of exploring a dysfunctional suburban family and laying bare its tragedies. At 14 Jill entertains few fantasies beyond her next Black Forest gateau, and forms a mountainous contrast with her bulimic sexaholic mother. The fantasy figure of Elvis reflects their mutual abuse of food, as well as giving resonance to a deeper family tragedy: the paralysis of Jill's father in a car accident, which ended his part-time career as an Elvis impersonator.

Stuart's seduction by Jill's mother is the catalyst for revealing the loneliness and alienation each character conceals behind their day-to- day dealings with each other. As familial tensions grow tighter, Cooking With Elvis combines outrageously absurd scenes with simultaneously sensitive character sketches, and if you never imagined that wobbling male buttocks and chocolate cake could also represent an anguished cry for help, you have a lot to learn from this play.

Trevor Fox, as the hapless Stuart, resists overplaying the lack of imagination and stupidity his role demands, so providing a wonderfully pathetic foil to mother and daughter's schemes. Sharon Percy as Jill and Charlie Hardwick as Mam spin an acidly convincing mother/daughter rivalry, while Jo Caffrey attains a paradoxical sequin-studded dignity as the paralysed Dad who metamorphoses into Elvis, with an appropriate song for every twist in the family's painful psychology.

Cooking With Elvis started life off as a radio play, but Live Theatre's production buzzes with both surreal visual gags and verbal one-liners. Darkly intelligent and piercingly funny it has to be one of Edinburgh's hits.