(As/Des)cent[author-post-rating] (2/5 stars)

Though positing itself as a great British ghost story, DBS Productions’s two-hander (As/Des)cent is disturbing for all the wrong reasons. Plot-wise, there’s a pretty close resemblance to Schaffer’s Equus – i.e ironically troubled psychiatrist tries to disentangle the strange mind of withdrawn young man – but that’s where the similarities abruptly stop.

To do justice to the actors playing the Doctor and haunted patient, Ben, the pair turn in quite passable performances, but they struggle with JD Henshaw’s turgid and cliche-ridden script, whilst the production itself is dogged by a mystifying version of ‘naturalism’ that means that the men have to keep changing their shirts between the short scenes in order to show the passing of time, even when an apparently experienced and medically-trained professional calls his primary patient “Mr. Phillips” and has painfully clunky outbursts such as “oh, you foolish man!”

“The patient continues in the pursuit of circular logic,” the doctor notes into his dictaphone, and it’s one of the few believable statements in the entire show. The onstage action is comprised entirely of remarkably tension-free exchanges between the two men, ostensibly meant to insinuate a creeping sense of dread, whereas the only chill in the air comes from the Sweet Grassmarket venue’s over-zealous air conditioning. What’s worse is the script has a  kind of smugness about it – when Ben rattles off something about his now-dead girlfriend, “Love is like a punch in the stomach”, the doc acts like this is a profound and revelatory observation rather than something a teenager might scratch into a school desk.

It’s protracted and predictable stuff – five minutes in, you could write the ‘shocking’ twist yourself – and the only horrifying thing about Helen (the possessive and evil ghost girlfriend) is that she’s nothing more than a stock character from schlock-horror, such a lazy and ghastly rendering of femininity I can’t understand how she can be allowed to underpin the entire plot. Still, there are brief moments of acceptable spookiness, a touch of poetry amongst the dross, a sense of something with something like potential, but if it’s a fright-fest you’re looking for, then, unless you find boredom terrifying, steer clear.

(As/Des)cent is playing at Sweet Grassmarket as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival until August 25. For more information and tickets, please see the Edinburgh Fringe website.