This is a very strange little number. You can look at it two ways: Carla Lane, queen of the sitcom, has written either an unintentionally bad play, or an anti-sitcom that lays bare the truth behind all those ditsy housewives and mothers in TV comedies whose mild frustrations are apparently the fount of all humour.
It doesn't work, but there is enough here to keep you interested, from Kate Marlow's production, which treats the whole thing as if it were actually TV, to Nichollette Collins's comically deadpan performance, a convincing account of a woman in need of intravenous Prozac. Lena is a middle-aged woman. Her marriage is not unhappy but it has lost all passion. Her children have left home ("Bye Mam, thanks for your life"). She has nothing left but Radio 4 plays and sexual fantasies about Arron, the odd-job gardener, who may or may not be a figment of her imagination.
Most plays about middle-aged women's lives are horribly soft (think Shirley Valentine), but this is a relentless and quite uncomfortable account of a woman trying to hold it all together while she is dying inside. The real tragedy of Lena is not that she has become invisible to the wider world, but that her own family have failed to notice her distress.
Till Monday. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
