Nick Salamone is a very talented man who has written what must surely be one of the best, full-scale new plays in Edinburgh this year. He also has his fun, Alec Guinness style, playing half a dozen variegated characters, possibly the best and most amusing of whom is Professor Stephen Hawking.
Where George Orwell set his dystopia in 1984, Salamone has picked the United States 25 years later for this tale of the coming of the end of the world, loosely based on Oedipus Rex.
Nancy Lindelberg as President Clinton (obviously Hillary rather than her unfaithful husband) has manifold problems, despite the help of two Scots, Prime Minister Brown and her press secretary, Suzan Crowley's Morag, who also acts as chorus.
Salamone allows a single conceit, the idea that 65 million people, 1% of the world's inhabitants disappear simultaneously and then follows it through logically, amusingly and fascinatingly.
Initially, the army suggest a mass alien abduction. Since, according to statistics totted out by Morag, half of all Americans seem to believe in little green men, this is less far fetched than it might sound.
The actual explanation, particularly propagated by the Rev Pat Robertson, is hardly less likely and eventually drags in that renowned Muslim convert, Chelsea Clinton (Rebecca Metz), who unlike her dad is not one of the disappeared.
Hillary Agonistes is a well-constructed satire that deserves to have a life after Edinburgh, both for its ingenuity and the chance to watch the playwright in all of his different incarnations.