The room – part stage-set, part immersive installation – seems primed for a hoe-down, or a good long yarn-spinning session around a campfire. The air is pungent with mint and woodchips. An intimate space has been cleared in the forest, and live music softly welcomes us into the moment.

Then the story begins, and with it comes a vertiginous sense of being lifted far from all that is familiar, or logical. This comes with no small degree of irony as the narrative, dreamlike and vaporous as it is, concerns an interminable February imposed by dark forces (also called February) who have levied a ban on flight, whether it be the act itself, or even the mere mention of the word.

Within this cold, crepuscular scenario birds fall from the sky, children vanish and a masked resistance force, The Solution, urge the inhabitants of the town to go to war with February. ‘Anything is possible when you start a war.’

The sense engendered, beyond the topsy-turvy illogic of the dialogue, is one of pervasive unease, resistance, struggle, and oppression. It could simply be depression that is being alluded to here – seasonally affected, or otherwise. But in the repeated calls to go to war, to resist, to refuse to accept a meaninglessly cruel and vindictive present, it is too tempting to conclude that the drive is more politically allegorical. The spirit of resistance is made manifest through defiantly creative acts; drawings of hot air balloons are pinned to trees and tattooed onto the arms of children. Little red balloons even feature in the fabric of the costumes. Similarly, within Michael John McCarthy’s excellent sound design arise songs of endurance and the plights of the downtrodden, including works by Low, The Handsome Family, Tom Waits and Stephen Foster.

Shane Jones’s novel was always going to provide a maddeningly complex source material to translate into a theatrical context. Grid Iron have done a remarkable job of pulling together poised performances, evocative soundscaping, understated technology, simple props inventively and thoroughly exploited, and have used the expertise gained from years of site specific works to thoroughly own the space and make it an integral part of performance.

There is a lingering sense, however, that the production is somewhat undermined by the wilfully forced lyricism of the material. The kind of post-modern, meta-fictive pseudo-surreal outpouring of ideas exemplified by Jones’s novel is so well worn that it becomes a distraction in itself to count the sources of his inspiration; Italo Calvino, Borges, Lorca, Angela Carter, Steve Erickson, Ben Marcus. The list goes on. And on. Even Jones himself took to citing many of the sources of inspiration within the body of his own text. Whether you are happy to sail along with all of this depends on whether you find the idea of a girl who smells of honey and smoke lyrical, evocative or mawkish.

The mouths of the dead fill with snow, and vines grow from spines to curl down from clouds and fill the sky. There is a portentous melancholy comprising overly familiar elements of ivy and ice and fire and masks and missing children and dreams of ascent, and so on, and so on. They are all beautifully evocative in their own terms but piled on so thickly these lyrical conceits somehow undermine any allegorical intent by ascribing more value to the sheer playfulness of it all.

The narrative line slackens when one becomes aware that really there perhaps is no clear and present danger after all and that the characters are struggling against themselves and each other. They have it within themselves to author their own escape from this darkness.

This is an impeccable production, make no mistake. And there is much here to marvel at as Grid Iron once more prove themselves to be one of Scotland’s most relevant, resourceful and committed companies. The performances from Vicki Manderson, Keith MacPherson and, especially, Melody Grove are solid. Karen Tennent’s set brilliantly frames and contains the dreamy internal logic of the tale and Simon Wilkinson lights the intimate space with subtlety, effectively shifting focus and mood with each passing fragmentary episode. I only find myself wishing that – irony upon irony – they could have done more to pin down and prevent their wayward source material from making so many flights of fancy.

Once upon a long ago in the faded ochre of a 1970s childhood I sat in the stalls of Edinburgh’s venerable Kings Theatre and saw my first instance of real magic – nothing to do with rabbits, or top hats, or cards, but the specific kind of magic that can only happen in a theatre. You know, that nameless thing that happens as a result of light and dark changing roles, of things not doing what you expect. The dizzy manifestation of dreams conjured between people who contrive to make something happen in a box. That thing. Rikki Fulton, in full panto dame finery (and there has never been finer) tipped Jack Milroy into an old style carriage pram and began steering the old contraption towards the back screen of the stage. Suddenly, with no intimation whatsoever, the theatre erupted with the sound of a pulsing, racing beat, and the back screen filled with a double speed movie of busy streets, into which the characters – Francie and Josie – seemed to be hurtling full pelt. With us as their passengers.

I am no longer that wee wide-eyed boy in the red plush stalls, and time and technology have moved on somewhat, but this afternoon I saw the signs of the magic, or bewitching, passing through to a new generation.

Siro-A (Japanese for white face) are a young, five strong ensemble comprising three dancers, a video artist and a DJ. What they provide is a tightly and wittily choreographed sequence of quick- fire dance and movement routines that make spectacular use of digital projection, lighting and software. The sheer inventiveness of the interplay between physical performance and digital projection is lightly worn and seldom laboured, with the result that the whole thing feels playful, open hearted and fresh.

The technology is cutting-edge contemporary, which is to say that at times it goes to great effort to appear retro. So there are plentiful references to 8-bit gaming and arcade music, whilst particular highlights for me include a lonely figure in a haunted house being toyed with by the huge white hands and leering Mephistophelean masked face of a phantom, and a dazzling finale piece deploying motorik rhythms, marching production lines of cloned bodies, repeating on themselves, folding upon one another, dissolving into streaming parallel bands of shifting light. It was like some crazed visualisation of the Futurist manifesto.

The handheld device generation will be familiar with all of the technology, of course, and its fair to say that at certain points during the show you may feel like you have been sucked through a screen and thrown directly into an iPad game, but in seeing what is possible when friends, ideas, skill, application and technology combine in a flash of inspiration – in short, magic – then this amounts to a show that will live long in their imagination and make them, maybe, just perhaps, look at their own gaming, their own street dancing, their own technology mash-ups and begin to think… What if?

Sam, my 11-year-old co-reviewer, and a boy for whom the act of writing anything more than his name provokes horror, outrage and, worst of all, boredom, furiously scribbled in the dark, turning frequently to make comments and ask questions. He assured me that they were using GoPro’s to capture video and that things wouldn’t break because he could see an Apple logo dimply glowing at the back of the stage.’If they had used Windows 10 it would have broken, Dad’.  He assured me that the quality of street dancing, and the back flips, was outstanding, and that he was already thinking of ways of how he could get a palette of lights to project onto white squares that he would fasten to his body. He reported that much of it made him dizzy, but in a good way, and that the use of classic games and sounds made the whole thing ‘epic’. On the way out I heard another slightly older child, when asked how many stars she would give it, said, ‘We don’t do stars now. That was Double Thumbs, and it was Awesome Possum’.

This energetic, inventive, warm-hearted slice of Techno-Vaudeville is ultimately about magic, and, I think, the awakening of possibilities in a new generation so please, take your young people. They will love it – and their open embrace of the spectacle will draw you in to a strangely familiar old spell of the stage.

 SIRO-A, presented at George Square Theatre throughout the Fringe, is reviewed by Michael Begg (49) and Sam Begg (11).

I love masks. They are among our most strange contrivances, and such a mystery for something so commonplace.

In Greek tragedy the chorus masks were worn not merely as costume elements, but as resonance chambers for the ritual cries of the chorus. Their consequent mental transportation into the darkest inner realms were, effectively, masked from the audience who, nonetheless, would pay witness and, via the qualities of the mask, project themselves into a position of direct experience alongside the performer. This led to a collective sense of purgation and healing, and audiences would leave the amphitheatre feeling soulfully cleansed as much as entertained.

This mysterious lens-like quality of the mask, where one can empathise, engage and project whilst somehow remaining safe from ones own imaginings goes some way to explain the prevalence of death masks in so many international cultures.

It perhaps also explains why a gruesome little tale of multiple murders, kleptomania, family feuding and melancholic yearning, all contained within a grubby Alpine hotel, is one of the breeziest comedic shows you’re likely to find at this year’s Fringe.

Familie Flöz, the collective pool of theatre-makers based in Berlin who have made a mission of raising the profile of mask theatre – and have done so with conspicuous success – make a welcome return to Edinburgh with Hotel Paradiso.

Within the constraints of mime and mask they exhibit impressive emotional subtlety and dexterity, so much so that one is occasionally fooled into believing the expression on the masks themselves to have changed.  Was that a smile that curled the corner of the cook’s mouth as he attended to another corpse with his trusty circular saw? Did that repressed hoteliers lip really tremble as his opportunity for love and escape to a brighter life floated out of the door, never to be seen again? I could have sworn that an eyebrow arched as a plan – a dark plan – took form in the mind of the kleptomaniac maid? Surely not. Masks are frozen. They express nothing. How could they? And yet… And yet…

Flös are the continuation of a long, proud tradition and there is much in their work that pays homage to the tightly worked routines of silent cinema, especially Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd; the engagement with problematic props, the potential for multiple gags contained within familiar objects, the proximity of comedy and pathos. They are also doubtlessly assisted in capturing the audience through the familiar constructs of farce and sit-com (don’t mention the Fawlty Towers comparison).

The performance is suffused with charm and executed with impressive mastery. The dark tale is lightly told and there is no shortage of laugh out loud moments. Particularly worthy of note is the dumb and dumber cop cameo. For those seeking pure entertainment there is much here to satisfy. For those curious about the role of mask and mime there is much here to ponder about how much is said, how much is communicated, before a word is ever spoken.

Hotel Paradiso is presented by Aurora Nova and plays at Pleasance Courtyard everyday throughout the Fringe,5-31 August, except 17 August