One of the best shows at the Edinburgh Festival this was the Anonymous Society's brilliant package of songs by Jacques Brel, the legendary Belgian singer of the Fifties. But this is no cafe croon-in, more a fully-fledged piece of performance theatre. It lasts just 75 minutes and this gives these wonderfully plangent songs a startling new life.

Just listen to the cast - largely Belgian - singing in English, 19 songs by the seminal master of mood is a genuinely theatrical experience. The sense of loss and death goes the way of the Charles Aznavour dial.  Brel's famous Ne Me Quitte Pas is here savagely despairing and, like most of these numbers (including the haunting To Watch A Friend In Pain), it   grips the heart like an icy hand. It helps that the cast features three beautiful  women  to front a mixed team, men often singing women's parts and vice versa. A piano and accordion, plus occasional electric guitar, are the accompaniment; strobe lighting and a sofa to accommodate the performer-singers suggest a comfiness not found in the music.

Andrew Wale's and Perrin Allen's fractured, disturbing staging - choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui - is dislocated and stylish. The obsessive twitching and fidgeting give a thoroughly wired feel. Yet it is the music that counts - its truth, its aching intensity. The show becomes an almost masochistic pleasure as the songs cut deeper and deeper.