There's your average run-of-the-mill Edinburgh monologue - and then there's this. Dominic Cavendish's adaptation of George Orwell's 1939 novel has classy, understated prose, elegant pruning and shaping, plus a performance from Hal Cruttenden that is perfectly judged. Cruttenden doesn't so much play glumly respectable middle-aged, middle-income insurance salesman George Bowling as inhabit him. Discontent and regret ooze out of every pore; his body looks saggy and lumpy, like an unloved sofa. This is a man resigned to the fact that "no woman will ever look at me again". Then the tiny, lethal pause. "Unless I pay her."
There is a touch of the comic about George, and a touch of the Cassandras, too. He ruefully predicts that both he and the country are going to the dogs. George wants out, but that is not possible on less than £10 a week. He thinks of the road where he lives as "a prison with cells, all in a row; semi-detached torture chambers". He only likes his children when they are asleep, and he can't bear his wife.
A windfall offers the possibility of temporary reprieve from this dull, sad life, and he escapes for a week to the village of his childhood, a place of Elgar, long summer days and monstrous carp in secret pools awaiting his rod and line. This is a magnificent monologue: for anyone who is fat and over 40, George's feeling that everything was better in childhood will strike a melancholy chord. Going back turns out to be a mistake, of course, and George knows he is going to go under with the country as it marches blindly off to war.
The sour smell in the air is that of a man being consumed by the cancer of terminal disappointment, in a show that, although limited by the monologue form, proves intelligent and surprisingly moving.
· Until August 25. Box office: 0131-623 3030.
