Bill Buffery and Gill Nathanson are the gifted actors and writers who have brought to previous Fringe Festivals Surviving Bluebeard and Messing With Medea.

In their new show, Earthly Delights, they remain in classical mode, taking the myth of the Greek god Hephaestus, and turning it into a story about story-telling. He is the god of fire and of craftsmen and he is a crafty fellow, both in the way that he tells stories and the way he maintains power through that narrative act. Nathanson plays a number of women in this 70 minute long jewel, including Aphrodite, Psyche and Pandora.

Or, more accurately, she is obliged to act out these roles by Hephaestus, who is a tyrant of the imagination. He is also a seductive story-teller and words are the ropes with which he binds her to him.

The play is about her journey to freedom and it, too, is crafty. At the core of her liberation is the awareness that stories, however beautifully told, are not without moral consequences. Hephaestus is a monster, not because he is "bandy-legged"; as Yeats described him, but because he uses his filigreed and erotic stories as snares. He wants to contain her body, soul and imagination and watching her disentanglement from that entrapment is a fine and brilliant thing.

The Fringe doesn't get any better than this. Robert Enright CBC Winnipeg

It is always a little dangerous to try to describe the theatrical madness that comes from Bill Buffery and Gill Nathanson. Well-known for packing a good deal of complexity into their hour-long shows, the duo from Barnstaple, UK, offer a fascinating recipe. Take a god, not one of the big ones, but a god nevertheless. Add a muse, a self-described modern woman who is not entirely sure she wishes to continue in her current position. Mix some archetypal tales of Greek and Roman excess and you get Earthly Delights.

Buffery and Nathanson deliberately avoid any description of their plot, and this review will honour that tradition. Suffice to say the actors are tremendously charismatic, charming and dangerously witty. The characters may be immortal, but the play is definitely an earthly delight. Winnipeg Free Press

Greek mythology takes on a poignantly modern context in this story of a relationship in decay. Having been cast down from Mount Olympus, Hephaestus amuses himself with stories that border on the misogynistic as he attempts to keep his muse in her place. She has a few stories of her own, and they carry an erotic subtext that worries Hephaestus. The tale is beautifully told in a minimalist fashion by Gill Nathanson and Bill Buffery that is truly inspired and unexpectedly funny. Peter Vesuwalla. Winnipeg Sun

The ugliest of all gods, Hephaestus (Bill Buffery), sits on a deserted beach on a Greek isle. (How ugly was he? He was so ugly his father Zeus threw him off Mount Olympus, breaking his body on the rocks).

Rising naked from the waves is Aphrodite - the goddess of love, passion and desire. Well, not really. It's his muse (Gill Nathanson), just back from a little swim.

Apparently the two have been at it for several millennia - telling and retelling the old stories of the gods - and their relationship is beginning to unravel. "My stories are for telling, not for therapy," he observes sourly.

But like all great myths, his "stories" find resonance in their lives (and ours) whether he wants that or not. She begrudgingly joins him in the tales once more - wondrous tales of the magnificent copulation of Aphrodite and Mars, of Hades and the beautiful Persephone who glories in her reign as Queen of Hell - the familiar stories of mythology.

But she wants more. He may be a god but she is a daughter of Pandora, who has opened her forbidden box and infected humanity with all the ills that taint our existence. But Pandora has also given us the opportunity to cope, change and grow - something the gods will never be able to do. This modern muse has come to realize that her story is no longer his. Like Narcissus, he can only look in the pool - struck and held by his own image for eternity and no longer relevant except as metaphor.

What Buffery and Nathanson have fashioned with Earthly Delights is an intricate emotional, intellectual and theatrical puzzle.

"Take what you will from our story," they say, while challenging us on many levels. Using a wide range of styles and language, a stage full of simple but effective props, expressive physical theatre, some singing (with guitar and accordion) employing complex, difficult harmonies and charismatic performances, these two hold us in a story as old as the gods themselves and as new as any modern woman who discovers she can find her own way.

Buffery's a compelling storyteller with the voice of a trained Shakespearean actor - Nathanson's his perfect match, with the liquid delivery, a supple, angular body and the expressive arms of a ballerina.

Earthly Delights probes into the continuing power of myth. It is also a bracing report from the front lines of an ever-evolving society. Colin MacLean Edmonton Sun