I LIKED this show before it started. Crystal Pite is known for her insight into the resources of big theatres. She mobilises these with assurance and flair. The powers-that-be rightly queue up to engage her. Here she is at Edinburgh International Festival vaunting a piece of dance-theatre in which “a group of medieval re-enactors gather for their annual general meeting.”

On paper alone, this is priceless. 

Assembly Hall, choreographed by Pite with script and co-direction by Jonathon Young, is performed by eight dancers who shift between soap-operatic social power-play and the interaction of fantasy figures. This work is brilliant when its central conceit is neatly sidestepped, in episodes of mercurial rapidity and frictionless physical shapeshifting. 

Assembly Hall’s large attentive audience may well identify with the notion of hanging in there while some psychic lease expires. Beloved facilities are never not on the wane. It’s where we are. This show’s cast address the question of whether to entrench, migrate or disband, as their habitual premises flake and crumble. Their puppet-like physical jerks lip-synch with copious heard-it-all-before dialogue. I think we’re meant to tire of this. 

Subsequent choreographed heroic tableau and mythological spoofs ensue, with a welcome tonal tinge of compassion and sincerity.

Assembly Hall adopts a light referential touch. I thought of the elusive spiritual truths that vexatiously hover around in plays like Maeterlinck’s Pelleas And Melisande (yes, they do). Virginia Woolf’s masterful Between The Acts came to mind; with its amateur-dramatic protagonists in the embrace of archetypal pageantry. 

Less integral was Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, weighing in on this show’s eclectic soundtrack: this is a none-too porous stand-alone work, comprised of its composer’s sublime finesse and cogent edit — compared with which, we all ramble somewhat.

Amid the EIF/EIFF/EFF/EAF behemoth, Assembly Hall’s zeitgeist invokes the genuine article — engaging new theatre, connecting with witness on a grand scale. I say this now, whereas the event itself felt fragmentary. I was, at times, truly in bits.

Runs until August 24. Boxoffice: eif.co.uk