Showing @ Traverse @ Barony Bar, Edinburgh, until Thu 1 Mar

Those old icons of permissive, even reckless lifestyles, have become somewhat of a cliché in modern society. The method of tortured artists and frustrated visionaries to sit and wile away the hours in some dull, backroom gin-joint may still appeal to our cultural nostalgia, of portraying legends like Cash and Waits in film, but it feels a bit lumbering and obsolete today. It’s a matter reignited by director Ben Harrison with Grid Iron who present Barflies.

Taken from the various jumbled writings of Charles Bukowski on drinking, smoking and sleeping around, Harrison once more uses the oaked, rustic beauty of Edinburgh’s Barony Bar to play out the little vignettes. Accompanied by saloon-style live piano music, intimate lighting and proximities drag us into the world of the barstool drinker as Keith Fleming and Charlene Boyd showcase their characters, from dirty stop-outs to profound intellectuals.

First performed during the summer of 2009, Barflies has a natural dynamism suited to the Fringe festival; the chance to sit in a bar with your mates and soak up the warm atmosphere which lingers in Barony offers a welcome respite to dark, cramped comedy gigs. The message embedded within Harrison’s site-specific show is penetrating but never preachy, fusing the ideas of how we perceive life with what makes us happy (‘just think how much more pleasing it would be to hear you are the world’s greatest fucker’, muses Fleming’s Henry).

You wonder though, within the girdled closeness of Barony, what more forceful and explicit comments could be made on today’s desire for wildness and liberation. Bukowski wrote heavily about the working-class individual; perhaps there is something inherently political about the ideas of needing to drink and smoke which Harrison fails to tease out, lost in the idea of aesthetic as he sometimes is. The performance is admittedly an engrossing seduction, asking us to reflect on the need for loosened values and occasional fits of impetuosity, but it always seems to yearn for an extra level of commentary.