"I've got nothing to talk to you about." "We're talking now." "Yeah, but about nothing." "It's filling the gaps, isn't it?" "It's making the gaps. If we didn't talk there would be no gaps." So goes the exchange between father and daughter in this two-hander from Enda Walsh, set on a tiny bed where the polio-afflicted daughter has been imprisoned like a fairy-tale princess.
Bedbound may not have the originality of Walsh's Disco Pigs but it demonstrates the same theatrical power. Beginning with a falling wall that hits the ground to reveal the two marooned protagonists, the play is a direct descendant of the work of Samuel Beckett, and is shot through with the wild-west mentality of small-town Ireland. It is like watching a dam burst, or two of those tiny figures who appear out of a clock as it strikes the hour and are forced to return every 60 minutes.
These characters vomit words. They say so much and they say nothing. They don't want to talk and they cannot stop themselves. Testimony spills out here like the confessions on true-life TV of murder, abuse, anger and warped love. These are people deformed by experience and anger, taking refuge in the romantic. In trying to fill the gaps between them, they have only created terrifying crevasses down which you could disappear for ever.
The ambiguity of Walsh's drama is in its final moments. Is there a tiny gesture of hope or just the loopy cycle of endlessly repeated behaviour? No ambiguity, though, in the author's own poundingly paced production or the performances of Liam Carney as the rage-filled father and Norma Sheahan as the daughter whose scissor-hands cut the air with futile entreaties.
Until Sunday. Box office: 0131-228 1404.
