Arts Admin's first summer season is under way, and the refurbished Toynbee Studios is a good setting for the latest piece from Curious, best known for its site-specific piece, On the Scent, which conjured emotion through smell. The slightly cracked surroundings of the old theatre provide a neat counterpoint to this latest investigation into the dustier corners of human emotion, and that hidden, often-neglected place where yearning, nostalgia and lonesomeness mingle.
(Be)Longing is like a road trip into the atriums of the heart, or a song whose first chords fill you with sweet despair. A sign outside a Shanghai guesthouse that announces "a longing house; vacancies" provides the starting point for two entwining journeys, mapping out territory that includes the vast landscapes of the American south-west, whose emptiness can never be filled, and a muffled heart beat. It takes in a practical demonstration of the difficulty of playing House of the Rising Sun on a guitar, and offers useful information - the weight of the heart is apparently around 10.2oz, about the weight of a small Starbucks latte.
This is not a big, change-your-life sort of show, but the quiet power of Leslie Hill and Helen Paris's performance lies in its low-key directness, its quirky juxtapositions, and its understanding of the geography of loneliness and the myth of return.
In one of the best sequences, Hill - dressed as a cowboy, her outfit's jauntiness disguising her fragility - returns to her home in the US, but is unable to enter the area because a missile test is taking place. The US government's offer of free popcorn is no solace when you have been kept out but, as Hill points out, all road trips are as much about what you are driving away from, as what you are driving towards.
· At Theatre Workshop, Edinburgh, August 20-25. Box office: 0131-226 5425.
