AFTER last year's award for the best overall production on the Fringe, Pan Pan Theatre has graduated to the main festival with this energetic synthesis, of mime, sound and frenetic gesture, devised by the company. In a dark, enclosed workshop three apprentices - Agata (Patrizia Barbagallo), Bartok (Rod Chichignoud) and No 252 (Mark McCaffrey) toil under the absolute control of the Master Tailor (Charles Kelly), sewing and unpicking, creating and destroying.

Alternating impulses of aggression and control, tensions between the desire to escape and to re main and conform are played out with a minimum of dialogue, but with heightened facial and physical expression, accompanied by Natasha Lohan's live piano playing. Using wooden tables, which at times are scattered around the stage, then lined up and covered with a long roll of white fabric, the four performers spin and weave around each other in movements of frustration and desire, in and out of the light.

The metaphor of tailoring provides a fruitful store of images of disrobing and revelation, disguise, allure and reinvent ion, and finally of enshrouding - which are all teased out in an imaginative, often hypnotic manner.

There are flashes of great beauty in the loose limbed choreography, and even a few comic moments, but not enough to relieve the dominant overwrought tone and the unwaveing, angst ridden intensity which, after an hour and a quarter, became somewhat relentless. There is no doubt about Pan Pan's considerable talent but it's not always necessary for physical theatre to take itself quite so seriously.