Theatre reviews: Class Enemy | Looking At Tazieh | The Caravan | Motherland | In Conflict

Class Enemy, Royal Lyceum
****

Looking At Tazieh, The Hub
***

The Caravan, Pleasance
****

Motherland, Underbelly
****

In Conflict, Assembly Rooms
***

WHEN I first saw CLASS ENEMY in Belgrade, I had no trouble accepting the young actors of Sarajevo's East West Theatre Company as the alienated teenagers of Nigel Williams' play. But seeing the performance again in the Edinburgh International Festival only a week after the first night of Ontroerend Goed's Once And For All, a play featuring real teenagers, I find myself making an extra effort to believe in the stage fiction. Now the actors seem not quite gangly enough and just a little too mature.

Fortunately, they are also very good and, just as you accept the hyper-real intervention of a number of hip-hop raps, so you come to believe these children really are the no-hope inmates of a dead-end school. This is all to the good because the question of our belief is crucial to the production's success.

Although it is based on a 30-year-old play about a socially dysfunctional Britain, this Class Enemy (run ended) has an urgent message about life for young people in today's Bosnia. This classroom, where even teachers fear to tread, symbolises a society on the brink of violent disorder as a result of the deprivations of civil war in the 1990s. "Even Allah has turned his back on us," says one of the students, as they try to cling on to anything that will give them a sense of worth.

The girl who draws a chalk geranium on her top lives in hope of salvation, but she is fighting against a tide of nihilism that suggests this neglected generation will find solace only in religious extremism and political violence. It's a troubling warning, but if Pasovic and his company are even halfway right, this is a truth that we need to know about.

Sometimes the truth is harder to communicate. How, for example, are those of us with no experience of the Shia denomination of Islam to understand the cultural meaning of the tazieh, a religious passion play? The solution in the EIF's LOOKING AT TAZIEH (run ended), a film by Abbas Kiarostami, is to focus on the audience rather more than the event itself. On either side of a small screen showing the tazieh are much bigger screens, one showing the women, the other showing the men in a segregated audience. None of us is going to become an expert in the ancient tazieh tradition in a single sitting, but by watching the audience – beautifully shot in black-and-white close-ups – we get a strong, hypnotic flavour of the performance's emotional and religious impact.

Another way of dealing with the truth is to go straight to the source material. In the past decade, there has been a flurry of plays based on interviews, diaries and transcripts, a phenomenon that satisfies our desire, in the era of reality TV, to understand the world in a seemingly unmediated way. There is plenty of verbatim theatre around this year and, although none rises to the level of Deep Cut (reviewed two weeks ago), which is both political and passionate, all of them appeal to our love of human stories.

One of the gentlest of these is THE CARAVAN which, despite being just half an hour long and showing a particularly British kind of reserve, takes a lingering hold on the imagination. There is the novelty value of seeing a show in a caravan, of course, but what you remember are the ordinary tales of displacement faithfully reproduced by the company from interviews with people who were forced out of their homes by last year's floods in England. There is a play to be written about the kind of land mismanagement that makes flooding more likely, but The Caravan has little concern for that. Rather, it shows us ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and gains a quiet power through its restraint.

Something similar can be said of MOTHERLAND, which puts the voices of soldiers' girlfriends and mothers on stage. Based on interviews with women in the north-east of England, it gives us an insight into the lives of those left behind when the fighting starts. It happens to be about Iraq, but it could be about any war – which is its strength and weakness. The low-key performances allow us to hear unfamiliar voices, but the lack of political analysis means we are saddened, not angered.

The same is true of IN CONFLICT which shows Iraq from the soldiers' point of view, whether their experience has left them defiantly patriotic or profoundly disillusioned. The stories told by this young American company are individually absorbing – unless you've been to war, it's a revelation to hear what it's really like – but there is not enough sense of progression to give dramatic shape to a long show and certainly nothing here that Black Watch didn't do more forcibly. v

• The Caravan, Pleasance, today and tomorrow, 12.30pm, 1.10pm, 1.50pm, 2.30pm, 3.10pm, 3.50pm. Motherland, The Underbelly, today and tomorrow, 7.05pm. In Conflict, Assembly, today and tomorrow, 2pm