Pardon / In Cuffs (Traverse, Edinburgh)

The first exceptional show at the Traverse this year is this hypnotic, disturbing series of encounters between a prosecutor and assorted criminals on a small revolving stage played out by three Flemish actors from SKaGeN, a company formed by graduates of the Antwerp Conservatory headed by Dora van der Groen and Ivo van Hove.

What is striking about the interrogations is that, as in the great inquisition scene in Dostoevsky, it's a case of judgement v criminal with no intervening legal process or argument for the defence.

And for most of the 80 minutes, the authority figure is a woman (Clara van den Broek) in a peachy silk dress and killer red shoes, the criminals alternated by Korneel Hamers and Valentijn Dhaenens – one blonde, creased, washed up, desperate; the other fleshy, long-haired and bespectacled, glowering – who could indeed have stepped from the pages of a Russian novelist, or a play by Gogol.

As the stage revolves, so the arguments accumulate and the dynamics between the actors shift about and vary, and each actor takes turns to sit at a small, wheezy harmonium keyboard to play snatches of accompaniment, hymns and Beethoven; the men, sometimes prostrate, emit long harmonic growls of prayer and despair.

After the submissions of the guilt of petty thieves, coke addicts, swindlers, drunks and wife-beaters, the tables are turned viciously when the female prosecutor goes on the attack. Everyone's guilty of something. You might be a migrant, HIV positive, a seducer, a licence dodger. You scrawl your name on a wooden table and, if you die, you may levitate…

Pardon / In Cuffs continues at the Traverse Theatre until 30 August