Iain Heggie's play is a filthy and very free adaptation of Marivaux's play Double Inconstancy. It is set in a very different context - the Ayrshire training centre of Costly Coffee, a global chain of coffee bars - but asks the same question: can the course of love be altered? In a world shaped by the machinations of multinational corporations, marred by cynicism and cheapened by the froth of celebrity (every character in Heggie's play shares a first name with a star), what happens to commitment and integrity?
These questions are posed in lively fashion, especially in the first act, where the fast-paced, sharply written, expletive-heavy Glasgow patter stabs and shocks. Ringo, a Costly Coffee worker, delivers fresh insight into the class system: "Rich bastards and top totty go together like hard-on and gaping fanny." Jarvis, a right-on eco-campaigner, has a bristlingly right-off way of talking about his girlfriend, Celine ("Where is she till she gets my arse rimmed and my cock sucked?"), and a father justifies sleeping with his son ("What use are family unless it's to get a slag?").
All this is slickly delivered by a strong cast, working well with characters that are little more than archetypes. Gabriel Quigley plays Whitney, the driving force behind the tests of love, with the right steely confidence, and Julie Austin brings to Celine, a woman torn between Jarvis and a new love, a gleeful comic polish. There are no weak performances, and Graham Eatough's direction is sufficiently taut in the first hour for the play to have moments of bleak, dark satire.
There are limitations, however. In the second act, not only does much of the dramatic tension seep away, but the mood also feels more sitcom than savage. There are still occasional barks of laughter from the audience, unable to believe quite what they are hearing and seeing, but the fairy-tale silliness of the scenarios begins to grate. If only Heggie could write the dialogue he does, with its painfully insightful observation, and set it in a world that feels more real. That could have the power of a double espresso, gulped down in one.
Until June 1. Box office: 0141-552 4267.
