With Edinburgh bursting at the seams with Bank Holiday revellers, and the Fringe comedy circuit reaching its loud-mouthed climax, the International Festival's decision to administer a dose of Samuel Beckett seems perfectly judged.
This mini-season consists of pieces that have all been seen before as the Gate Theatre, Dublin and its director Michael Colgan continue their ongoing exploration of every aspect of the playwright's work. Each is an adaptation for stage of a piece originally written for another medium, and the first is Eh Joe, Beckett's first television play, from 1965.
On stage, in film director Atom Egoyan's production (first premiered in 2006, with the same cast), we see the great Michael Gambon, closing the doors and windows of an airless, yellow room then sitting, almost immobile upon his bed, in profile. He never speaks. Instead disembodied words, spoken by Penelope Wilton, float through his head.
We hear her voice, and then watch, projected onto a screen at the front of the stage, Gambon's face, as he reacts to the words running through his head. Scored with lines, with great, puffy bags under his eyes, his expression runs the gamut from sadness to contempt, to fear, to weariness, to brief flickers of pleasure as Wilton tells the story
of Joe, a man unkind to the world, who throttled the voices in his head to whispers, and who drove a woman - "the green one...the narrow one" - to suicide by his indifference.
The words are extraordinary, falling like petals in Wilton's powerful, poetic reading, which both perfectly conforms to the play's description of her having a voice like "flint glass" and finds remarkable subtlety in every phrase. Simply the many ways she finds to murmur "eh, Joe" are heavy with meaning.
Gambon's face is just as subtle, thoughts passing through his shining eyes, emotions sweeping his ravaged visage like wind through a corn field, so delicate you only catch them as they have gone Only once does he move a graceful hand, sweeping it gently across his cheek.
It is an impressive piece of reaction. Yet for all its wonder, this 30-minute mood-setter doesn't quite feel enough. In this festival context, I don't quite understand why it wasn't twinned with another of the short Beckett plays we are seeing on other nights.
And for all his controlled brilliance, it wasn't Gambon's face I saw when I left the theatre; it was Wilton's voice I heard. The absent is somehow more powerful than the present. Which, come to think of it, might be exactly what Beckett wanted.
In repertory until August 31. Tickets: 0131 473 2000; eif.co.uk