Nick (Les Dennis) is the writer of Healing Hands, a TV soap that has been voted most realistic hospital drama by Which Hospital Drama Magazine, because everyone loves a severed leg, particularly in close-up. Nick hates the show's actors ("a bunch of intellectually impotent haircuts") who have been propelled on to the front page of OK magazine by the success of the series, but most of all he hates himself. He knows he could be writing art not tosh, and he loathes the cult of celebrity and the fact that we prefer to read about Posh and Becks than wars and famine. But Nick is up to his eyes in gambling debts and the only solution is to write his way out of trouble.
Guy Jones' farcical comedy is at times waspishly funny and has more than its fair share of hugely enjoyable, razor-sharp lines - it's just a pity that they don't connect to the plot more often. Maybe they would if Jones could locate the plot, which he appears to have carelessly mislaid.
The scenario is so preposterous and the characters' motivations so absurd that it's hard not to giggle when Dennis's Nick starts making impassioned speeches about saving the planet rather than spending our time voting some "whacky retard" out of Big Brother. Particularly as Dennis himself was one of those "whacky retards", as was another cast member, Jeremy Edwards, the pretty-boy actor who here plays a pretty-boy actor who has it written into his contract that he has to take off his shirt in every episode. Ah, what a wag the casting director for Marlon Brando's Corset must be! Oh the delicious post-modern irony of it all! I nearly threw up into the copy of Heat I had dangling ironically over my arm-rest.
There is a good play about the stupidity of celebrity buried in here somewhere, a piece that could do for celebrity culture what Popcorn did for sex and violence. Jones has the talent to write it, so why is he squandering himself on this? I do hope the boy hasn't got a gambling problem.
· Until August 28. Box office: 0131-556 6550. Then touring.
