It's so hot and sluggish in the Gilded Balloon that even a hyperactive insomniac might struggle not to snooze, let alone an average audience faced with a meditation on the third of our lives spent in bed. All credit, then, to the Paper Birds for staving off torpor and holding our attention, even if the rewards for that attention feel scant.
The format of 40 Feathered Winks, in which an overarching theme is explored through a handful of interwoven stories, is standard for this kind of devised physical performance. The show's shortcomings are equally typical of a blossoming young company. Essentially, execution falls short of ambition: the movement is often gauche, the acting (particularly the use of the face) over-emphatic, the narrative slender and the design plain. And yet, there are moments of real invention and emotional impact, when the group's talent shines. Their depiction of a couple so bored with one another they read while making love is wonderfully witty, and a scene in which a new mother with postnatal depression pounds at her duvet in horror and frustration at the screams of her child is gut-wrenching. With time and experience, you feel, they could come up with an entire show as effective as these two vignettes.
· Until August 27. Box office: 0131-668 1633.
