Would it be possible to dramatise the Act of Union? Unlikely, but 7:84 has justly recognised that 300 years of marriage between England and Scotland deserves to be commemorated in some way - especially as the pro-independence SNP surges ahead in the polls. Director Lorenzo Mele finds a sideways solution, commissioning four writers to respond to the themes of separation and union, while keeping the specifics at one remove.
The result is four family-centred playlets that strain so hard to mean something, they only intermittently take on a life of their own. This is theatre as puzzle page, offering the intellectual challenge of figuring out the metaphors, but giving relatively little insight once you have done so.
Nicola McCartney's Wound offers the most heavy-handed parallel, a schematic portrait of a quarrelling family trying to mollify their daughter. She, we figure, is the angry Northern Irish unionist rejected by the birth mother of the UK and spurned by the adoptive parents of the Republic. It might have worked as comedy, but delivered straight, the metaphor is laboured and the performances stilted.
Similarly, Linda McLean's Doch-an-Doris (A Parting Drink) presents the nations as a family awaiting marriage guidance, but is, at least, leavened by a spark of humour. Selma Dimitrijevic uses an intriguing structure to compare two misunderstandings between a father and son in A Time to Go.
Significantly, the most successful of the four is also the least oblique. Haresh Sharma's Eclipse is a monologue about a gay man from Singapore retracing the journey of his forebears out of Pakistan and India. Absorbingly told by Umar Ahmed, it suggests that ancestral memory is never as meaningful as the allegiances of everyday life.
· At the MacPhail Centre, Ullapool (01854 613336), tomorrow. Then touring.
