There is a line in Patrick Marber's Closer when one of the male characters confesses that if women knew what went on in men's heads, they would be appalled. That moment slipped into my head when the male character in Stitching admitted that he had his first orgasm looking at a picture of naked women lining up to be gassed in Auschwitz.
Anthony Neilsen's two-hander focuses on the gulf between what men and women want, and what happens when sexual fantasy is a substitute for real intimacy. Abby is pregnant, and she and Stuart are trying to unstitch their troubled relationship to see if there is a way forward for them and a child. But is Abby as damaged as she seems, and is Stuart the reasonable bloke he appears?
Neilsen's play is like a huge piece of knitting that has unravelled. You don't know where the beginning or end is, what is true and what is not. It is full of dropped stitches, too many to make it a good play. That is a pity because it is a brave one, acted with enormous bravado by Selina Boyack and Phil McKee.
Stitching isn't easy to watch. It confronts the fact that men fantasise about schoolgirls and women sometimes enjoy playing the whore. Neilsen also suggests something unpalatable but probably true: women frequently acquiesce to things, particularly in bed, out of either love or emotional neediness. So often when asked what we want, we reply, like Abby: "I want what you want." That way, suggests Neilsen, lies unhappiness and madness.
Fantasy may have a place in the bedroom, but like the pornography Stuart downloads from the net, it infects and destroys just as much as Abby's need to please leads to the death of a child and an appalling self-mutilation. Neilsen shows us terrible things. We can choose to face up to them and ourselves, or simply look away.
· Until August 24. Box office: 0131-228 1404.
