By night, the countryside is very dark. By day it is almost entirely white - barely a black face is to be seen. Inspired by Trevor Phillips' question as to whether the countryside is guilty of "passive apartheid" and produced by the excellent Pentabus, whose home county is Shropshire (98.8% white, according to government statistics), these seven monologues by different writers turn out to be as much about the relationship of city to countryside as they are about racism.
Inevitably, the standard of writing varies wildly. But there are some corkers here, including Richard Rai O'Neill's The Management Reserves the Right, in which a black landlord of a heritage-style country inn tries to curry favour with the locals by banning "travellers" only to find himself in trouble with the local bobby. Sonali Bhattacharyya's unsettling Two Men in the Fog, about a strange meeting between an Asian man renting a cottage and the white farmer who owns the land, is also strong.
One suspects that many of the writers involved are urban dwellers, and these plays are revealing about metropolitan ignorance and attitudes to rural life. There is, for instance, a tendency to portray the countryside as a sort of gothic Wuthering Heights. You can also argue that, for all its much-vaunted multiculturalism, London is simply a city of many communities existing side by side.
None the less, when they are good, they are very good indeed. Such is the case with Kara Miller's Letting Yourself Go, a tragi-comic monologue about a lonely woman who suffers trolley rage on encountering a black woman blocking the aisle in the village shop.
Like the writing, the performances are uneven, but Theresa Heskins's production has focus and clarity. Although you could argue that these might work just as well on radio, they are undoubtedly given clout by being performed on stage - not least as a reminder that if the countryside has an absence of black faces, so does the Fringe.
· Until August 27. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
