Questions of identity are an obsession of Scottish drama but rarely have they been pinned down with the cartographical precision of Iain F MacLeod's three-hander produced by the Traverse theatre for its annual Highlands and Islands tour.
A voluntary patient in a Glasgow psychiatric hospital, Dan is an ex-soldier traumatised by his experiences in the first Gulf war. His neurosis is characterised by an obsessive making of maps of the Isle of Lewis where he spent his formative years. But, as visiting Ordnance Survey worker Anne discovers, his maps are emotive representations of the landscape, less concerned with trig points than folklore, every inch containing stories and memories.
What makes Dan such a compelling character is the sense of a tough outer shell containing a wild poetic centre. Played by Iain Macrae in Philip Howard's production, he is a straight-backed military man with a protective need for privacy and an emotional awareness of the topography in his head that frightens him as much as it exhilarates.
By contrast the more easygoing Anne - a little too easygoing in Lesley Hart's performance - can find no such romance with the GPS accuracy of the modern map-maker, and for her the Gaelic place names are just words.
The two viewpoints - the rational versus the romantic - make an intriguing juxtaposition, given a spin by the excellent John Kazek as fellow patient Lube whose dreams of physical escape seem to leave him the most mentally trapped of the three.
If MacLeod's sense of pace is undermined by the distracting use of Paul Mounsey's music, his word games and poetic touch keep the writing fresh. But the play's central metaphor doesn't resonate as broadly as it might and Dan's dilemma seems too specific to speak to us more broadly. MacLeod, however, is definitely on the map.
· At Strathpeffer Pavilion tonight. Box office: 01997 420124. Then touring.
