If Britain is as fucked as playwright Philip Stokes claims it is - and there's little reason to disbelieve him - it's trailing some bright trash in its wake. Heroin(e) for Breakfast - winner of the Holden Street Theatre's Edinburgh Award (first prize, presumably, a season at Adelaide's Holden St Theatre) - is a theatrical firework thrown up from the pit of Britain's self delusion. It treads carelessly where angels, quite rightly, fear to go, traversing comedy, meta-theatrical comment, trash culture and tragedy; it dares a cliche here, a flood of bathos there, and never quite trips itself up. In other words, it's rough, it's alive, and it's not to be missed.


For the first five minutes or so it seems to be a frenetic sex comedy set in a squalid flat, where the three inhabitants tup each other like dogs - and with, it seems, about as much feeling. Tommy (Craig McArdle) is smart, arrogant, and inclined to believe he is God's gift to women (or possibly God himself). More, he boasts that he is the embodiment of self-control and libertine freedom: he acts as he chooses without reference to anything but his own desire. McArdle's performance is grotesquely clownish, with an angular physicality that is hilarious, repellent and strangely charismatic.

And he talks. Boy, does he talk. It is a kind of aphasia, as if he can't stop in case he hears what he is saying. At the other end of his endless flow of articulate, intelligently excoriating vanities are the two women in his life - the schoolgirl he's shamelessly fucking, Edie (Kate Daley), who is the younger sister of his ex-girlfriend and flatmate Chloe (Kirsty Green). Chloe remains miserably in love with him, and his bedding Edie has destroyed the relationship between the sisters. But more dominant than either of these women is heroin, here portrayed as a beautiful and sinister Marilyn Monroe (Hayley Shillito), who has long seduced Tommy and into whose deadly arms he lures the two women.

Tommy is the latest and perhaps the most vicious of a long series of British anti-heroes, beginning with John Osborne's Jimmy Porter or Lindsay Anderson's Michael Travis. And like them, he represents what is sick about Britain itself - its delusion, its emotional poverty, its inability to face its own losses, its destructiveness. The play signals its intentions early - a poster of a British bulldog looking suitably Churchillian is hanging on the wall and Tommy spends the early scenes in Union Jack underpants. He is, like all these anti-heroes, a rebel who splutters out like a spent cigarette on the pavement: but not without spitting in the eye of everyone else first. He is too intelligent not to know what he is doing. Worse, he likes it.

Underpinning this play is a savage, bitter anger, and it's this unifying force that brings its several styles and ambitions together into a singular work of theatre. The story of the three junkies follows a predictable course, but in an unpredictable way. For all its savagery, this is not cynical theatre. It's not, either, simply a story about the delusions of junkies: it's equally an attack on the delusions of power, which have their own deadly addiction. It's no accident that Heroine, when she arrives, is American, nor that she keeps spouting Obama slogans of empowerment ("yes, we can!") For Britain now can only taste the lost thrill of Empire through the agency of the United States: and the lure of that power is as disabling and destructive as any drug.

Stokes, who both wrote and directed the play, uses every theatrical trick in the book to manipulate the audience, including lots of smoke - the actors step out of the scene, talk through the fourth wall, abuse or plead with the audience. The performances are all completely fearless and wholly passionate: it would be hard to perform this play with anything less than total commitment, because the whole thing might fall apart.

One of the highlights is the ecstatic embrace of Heroin(e) during an X-Factor style dance number; and after this high, the fable turns dark. But Stokes resists the temptation of moralising; even if Tommy is inclined to moralise at the audience, it's always ambiguous and spiked with deadly irony. The play ends with a tour de force of theatre that runs right at the edge of sentimentality, and somehow (just) gets away with it. Definitely a highlight of the Fringe, and highly recommended. But definitely not for those who are easily offended.

Picture: Craig McArdle and Hayley Shillito in Heroin(e) for Breakfast.

Heroin(e) for Breakfast, written and directed by Philip Stokes. Set by Craig Lomas, costumes by Carley Marsh, lighting by Marie Dalton. With Kate Daley, Kirst Green, Craig McArdle and Hayley Shillito. Horizon Arts, Holden St Theatre, Adelaide Fringe, until March 14.

For reasons which now are mysterious to me, but which probably reside in a diabolical subconscious masochism, I decided to see three Adelaide Fringe shows yesterday, which also happened to be the day I arrived. I found myself scrambling from show to show, with barely time to draw breath between each one. It's not an ideal way to see theatre, at least not for me: I like to think about what I've seen before being flooded with yet more stimuli. But as a crash course in the theatrical variety on offer at the Adelaide Fringe, it was probably exemplary.

The first was a rather charming piece of audio-instructed theatre, En Route, by Melbourne group Bettybooke. This won the Best Live Art Award in last year's Melbourne Fringe, and is, as they say, a "pedestrian-based event", in which mobile phones, iPods, hidden letters, chalked signs and company members lead you on a kind of Easter Egg hunt through the Adelaide CBD, with the city itself as the prize. It's part of an international trend of headphone-centric theatre that seeks to put the audience in the middle of the performance: through its insistence that participants look out, as it were, through their skull, it generates a crowded solitude that is at the centre of urban experience. The stage is the city, the theatre is your imagination, and the presiding god is Ranier Maria Rilke, whose insistence on the gaze is one of its final meditations.

There are 17 tracks, each accompanying a different route, and each offering a different audio experience that features music by local Adelaide musicians. Some are simple instructions ("walk slowly, take your time, look..."); some are narratives, such as a saunter through a bizarrely empty shopping arcade to a detective story; some are meditations on the act of perception by people like Maurice Merleau Ponty; others generate a mood for a walk down a particular lane, or create a background to a short exhibition of artworks about Dante's Purgatorio, shown in a carpark stairwell. It's a complex show, because the perspectives are constantly changing, but it's fun because it's constantly surprising, and it generates a nice balance between the participant's freedom and its own structuring necessities. I thought it a little long - maybe the ideal length for a show of this sort is an hour - but it kept me constantly interested while, of course, giving me some healthful exercise.

In an illustration of the perils of making theatre in an uncontrolled environment, my En Route began with a couple of security guards taking violent exception to Bettybooke "conducting its business" on the verandah of the Adelaide GPO, backed by a chorus of outraged staff members. I can't imagine what they thought we were doing, as they warned me against the sinister man ("don't trust him!") who was fitting me up with an iPod; perhaps they thought we were dealing drugs. Who knows? Their hostility was in marked contrast to this show's essential innocence, which was maybe what I liked most about it.

After that, I had time for a G&T in the diverting environs of the Garden of Unearthly Delights before heading to The Hive - a tent with chairs - for Baba Brinkman's The Rap Guide to Evolution. Brinkman is a Vancouver rapper whose last work was, apparently, a rap version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. After a performance of that show, he was approached by a scientist who asked him if he could do the same for Darwin as he did for Chaucer, and thus was produced what Brinkman calls "the very first peer-reviewed hiphop show".

Anyone who thinks rap is just about gangstas and hos should take a look at this (as it is as instructive about the social origins of rap as it is about Darwin, it might equally have been named The Evolutionary Guide to Rap). After a fair bit of forceful campaigning from my kids, I've had to lower my prejudices: rap is the popular poetic form, it's as various as any art, and there's some classy stuff in there. This is probably one of its stranger manifestations, but Brinkman's Byronic wit and performative energy combine to make it an irresistible hour. Plus you get to learn a lot about mitochondria and the social behaviour of slime moulds. Wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Darwin (and the slogan "Very Gradual Change You Can Believe In"), Brinkman takes us through 10 chapters, in which he explores various aspects of Darwin's theory (and attacks the whole premise of Intelligent Design), ultimately to reveal the humanity and "grandeur" of Darwin's vision. Science is seldom this much fun.

My final destination was a performance of My Name is Rachel Corrie, at X Space at AC Arts. Edited from the writings of young activist Rachel Corrie by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, it premiered at the Royal Court in London before running into controversy when the New York Theatre Workshop "indefinitely postponed" its performance in New York in 2006. Although I followed the various controversies with interest - this is a play that situates itself right on top of the Israel/Palestine political faultline, and generates as much seismic activity as one might expect - I haven't before now had a chance to see it.

As is well known, Rachel Corrie was killed in Gaza in 2003, when she was crushed by a bulldozer while defending a Palestinian home from being demolished. At the time, she was part of a band of non-violent international activists who sought to protect the homes, properties and lives of the Palestinians by interpolating their bodies between them and the IDF, on the assumption that killing a foreign national would cause more trouble than a Palestinian. The play is taken from her emails and diary entries, and follows the trajectory of a bright, idealistic young woman with enormous personal courage. It is also - and this is where the controversy stepped in - a bald statement about the daily persecution of ordinary Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

In this rather beautiful production directed by Daniel Clarke, Hannah Norris gives a passionate and accurately observed performance of Corrie. As the play opens, she stands amid a pile of cardboard boxes in the mess of her chaotic bedroom. The first half consists of recollections from Corrie's school and college years, and her early activism. This, the most engaging part of the play, is staged with effective simplicity, with Norris bit by bit packing away her belongings as she speaks. She's funny, innocent, smart, ironically aware of the pitfalls of being a "progressive", and remarkably intelligent. In the second half, when Corrie journeys to Palestine, the boxes become the walls and houses of Palestine: some open up to reveal miniatures of houses, or spill out a rubble of children's shoes and stones. This section's staging was much fussier, with actions that seemed merely decorative - the arranging of the children's shoes in the shape of a heart, for instance.

The production's conscious theatricality heightened the problem with using this kind of verbatim script: criticising it is a little like attacking a memorial service for using bad grammar. Here the play is presented as theatre, but it carries with it a weight of authenticity that closes down responses. It's like being in church: its polemic is unforgiving and earnest, with the constant reminder that behind this theatrical illusion is a dead woman. One is supposed to be moved, or one is heartlessly dismissing this awful death.

I wasn't moved, but it wasn't because Norris's remarkable performance lacked any skill or feeling: it was the set-up of the whole play, which left me no room to respond, either emotionally or politically. What if you already know about the IDF demolitions of houses, gardens and olive groves, or the daily harassment of civilians in the Occupied Territories? Is your task in this theatre, then, simply to nod in agreement (or, alternatively, to rage in disagreement?) And does either response really lead to thought?

I prefer, for example, Brecht's approach, which understood the power of Verfremdungseffekt, the "making-strange" which permits - rather, which insists on - active thinking as a response, in order to get beyond the singular focus of empathy (which Brecht thought fatally bourgeois). There's a Zizekian argument to be unpacked here, which I have neither the time nor the energy to follow through: but Howard Barker says it all quite well from the aesthetic side of the equation. Uncomplicated empathy is what drives this show; it's a well-realised production done in complete good faith, but it demonstrates that empathy is not enough for either political or artistic radicalism. Which is not at all the same as saying that it ought not to be there.

En Route, concept by Julian Rickert, created by Bettybooke - Suzanne Kersten, Claire Korobacz, Paul Moir and Julian Rickert. Adelaide Fringe, until March 14.

The Rap Guide to Evolution, Baba Brinkman and SPL Productions. The Hive, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Adelaide Fringe, until March 13.

My Name is Rachel Corrie, from writings by Rachel Corrie, edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, directed by Daniel Clarke. Design by Cassandra Backler, lighting and sound design by Ben Flett, video by Annemarie Kohn. Performed by Hannah Norris. X Space at AC Arts, Adelaide Fringe, until March 14.