Edinburgh 2012: The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Gilded Balloon, review

Aficionados of Apple products can maybe sleep a little easier this week following reports that Foxconn – the company’s top supplier and the biggest electronics manufacturer in the world – has been introducing pay and working condition improvements at its vast plants in China in the wake of an international outcry over suicides and alleged exploitation at those factories.

It can be hard to express slavish devotion to all things iPhone and iPad when you’ve got grim images of slave labour coursing through the old brainbox, and few individuals have done more to install them in the public psyche than the American monologuist Mike Daisey.

Daisey is a self-professed worshipper in “the cult of Mac” who experienced a Damascene revelation of doubt on learning about some test photos left on an iPhone that gave a blurry impression of the production line. It hadn’t occurred to him that these must-have gizmos were assembled by hand and his compulsion to discover more led him to the vast new Chinese city of Shenzhen. What he gleaned there helped form The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a fiery one-man show seen by more than 75,000 people since the summer of 2010.

Notoriety attached itself to the piece when it was “exposed” earlier this year for conflating first and second-hand material without acknowledging this up-front. Even if you don’t buy Daisey’s defence that theatre operates by different rules from journalism, the ethical considerations and documented material the work promulgates still hold good.

As redelivered for its first UK run in a bracingly bellicose performance by Grant O’ Rourke, it emerges as a brilliant, sardonic synopsis of Apple’s rise to the top and as an impassioned, witty wake-up call to a consumerist population that seems in zombified thrall to technology and urgently needs to reboot its empathy and compassion for the wider world.

Tickets: 0131 622 6552