Adele loves the TV holiday programmes, and stands on the station roof watching the trains flash by, dreaming of Budapest and Vienna. Katia and Sava have been travelling so long that they want to rest and take root, but know that they must move on to a bigger place, where they can lose themselves in the crowds. Shadowy Morocco roams the world, slipping across borders, buying and selling.
Set on a tiny station platform in a small European border town, David Greig's 10-year-old play never feels as if it were written the day before yesterday. His town - a once important place where passports were checked - is in its death throes: the local light bulb factory has shut and the trains no longer stop there.
The hopelessness of refugees who can never find a place to rest, the disenfranchisement of the young, a culture where the profit is not in making but buying and selling, and imagined threats from immigrants hang in the air wherever people feel that it is not just the trains but their future that has been cancelled.
This is early Greig, but its pungent mix of poetry and realism is instantly recognisable, as is the heightened awareness of geography, and its depiction of people living on the edge, physically and mentally.
Europe is a story of our times, and it doesn't need the kind of flashy production it gets from Douglas Rintoul or a busy design that obscures several important scenes on the station roof. Some of the performances haven't yet found their focus, either, but Greig's play has an in-built power thundering like a train towards a climax where snow falls, wolves gather and, for some, escape becomes a possibility.
· Until tomorrow. Box office: 01382 223530. At the Barbican, London EC2, from Thursday. Box office: 0845 120 7550.
