Hadda and Hassan Lekliches!

The National Theatre of Scotland and Oran Mor’s One Day in Spring season goes out on a high at the Traverse this week, with a second outing for Jaouad Essounani's energetic two-hander, which takes a trip through Morocco’s troubled recent history with a disarming mix of humour and tragedy. Our hosts for this journey are force of nature Hadda (Juliana Yazbeck) and her cousin Hassan (El Razzougui), whose uneasy passage from innocence to experience is closely tied to their country’s fate and relationship with the West.

While Hadda graduates from increasingly horrific sexual exploitation to prostitution, learning to hate her oppressors along the way, Hassan’s quest for employment in the big city leads him into the company of radicals, and eventually to Guantanamo Bay. Essounani toys throughout with his audience’s expectations in a script that mixes realism and the fable in a powerful and provocative manner. Grid Iron’s Ben Harrison creates this rich canvas with only a smattering of props, some back projections and an atmospheric percussion soundtrack. The pair of performers, meanwhile, switch effortlessly from one character to the next, with Yazbeck’s virtuoso performance a particular revelation.

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 9 Jun.