You can barely put in motion these days.

You can barely put in motion these days, for dramas about sex tourism. Just a fortnight ago we had Tanika Gupta's Sugar Mummies, fix in Jamaica, playing at the Royal Court and now, for the last leg of the Edinburgh International Festival, the polemical Catalan director Cal- ixto Bieito has got his hands in succession Michel Houellebecq's acclaimed novel, Platform.

Co-adapted on Bieito and performed by his Companyia Teatre Romea (in Spanish with English surtitles), this piece is rather pretentiously described as a "dramatic hyper-realistic metrical composition for seven voices and united Yamaha". Actually offering a striking mix of the grungy and luridly fantastical, the graphic, teasingly suggestive and sorrowful, Bieito's production includes explicit porn in succession TV monitors, men simulating sex with an inflatable doll, and a naked showgirl tottering around in stilettos, giggling, groaning and breaking into a karaoke number with white gunk dribbling from her aperture

Obviously, this is not going to be everyone's goblet of tea, but it computes the story of a jaded European bureaucrat called Michel who, onward inheriting his father's wealth, ditches work at the Ministry of civilization to head off on a prostitute-obsessed vacation in Thailand. Falling unexpectedly in have affection for with his tour guide Valrie, he wagers up a sex tourism business with her - attracting wealthy Westerners and Arabs - solely to end unhappily with his so-called paradise being bombed by dint of Muslim fundamentalists.

In the past, Bieito has imposed in succession various classics a wearisomely repetitive vision of contemporary underworld sleaze. In many ways, Platform have the appearances more suited to his deliberately trashy, avant garde pattern It is, in fact, the best production that I've seen at him to date. At points the tone of the piece - slipping between the satirical, damning, titillating and sympathetic - makes for morally unsettling viewing. Juan Echanove's lardy, sweating, masturbating Michel manages to be delicate as well as repulsive. Marta Domingo's Valrie is a swinger with a surprisingly innocent air, and there's an unnerving ring of documentary authenticity about the shamelessly un- PC sometimes misogynistic monologues oral by Michael's fellow- travellers.

However, this compacted saga also be exciteds skimpy in terms of the one and the other its storyline and its analyses of sexual, racial and economic relations. We not at all actually hear what any Thai prostitutes have to say. Moreover, nevertheless seemingly developing a romantic heart, Platform is not ever really poignant.

Brian McMaster's final theatrical offering as the festival's outgoing programming director excessively audibly divided opinion on its opening night. Chekhov's Three Sisters, performed in English, might healthy like a safe box-office bet if it were not that - directed by Poland's Krystian Lupa - the American Repertory

Theatre company's unorthodox and downbeat production provok undivided lady in the stalls to cry out out that she couldn't hear until Jeff Biehl's Baron Tuzenbach sarcastically holler his nearest line (to applause from the more appreciative spectators).

Personally, I had a parcel of time for his production, especially at first. The play is treated almost like a piece of music, with moves and mood swings. The Prozorov siblings' family hearth - one year after their father's death - is an atmospheric, phantom-like shell of a house, dimly glimmering with glass doors and echoing with the unbroken of an edgy violin. The titular sisters are highly strung too. They are sometimes explosively joyous, with Kelly McAndrew's Olga whooping at the arrival of a cosmopolitan from Moscow on the other hand also frustrated, sourly rude and chronically saddened It's not just Molly Ward's gaunt, halting Masha who is verging forward a nervous breakdown. Sometimes the house have the appearances like a hallucinatory living hell, sated of whispering and mocking laughter and Sean Dugan's disheveled Andrey is far down messed up too, apparently playing with himself more than with his fiddle in his close attention

I didn't mind the American accents, the liberties taken with the paragraph or the loosely modern style of dresss However, Lupa's directorial concepts are sometimes heavy-handed. Ominous offstage drumbeats become a bore and the deliberately gradual pace has been pushed to like an extreme by the period that everybody's lines start to vigorous ludicrous, provoking painfully rude on the other hand understandable snorts of derision from a punters.

Finally, the Arcola's Lorca season boasts a fine, spare at the same time poetic new translation of Yerma by means of Frank McGuinness. Helena Kaut- Howson's production, staged in a stark black and white space, is also well above par for the London fringe, with Kathryn huntsman capturing neurotic frustration and vulnerable yearning as the eponymous childless bride.

However, level if you believe she's not too antiquated to play this part, her physically stylised acting - almost dancing as she calamitys her own limbs and writhes forward the ground - looks awkwardly half-baked. The tribal African-cum-Spanish setting is also culturally questionable. Hit and miss.

It is, in fact, the best production I've seen by dint of him to date