South African writer and performer Greig Coetzee kicks up a storm with this dazzling display of rhyming couplets. His play, a one-man road movie for the stage, is both a love story and a lament for what happens when your life just doesn't rhyme any more. Its anti-hero is Johnny, a dispossessed, white, working-class South African who served in the military during the apartheid years and who now can't find a place for himself in the new South Africa. He has no money, no purpose, no self-respect and no hope. Then he meets Eve, and the two take off like a South African Bonnie and Clyde on a helter skelter ride through the country's badlands, cheap motels and dangerous bars.
Initially you wonder whether Coetzee will be constrained by his poetic form and whether your ear will adjust to it, particularly as the poetry is a stew of slang which cooks English, Afrikaans and Zulu in a single pot. But the writing pulls you in with its natural rhythms, Syd Kitchen's live soundtrack has you hooked, and Coetzee himself is mesmerising, and what might be just another tale of low life and doomed love becomes a story of all South Africa's Johnny Boskaks, all looking for their place in the world, searching for redemption.
The writing dazzles. Eve is a "double-come, bubble-gum chewing, kick-arse, troublesome angel," her demon ex-lover has muscles in his arm that "wrestle like snakes." Imagine if Shakespeare had ever taken to gangsta rap, and you'll get my drift.
· Until Sunday. Box office: 0131-228 1404.
