What Remains @ Traverse

Grid Iron are Scotland's ever reliable promenade experts. Their new production What Remains is an affectionate pastiche of gothic conventions inspired by its core members passion for the genre, and by solo performer David Paul Jones's own interests as a musician.

Jones plays pianist Gilbert K Pendergast, master of an elitist Conservatoire, a place perfectly realised in the sinister sterility of Edinburgh Medical School's Anatomy Department. Jones's tortured artist is a faithful homage to the classic lonely, obsessive and cloistered monomaniac, a tribute to everyone from Faustus to Heathcliff to Hannibal Lecter.

As the audience move through the space,  they are gently framed as applicants to the school, detectives or ghostly observers, and the story of Prenderghast's obsession, his loss, his cruelty and ultimately his madness, is communicated through suggestive set-pieces rather than direct narration. At one point we are tucked up in bed and instructed by a disembodied HAL style voice to fill out application forms full of unsettling questions. At others, we explore a disturbing installation, or are serenaded by Prendergast from a balcony, and the range here really showcases Grid Iron's effortless mastery of the promenade format.

There's never been a shortage of gothic fan fiction and it's difficult to say what What Remains adds or says that's new. It's stylish, competent, mildly tongue in cheek fun, but whether you experience this as tasteful and restrained or dull and uninspired may depend on your temperament.

Ultimately the question they seemed to me to be asking was "What Remains for us to say?" and if it is intended as an autobiographical statement, then Jones' comically histrionic depiction of himself is certainly a charming one - the artist tortured by his own unsurpassable genius.