It has taken more than six years for Shining Souls to come home. Chris Hannan's elegiac play about survival among the market stalls and tenements of Glasgow opened in Edinburgh, and has since played in London and New York. There is nowhere better for it to make its west-of-Scotland debut than at the Tron.
The theatre, on the edge of Glasgow city centre, is a stone's throw from the famous Barrowlands market, around which the drama is set. In this part of town, there is always a sense that the putrid is mixing with the ethereal.
Imagine EastEnders transposed to the streets of Glasgow and written by a modern, Buddhist Shakespeare. Hannan's characters, from the bereaved Ann to gambling wideboy Charlie, are like a busted flush. Yet the play's title is not entirely ironic. There is a strange and beguiling spirituality to every encounter.
Ann is stumbling through life, the double suicide of her twin sons like a gaping wound in her side. In search of solace, she has replaced her boys with twin lovers, both called Billy, one of whom she is set to marry. Meanwhile, Charlie, dole money blown at the bookies yet again, cobbles together a story of his mother's imminent death in order to extort cash from the wife he has abandoned, only to discover that his mother has actually been rushed to the infirmary.
Hannan weaves weird and wonderful characters together with a beautifully sympathetic dialogue. When the second of Ann's Billys talks of the "serenity" of walking out of a bus crash into a field of cows, he epitomises the fabulously odd poetry of the play.
Kathryn Howden's deeply affecting Ann and Paul Blair's inch-perfect Charlie shine in a superb cast. Jacqui Gunn's concrete-grey set is brilliantly attuned to director Alison Peebles's exquisitely presented field of broken dreams.
· Until March 1. Box office: 0141-552 4267.
