The cast of Queen Of The Slaughter included a professional dancer, an expert fencer and musician, a parkour enthusiast and a classical pianist who is also a master of the operatic form known as belle canto.

They would've been perfectly within their rights to scrap the theatrical innovation and put on a variety show. And in a sense, Queen Of The Slaughter was a sort of variety performance, a dark showcase staged in smoke and candlelight in which live music seduced, swords swung within centimetres of throats and the protagonist finally danced, rather beautifully, with death.

Set in an unknown country (the sparse text was in different languages) in the den of an unnamed band of unearthly fighters, the piece outlined the steps by which a green young recruit was drawn to kill a former comrade.

Told in flashback, it began and ended with the barked orders of a firing squad, moving in between through a series of vivid images: the three revolutionaries arriving on the scene like descending furies, a piano that spun as it was played, a burning book, a torn red flag that read Liberty (or rather LIBERT...) Binding the whole were a series of parkour-influenced movement sequences which were somehow both graceful and brutish. As the man's indoctrination was accomplished by the repetition of meaningless statements from the pages of an innocuous looking little book, his slight frame became the prop for one fast-vaulting comrade.

Those who saw last year's Ten Thousand Several Doors, Prodigal Theatre's superb reworking of The Duchess Of Malfi, will have hungered for a stronger, meatier narrative. Devising their own play from scratch, the company stripped their art to the bones, exposing the rigorous choreography and styling which has always underpinned their work. In doing so they made sure of our admiration while forfeiting some of the mystery and the marvel.

A dramatic departure from last year's main Festival sell-out, Queen Of The Slaughter still proved thoroughly captivating and utterly distinctive. This was not Prodigal's best work, but it was their bravest.