Rou thinks he is king of the castle, Jack the lad, the one the rest of his gang admires and envies for his ability to shag anything with a nervous system. He thinks he can chew them up and spit them out. Then one Saturday night things start going wrong when the husband of the married woman he's been seeing turns up and secrets are revealed.
Xavier Durringer is often referred to as the French Mark Ravenhill, and it is the author of Shopping and Fucking who has translated this brief glimpse into the hopeless lives of a group of young people living not in glamorous Paris but in the soulless suburbs beyond. I think he might have done a rush job.
Ravenhill's script is ragged, and although the production has an appropriate rawness, it doesn't have either a specificity of setting or the precision in the performances that this kind of theatre needs if it is going to look tough rather than flabby. The evening intermittently splutters into life but it never explodes with the force that it should. The young cast swaggers but they never deliver the nihilistic desperation to suggest that they are really lost souls stuck in a violent, brutal purgatory.
Until August 26. Box office: 0131-225 5105.
