Soaking up the atmosphere

''It's real monsoon time,'' intimates playwright/actor/director David MacIvor, un-metaphorically, as we move through downtown Toronto to the local Sunday morning, pre-rehearsal book-stop coffee shop. In truth, by Edinburgh standards, particularly Edinburgh Fringe standards, the ''monsoon'' is little more than a light and lazy

drizzle. The warm stuff at that. But, here in Canada, everything is more extreme, even the weather. Or at least that's how the theatre here seems to tell it.

Da Da Kamera, the company of which MacIvor is the creative lynchpin, are preparing their new show, In On It, which arrives on the Edinburgh Fringe this week. It's a two-man, 10-character roundelet of sitcom style co-dependents, one of whom is ''good'', the other ''bad''. Through a series of power-plays, the differences between the two in turns blur and bridge the gap. At the moment, anyway.

''Now it's more of a play within a play that looks at how artists use their own lives in their work,'' according to MacIvor, who sees himself as more of an editor than a writer, and likes to ''throw things away''. ''Now I see it as a comedy about loss. I normally spend a lot of time on-stage alone, but, with two of us, it opens up a whole thing about relationships, and how we all come from so many different places you wonder how we manage to relate at all. It's an 'opposites attract' thing, but it's how you work and live with that.''

This relates to wider issues too, and may explain some of the recurring pre-occupations inherent in Canadian theatre. MacIvor says that, as a nation, Canada is ''between the eagle and the Queen''. It's a beautiful phrase that perfectly captures the ambivalence of a people living next door to the good old boys in the US of A, but still perceived as kissing cousins in the outback of a pukkah English province. In this respect, Canada is a no man's land occupied by in-betweenies. And that's before we even get near Quebec's transitory sense of itself and its culture.

Da Da Kamera see an affinity with Calgary's One Yellow

Rabbit, in that both companies work organically with a long-serving group of friends and

collaborators. ''So by the time you hit rehearsals,'' as MacIvor puts it, ''the foreplay's already been done.''

This is clear once rehearsals commence, as, despite MacIvor's near-obsessive eye for detail and fine-tuning, everybody feels comfortable enough to chip in. Everyone, in fact, is in on it.

Just before I leave, MacIvor and Darren O'Donnell go through ''the dance'', a well-hung pas de deux set to sixties saccharine girlie pop. To watch, it's as jerky as it is ridiculous and uplifting. I'm at once reminded of the music, hall routines so beloved by Beckett, whose own co-dependent double acts, hilarious and tragic, were the epitome of how opposites attract. Outside, the ''monsoon'' is away, and even the sun threatens to crack a smile.

The weather's been even worse in Calgary, where the annual Calgary Stampede, the biggest rodeo in the world, is in full thunder. Besides the main event, there are Wild West shoot-outs, and country singers on every corner. If you really, really want to, you can see Shania Twain live in concert three times a day.

For the Stampede's duration, Calgary's working population have been given the option of trading in their suits and ties for denims, Stetsons, waistcoats, and, in some cases, sheriff's badges. The entire city is decked out in cowboy gear like the goldrush is about to

happen. All, that is, except for one little goth girl who strops incongruously through the city wearing torn fishnets and a sneer.

And, if you look closely, you'll see the cowboys have mobile phones where they should be packing pistols.

In a city so enamoured of the depth of its 10-gallon dressing-up box, you'd think something so

formal and quaint as a theatre company would hardly be necessary. But, in a city where history and kitsch go hand in holster, with Spectacle riding side-saddle, One Yellow Rabbit fit perfectly.

One Yellow Rabbit have been Edinburgh regulars for a few years now. They do physical theatre, but not in a histrionic, slam-yourself- against-the-wall-and-scream sort of way. Like Da Da Kamera, they've gradually, organically developed their own style. Some might call it quirky. They have their own theatre, and when I arrive are running their annual week-long performance course for actors.

It's still light outside the first night I meet Blake Brooker, One Yellow Rabbit's co-artistic director, but a cool mist is threatening rain, so we seek shelter in a local bar, where we shoot the breeze.

Brooker's just been on the phone to his girlfriend, who lives in Toronto and has just started work on a film. The space between them must be vast. From Toronto to Calgary is a four-hour plane ride and a two-hour time-slip. Inside, Blake tells me all about One Yellow Rabbit, about how they're rooted in a DIY punk aesthetic, even though he doesn't use the word punk. Then he tells me about Thunderstruck, the play they're bringing to Edinburgh this year. It's about a family of three backwoods brothers who are left to tend to their sister after their parents' death.

''It's quite intense,'' he says, quite highly charged, but with a lot of humour there, too. It addresses the current fixation on what defines a family, and here there's a desire to keep the family in face of censure. In that way it's about love, but a fierce love.'' Thunderstruck was written by Daniel Danis, a big bear of a man whose play, Stones And Ashes, left Edinburgh audiences gob-smacked by its emotional rawness, as well as by the physicality of the language. If you ever meet Daniel Danis, it's obvious where it comes from. I interviewed him once, and so full of rage was he at not being able to express precisely what he wanted to say in the few words of English that he had, that he kept standing up, pacing the room with frustration. At one point

I thought he was going to hit

me. These days Danis lives beside a forest in the sticks of Quebec. It's blue-collar country, and is, according to Brooker and Clarke, where Thunderstruck was born. Brooker and Clarke reckon Thunderstruck has laughs, which, after Stones And Ashes, surprises me no end.

''He's normally treated reverently,'' says One Yellow Rabbit's other co- artistic director Denise Clarke the next day at lunch. ''But there are actually a lot of jokes in there, and Daniel was delighted we found that. It's a play about social orthodoxy, and feels like it's constructing its own myth.''

Clarke is a choreographer, and is running the bulk of the performance course, putting 20 students through what she calls a ''56-point physical vocabulary''. Clarke and Brooker seem easy together, intimate. And why shouldn't they be? They've worked together for years, and make me think of what Daniel MacIvor said about the foreplay already being done.

In the corner of One Yellow Rabbit's theatre there's a bunch of flowers hung upside down. They were sent by Leonard Cohen on the first night of Doing Leonard Cohen, the company's brilliant adaptation of Cohen's poems, along with his novel, Beautiful Losers, which stops off in Glasgow next week prior to Thunderstruck's Edinburgh Fringe run. Cohen is Canada's unofficial Poet Laureate, and possibly the country's most famous son.

Largely this fame comes through his songs, a series of wryly maudlin vignettes that flit between the spiritual and the erotic, and formed the after-hours soundtrack to the fag ends of late sixties student parties, when talk is deep, and Suzanne's melancholia is the perfect comedown.

''There's a great beauty and a great sadness in his work,'' Clarke enthuses. ''It's spiritual, it's physical, it's erotic,'' and she could be talking about any of the works mentioned here.

Cohen has been living these past few years in a Zen monastery, though

on my return to Scotland I discover he left it six months ago. Maybe he'll do another album

soon, and maybe, at some point, he'll see Doing Leonard Cohen, and send more flowers.

Watching how One Yellow Rabbit work and play so easily with each other, I'm taken back to that first night in Calgary, sitting with Brooker in the bar as the skies outside get darker.

Over a beer we talk about families and friends, and the void between the two. We talk about how there's no black and white anymore, and wonder if there ever was. Inevitably, with someone who describes their aesthetic as DIY, as Punk, we talk about music, about Godspeed You Black Emperor and Leonard Cohen, and all the sad little alt country combos in between.

In between. In my few days in Canada, those words have come up again and again. I recall Daniel MacIvor's comment about feeling ''between the eagle and the Queen'', and think of what lies beyond good and evil.

Watching Da Da Kamera and One Yellow Rabbit in action, the thin line between love and hate becomes clearer, illuminated by the counterpoint between hope and despair that forms the crux of so much Canadian drama. Outside, the sky lights up and splits in two. And, in the space between, the heavens open, and a monsoon pours.

n Doing Leonard Cohen, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Tuesday till August 12.

n In On It, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until August 13.

n Thunderstruck, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, August 15-26.