Allen Malcolm is a heartbroken wreck and, according to him, it's all Sting's fault. A hotshot, Alain de Botton-ish philosophy professor, he has been working flat out for months on a paper about Descartes when his long-suffering fiancee Bessie gives him tickets to a Sting concert for his birthday. How, Allen wonders, can he possibly love someone who likes Sting?
So Allen embarks upon an experiment: if he can convince Sting to remake and star in all of Nick Nolte's movies, he reasons, Sting will become strangely likable and Allen's love for Bessie will remain unshaken.
Presented in lecture form (the audience become Allen's students), Tom Lister's play is an erudite and enjoyably crazed riff on the estranged relationship between intellectual intelligence, common sense and basic human feeling. The show gets much of its snap from Daniel Pirrie's superb, wince-inducing turn as the knuckleheaded scholar whose break-up with Bessie leaves him sleeping in a cupboard, eating mayonnaise straight from the jar. Pirrie also bounces cleverly off audience reactions, and his expression of dismissive disbelief when someone tells him why he has lost Bessie is a thing of comic beauty.
The play's ending may lack an emotional payoff, but Pirrie leavens his character's selfishness with just enough charm to keep us concerned about his fate.
· Until August 27. Box office: 0131-668 1633.
