Theatre review: Miss Saigon, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

This weekend, by chance, marked the showing on British television of the final episode of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s mighty documentary on the Vietnam War. The story combines huge historic drama – the final panic at the fall of Saigon, the huge helicopters clattering in to lift the last few US troops from the roof of the American Embassy – with an immense sense of personal tragedy. And it’s because it so perfectly captures those qualities of the moment in which it is set that Cameron Mackintosh’s new 2014 production of Boublil and Schonberg’s smash-hit 1989 show emerges as such a brilliant musical for our time, full of resonances for a new age of war and displacement, and of questioning about the exploitative sexual relationships that come with male power, whether military, political or economic.