It was a clever move for director Jeremy Raison to team Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with Lorca's Blood Wedding in this mini-rep season. It isn't only that both are tales of young lovers compelled by social circumstance to meet a bloody end, it's also that we get to watch the same actors trying out similar but different roles. One night you can see Iain Robertson and Lorna Craig killing themselves for love in a Glasgow mortuary in Gregory Thompson's relocated Shakespeare, the next you can see them doing much the same in a scorching Spain.
Not only the cast but elements of Giuseppe di Iorio's set remain too, a concrete tenement mutating into a Spanish farmhouse as vast curtains sweep across the stage to obscure the previously graffiti-covered back wall.
It would be nice to say the idea demonstrated the actors' range, but while Robertson is single-minded and driven as Romeo, he seems stiff and humourless as Leonardo, the married lover of Craig's bride with whom he elopes on her wedding day. It's hard to see why she should behave so impulsively when this lover is scarcely any less one-dimensional than Mark Wood's lumbering bridegroom.
Lorca, like Shakespeare, is interested in the impetuousness of young lovers, especially when fuelled by social repression, but there's no need for love to be this blind. The result, in Raison's production, is that the interest swings to the older generation and two excellent performances from Jimmy Chisholm, playing the bride's pragmatic father with a compellingly slow, rural rhythm, and Cara Kelly, as the groom's bereaved mother, poignant, resigned and lyrical. Their scenes are highlights in a patchy production that only adds to the unevenness of Lorca's text with its strange interventions of the moon and a fairytale beggar woman. Matilda Brown's score might have provided the unifying glue, but its melodies are gloomy and rhythms muted, leaving Kelly's raw passion to carry the play.
· Until March 4
· Box office: 0141-429 0022
