The Blind, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Maeterlinck's compelling vision of the sightless

The 50 members of the audience are led along winding corridors, round awkward corners and past the ghostly shadows of the set of Siegfried to a small, dim space backstage at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre. Perched on benches, slightly disorientated and blinking in the darkness, we make out the spectral presence of 12 disembodied images – two groups of six male and six female sculpted faces.

Within each sex their facial features are identical, as if cloned. Immobile at first, these masks begin to stir into life: eyes roll, lips twitch, until they become fully-formed talking heads. Poised here between a puppet show, installation art and a multimedia performance video, The Blind, Maurice Maeterlinck's short play written in 1890, has been recreated as a "technological phantasmagoria" by Denis Marleau for Theatre UBU of Montreal.

Using just two actors – Céline Bonnier and Paul Savoie in an impressive 45-minute seamless flow of monologue and dialogue, which is punctuated by stifled sobbing and the occasional moan – Marleau projects their faces on to these masks so that we begin to imagine the personality of each lifeless countenance.

Twelve blind characters are in search of the priest who has brought them so far on this island, into a forest of rocks and trees, away from the safe confines of their home, or hospice as it is referred to here. Isolated in their sightlessness, their confusion and their hopelessness, they have lost their guide and their way. Questions and memories are all they have.

Nancy Tobin's evocative soundscape fills the gloomy air of this mystical island with a thousand noises, elemental echoes and suggestions that terrify these bewildered, trusting souls. They are afraid of passing birds, falling leaves, passing footsteps and barking dogs, while the sound of the lapping sea only adds to their disorientation since they cannot gauge how near it is.

When a dog finally attracts one of the men to a body, it becomes apparent that this is the elderly priest, their "eyes". With the realisation that he is dead comes the awful recognition that all hope is lost. Optimism reigns momentarily as they consider their carers – nuns, who never leave their retreat – and the lighthouse keepers whose eyes are focused on more distant objects than the needy at their feet.

The people's uncomprehending fear ebbs and flows, their individual panic contained within beautifully modulated tones of refined discourse, permeated with a passionless pathos that seems to pre-echo Samuel Beckett's metaphysical universe.

Our own sensory perceptions become confused as a child's cry circles the enclosed space, footsteps seem to stop abruptly in our midst. "Who are you?" Silence. "Have pity on us!" Silence. In UBU's powerfully engaging redefinition of Maeterlinck's visionary work, boundaries become blurred between actor, character, speech and spectator. The audience is magically caught up in this ritual of waiting and remembering, creating its own cloak of invisibility and suspended disbelief.

Ends tonight (0131-473 2000, returns only)