Edinburgh's official drama programme normally improves as it goes along. This year that shouldn't be too difficult, as it kicks off with Grid Iron's messy, confusing re-creation of the dying days of Scottish variety theatre. What makes it all the sadder is that writer Douglas Maxwell and director Ben Harrison were previously responsible for the hugely popular Decky Does a Bronco.
The problem is that Maxwell offers too many conflicting storylines. We see events through the eyes of a technician, trapped in a ghostly showbiz purgatory, recalling the time in 1929 when a tatty provincial theatre changed from cine-variety to talkies. But Maxwell then switches his interest to Charlie Buchanan, the travelling rep in charge of the cinematic switchover, who, rather like the hero of Gogol's Government Inspector, is mistaken for a figure of huge importance. On top of that Maxwell explores the lives of the sad, seedy variety performers who find it difficult to come to terms with reality.
As Osborne brilliantly showed in The Entertainer, a collapsing variety theatre can be used as a metaphor for a declining nation. But Maxwell's play fails to tell us anything much about the state of Scotland in 1929, and its attitude towards variety's lost souls is pitched uneasily between pity and contempt. The hapless Charlie is haunted by a childhood memory of being humiliated on stage by the theatre's resident comic, Jack Salt. A closeted, kilted singer is brutally rejected by his former partner who is now an unbalanced equilibrist. And the theatre's manager lives in cloud cuckoo land, believing that Harry Lauder will turn up to save his dying hall. On the evidence Maxwell presents, you believe that the talkies didn't come a moment too soon.
Buried somewhere in this inchoate play is a potentially interesting idea about the way we all use theatrical games as a protection against life. But it stands little chance of emerging in Ben Harrison's formless production, which resembles A Night at the Opera without the laughs. Only in its re-creation of a late 1920s concert-party does it begin to capture the surreal awfulness of the bottom-end of showbusiness. Of the performers stranded in this unfortunate botch-up, the only ones to emerge with much credit are David Ireland as the moon-faced Charlie and Peter Kelly as the demented manager singing old Lauder songs in the echoing stalls. The final impression, however, is that Maxwell has missed a heaven-sent opportunity to treat the decaying variety theatre as a potent poetic symbol.
· Until August 17. Box office: 0131-473 2000.
