Back in my newly adopted favourite café at the Fruitmarket Gallery. Today’s show. Oh my. As a director and sometime performer, I don’t like to be wilfully cruel. There’s surely some good in everything. I guess just sometimes it’s harder to see than others.

The Devoured is a cheerful piece which recounted the tale of one (Jewish) family struggling to survive in Nazi Germany in the Holocaust. Let me try and do it justice here.

So three or four of us are shambling around outside the venue, the Pleasance Over The Road. Unfortunate that it took me a trip to the Pleasance, then the Pleasance Dome, then the Pleasance again to procure a ticket and work out where it was. But I got there.

We get in. Small black stage surrounded by black curtains. 8 rows of x8 seats. A nice size I’m thinking. Maybe ten people take seats in all. As we enter the auditorium, one man is on stage in a spotlight, wearing the signature grey-striped pyjamas, running and running and shouting out over and over “run for the beast run for the beast”. It took us maybe five minutes to get in and get settled. The house lights go down. He runs and shouts for perhaps another three to four minutes. The same cry, the same run, obviously sweating pretty seriously by now. He’s not a young man so you fear a little for him.

He slumps to the ground eventually and starts recounting the night of the bombing. He, his mother, his child, his wife, sheltered in a cellar, not knowing what was going on outside. They were scared, scared, fucking scared. Eventually he decides he’ll have to go outside and see what’s going on. At this point, he was more scared, scared, fucking scared. He prowled around a bit, found out nothing, saw some of the city burning, burning, fucking burning. He saw a German who looked at him with hate in his eyes and he was scared, scared, fucking scared but he did nothing, nothing, fucking nothing. He went back to his family in the cellar. His child asked him what was going on and would they be alright and he lied, lied, fucking lied and said everything would be alright.

As Ismene would say, you get the picture here.

And so it went on. Things went from bad to worse for the family. They were decamped to the ghetto. His mother was humiliated by the SS in front of everyone. He was scared, scared, fucking scared. They had nowhere to live, they had no food, but he did nothing, nothing, fucking nothing. Most of them time he shouted. And sweated. He dropped his voice at one or two points. Both of which were easier to listen to – although obviously didn’t display the same rage at the situation that he was so eager to convey.

They were decamped to a concentration camp via a barbed wire encrusted train. They were starving, scared, tired but he did nothing, nothing etc. They got to the camp. Men and women and children were lined up separately. He got put in the healthy man’s queue, waited about a bit and was then told by a big Polish prisoner (really?) that their wives and children were dead, dead, fucking dead. He worked, worked, fucking worked during the day because it took his mind off things and at night, he screamed, screamed, fucking screamed. But still did nothing nothing, again etc.

Luckily, about here, it finished. Having established that he was ashamed and a coward, accompanied by a lot more repetition and swearing, the actor disappeared between the curtains at the back of the stage. The spotlight dimmed. Everyone stared slightly stupidly at the stage.

Eventually it emerged that he was not coming back. Everyone got up and left.

I approached the guy in the lighting box (who must have had to sit through that for how many long, long, fucking days) and said I was so sorry that no-one had clapped, the actor had worked really hard (a euphemistic compliment – Siobhan would be proud). The technical boy who was a venue member of staff as well as being just a boy said I shouldn’t worry, no-one ever clapped, it wasn’t really appropriate. So the poor actor rants and sweats (his pyjamas were sodden by the end) for fifty minutes every day and never gets a sniff of a clap.

I wondered if this was a clever part of the point that he was making about collective guilt. I waited and waited to see if anyone else would clap. No-one else did. So I felt stupid striking up with a clap – even though it was mostly out of pity.

Now the poor man is part of – I say part of but actually, he’s writer, director, founder of the company and actor – a group that specialises in performing new work that draws attention to human rights issues. And god love him and them. What a worthy ambition. What a worthy cause. What an honourable and well-intentioned thing to do.

And certainly the rage and impotence that must have been experienced in bucketloads by the poor Jews were feelingly conveyed. The exhaustion, the abuse, the haphazard nature of the abuse, the misery, the outrage, the injustice.

But in his shouty fervour, he left me feeling vaguely irritated, vaguely amused, vaguely bored (at one point, I thought I might count the “nothing, nothing, fkin nothings” which seemed to be his hallmark statement). I did come away thinking that I mustn’t be so shallow. But what lazy writing. Way too much swearing I thought, even given my very high foul language thresholds. And given that I snickered half way down the street as I walked away from the venue, I’m not convinced that, for me at least, he achieved all that he wished to with this piece.

Anyway, go and see it for yourselves. It could be that I'm just a shallow bitch.