This is Niall Ashdown's account of a week-long birdwatching holiday that he took with his father in the summer of 1998.
Not a lot happens, except that Niall chats to his dad about musicals and notches up 129 species of bird, including all 10 species of the European woodpecker. Yet somehow this gentle and wise little piece of storytelling theatre is quite mesmerising.
It takes hard work to be as artless as this. Ashdown is the most personable of performers and he structures the story of his Wild Wings holiday so that it is the words that remain unspoken, that really count. Interwoven with the tale of the group sighting the great bustard is a paean to the kind of childhood that has all but disappeared, and a study of a father-and-son relationship of both huge emotional distance and tender intimacy.
A quiet, unshowy and honest piece, Ashdown's show says as much about the strange behaviour of humans as it does of birds. I look forward to his train-spotting epic with anticipation.
Until August 27. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
