Shoplifters, wife-beaters, playground bullies - they're bad people, right? But look a little closer and the reality is rarely so simple. Behind any criminal act is a complex mess of desires, relationships and actions, few of them bad in themselves.
Thus it is in Nightingale and Chase, a modest two-hander about a couple careering towards trouble in spite of their best intentions. The outwardly respectable Nightingale turns out to be free with his fists, and his younger wife, Chase, has aserious shoplifting habit.
But playwright Zinnie Harris never lets this behaviour become their defining characteristics. Rather, she is non-judgmental, presenting the couple as well-meaning people who, through force of circumstance and pressure from each other, become drawn into criminal acts.
His violence and her thieving are not inevitable. But with Chase only just out of prison, and Nightingale keeping her away from the son she hasn't seen in 10 months, and the two of them not knowing how to talk to each other, it's all but impossible to avoid an ugly end.
That might come across as so much wishy-washy liberalism were it not for the tough honesty of Harris's writing, structured as a series of monologues to reveal thought as well as deed. By never showing Nightingale and Chase in conversation, she dramatises the gulf between them. This, and her subtext about mental illness, creates a picture of a world in which people's innocent desires - to love, to be at peace, to be a family - are forever thwarted by their own patterns of behaviour.
Seen at close quarters, the play has an extra intensity thanks to the unsentimental performances of Lewis Howden and Lesley Hart. In Guy Hollands's pared-down production, Howden brilliantly shows how a man can be both genial and violent, while Hart perfectly captures the toughness and vulnerability of a woman in trauma.
· Until February 28. Details: 0141-429 0022.
