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- guardian.co.uk, Thursday August 10 2000 00.00 BST
A man. A woman. He is going about his life in London, working, shopping, idly turning on the TV and watching the news. She is standing in a field, looking at the sky, a TV crew filming her bloodstained back. In the flicker of a cathode ray tube their lives suddenly collide and impact.
Chris Thorpe's two-hander, which takes the form of two intertwining monologues spoken by characters several hundred miles apart, is a very promising, very controlled piece of new writing about how TV news coverage brings tragedy and atrocity straight into our living rooms and how we dismiss it so easily. As the man says of the breaking news pictures of the woman with the corpse at her feet: "He is just special effects and she is just set dressing."
This is a very cunning, very simple piece of theatre that knows exactly what it is doing. The effect it is achieving with the stabbing emotional pain of the woman provides a sharp contrast with the casual, throwaway cynicism of the man who once "ran the world".
Paul Warwick's beautifully acted production is as sharp and clean as the writing. The performers, standing on sheets of paper, are almost completely immobilised. Only their shifting feet leave indelible stains on the dazzling white. Mud? Blood? More like our guilty indifference staring us in the face.
• Till August 28. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
