Isabel Wright's new play uses the familiar motifs of the rites of passage drama, but is different in one crucial respect. Through an intense, poetic evocation of one long summer, when adolescence turns imperceptibly into young adulthood for a group of four friends, Wright focuses on, as Madonna puts it, "what it feels like for a girl".
One of the things that this uneven but compelling production reminds us is how predominantly male the drama of maturation has always been. You know we're in new territory when the play opens with a scalding number from PJ Harvey, in an intimate reworking of the Traverse's main auditorium into claustrophobic theatre in the round. Collages, littered with images taken from the slick, brittle, damagingly aspirational pages of teen magazines, point to the emotional and imaginative landscape of the play: the world of a young woman struggling to work out who she is and what she could be.
The writing, however, is highly conventional, and the play feels very much like an adult take on what it's like to be in the maelstrom of the mid-teens. Two sub-plots - a drowned girl washed up on the beach, and what happens to an alienated, lonely younger sister of one of the four friends - feel tacked on.
What distinguishes the play are four superbly engaging central performances, especially from Kate Dickie as Amy, the mouthy tomboy, and Christina Cochran as Donna, who is branded promiscuous but is disillusioned by sex ("an awkward and lonely thing"). As the four friends negotiate the reality - rather than the queasy, mass-media fantasy - of what womanhood might be, splintering their gang and facing their myriad demons, the quality of the acting pulls us in, but their world never quite feels real enough. On the train home, I sat next to four friends who were roughly the same age as the characters in Blooded, dressed up for a Halloween night out. They were wilder, funnier and scarier than the gang in the play, and their world was one that I, from a distance of two decades, could barely fathom.
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 0131-228 1404. Then tours to Glasgow, Livingston, Aberdeen and Dundee.
