You get a happy sense of being fluent in Italian in Renato Gabrielli's new play for Suspect Culture, which celebrates its 10th anniversary with A Different Language. Rather like Miles Kington's Let's Parlez Franglais, it gives you just enough of two languages to create the illusion of getting by in both. When it plays to an Italian audience in Trieste next month, the laughs will be as loud, but they'll come in slightly different places.
Gabrielli takes an everyday scenario - a British woman and an Italian man signing up separately to a dating agency and being told they are remarkably compatible - and pushes it into areas of heightened naturalism, if not surrealism. While the agency gives the timid British woman a lesson in erotically charged Latin dancing, her Italian counterpart is subjected to a physical examination to determine whether he is the manual worker he claims to be.
The scenario has echoes of two previous Suspect Culture shows: 1996's Airport, in its bilingual playfulness, and 1999's Mainstream, in its wry commentary on the reduction of human beings into online tick-boxes. However, despite the best efforts of all concerned, this play is built on too slight a premise to sustain its 90 minutes. Selina Boyack and Sergio Romano give tremendous performances - she a bundle of self-deprecation, he full of empty bravado - but the closer they come to their goal of meeting each other, the less interesting their personal dilemmas become.
Director Graham Eatough uses Luigi Mattiazzi's excellent set of roller-coaster walkways to get the actors to dip, leap and spiral around each other, giving the piece a vibrant and unusual physicality. That and Kenny MacLeod's imposing score lend an air of something more substantial to an enjoyable if ultimately lightweight comedy.
· At the Traverse, Edinburgh, from tomorrow until Saturday. Box office: 0131-228 1404. Then touring.
