It's a fine line between tragedy and comedy, and although comedian Danielle Ward alerts us to its existence at the start of her show, she walks it with such inelegance you'd think she was barely aware of it.
As the title suggests, Take-a-Break Tales is a series of dramatisations of stories published in weekly confessional magazines, in which a mother might run off with her daughter's fiancé, a prison probation officer might abandon her marriage for an affair with one of her charges, and an impotent husband might encourage his wife to sleep with other men while he watches. In a really clever show, each tale would ache with sadness while making our sides ache with laughter. However, Ward betrays no sympathy towards the characters in these stories, only off-putting superiority and a touch of scorn.
Ward spends the show sitting on an armchair introducing and watching proceedings, while a cast of three adopt gormless working-class accents not dissimilar to those of Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke as the Slobs, and eliminate from each story any sense of real feeling. You'd mind this absence a lot less if the comic writing were stronger, but lines like: "Caroline appears to be covered in blood. Can you think of anything more distressing? I can, too: 9/11" fall entirely flat. Chances are, there's more real - if unintentional - laughs in a copy of Take a Break itself.
· Until August 28. Box office: 0131 556 6550.
