Novelist Louise Welsh has said that she was nervous about attending this stage adaptation of her debut crime novel for fear of shouting out and joining in. She managed to restrain herself on the first night, but the award-winning writer - selected recently by the Guardian as one of 50 women on the way to the top - would have been justified in cheering the job done by Tam Dean Burn, as actor, adaptor and co-director, with his fellow actor, Anne Marie Timoney, and co-director and designer, Kenny Miller.
There are always losses and gains when stories move from one medium to another. Here the gains are revealed immediately, while the losses show themselves gradually. The opening conveys a sense of degenerate malevolence: the gloom, the mirrors and the ripped-up paper look like the aftermath of some decadent party, while Timoney sits, lifeless, on a chair, tied up in rope. Is she a willing participant in a sadomasochistic game or the victim of some sad pornographer who gets his kicks from necrophilia?
Therein lies the theme of Welsh's book, which uses the thriller genre to question our attitudes to sexual behaviour. Her narrator, Rilke, is an auctioneer with a penchant for sex with strangers. His discovery of a stash of illegal pornography during a Glasgow house clearance both intrigues and outrages him. But how far removed are these snuff photographs from the Polaroid glamour shots taken at a camera club? What are our limits, asks Welsh, and why?
If Burn underplays the psychological torment felt by Rilke, he does a splendid job of holding together the character's contradictions. This is a stylish, well-paced, brilliantly acted production, and although it occasionally fails to make clear the intricacies of the story, it remains a taut and moody thriller.
· Until November 15. Box office: 0141-429 0022.
