If you ever wondered what the opposite of in-yer-face theatre was, take a look at this new work by Sharman Macdonald. Even to call it a drama would give too racy an impression. "Elegy" would be a better word for this gentle, humane, rather lovely study of a community struggling to find life after the death of a teenager.
We never see the red-headed Roslyn during the play's laidback 90 minutes, but she is present throughout. Her grave lies downstage on Robin Don's naturalistic set, which brilliantly accommodates Macdonald's three generations taking the sun in their curiously Mediterranean -like fishing village in Fife.
A year after the car accident that killed Roslyn, her friends, family and the wider community are searching for ways of going on without her. In this, it is not a play about death but life. Macdonald pinpoints those three difficult ages in which we make the transition from one generation to the next. There are the teenagers who can only imitate the adult world in their games while they await the start of an independent life of their own. There is Roslyn's bereaved mother - a compellingly buttoned-up Patricia Kerrigan - who has had the life stolen from her and never considered the possibility of love, sex and joy in the future. And there are the pensioners - a dotty double-act of Sandra Voe and Sheila Reid - insisting that, "Just because you're old you don't stop wanting."
Along with the boyfriend who must distinguish between the loves of the past and present, the characters take a restorative step towards personal freedom. Where a Sarah Kane play would culminate in some gruesome murder or other, Macdonald offers the benign suggestion that, even after death, life goes on.
This is theatre as placebo, but it tastes sweet and, in Mike Bradwell's co-production with London's Bush Theatre, it has an assured sense of the theatrical and an inoffensively feelgood air.
· Until March 12. Box office: 0131-248 4848.
