4

	C too (venue website) Theatre 5-30 Aug (not 17), 12:00pm (1:00pm)

For our first preview of Fringe 2010, we've picked something a bit different.  For starters, it's a classic American film-noir tale... transplanted to the less-than-mean streets of Edinburgh's Old Town.  But there's more: marrying the latest technology with a theatrical walking tour, Suspicious Package casts you, and the whole rest of the audience, in a starring role.

Pick up the props for your assigned part - the Detective or the Heiress, perhaps - and you're ready to go.  As you're guided by a borrowed iPod round a map of central Edinburgh, your personal path will occasionally cross with your fellow citizen-actors.  Lines of dialogue flash up on your screen, inviting you to release your inner thespian (or simply ham it up) as your words move the plot along.  And most intriguingly, you'll slowly learn details of your own character's past - with videoed flashback scenes filling in your personal back-story as you walk along.

It's a game as much as it's theatre, of course, and this type of work has appeared in Edinburgh before.  But it still sounds like rattling good fun - and the inspired choice of a film-noir genre is a new twist to the tale.  Encouragingly, it's been well-received on the far side of the Atlantic, with the New York Times (no less) promising that you'll leave the experience smiling.  All in all, then - this is one suspicious package we just can't wait to open.

Suspicious Package runs seven times a day, but each show has room for just six people.  It's worth booking early if you need to make a particular time.