Bloody Trams

If you’ve missed out on this wry verbatim play, you can always conjure a personal performance from any one of Edinburgh’s taxi drivers, shopkeepers or residents. Just ask them what they think of the city’s £700 million white elephant, that spent the best part of a decade gouging its way across the city.

Director Joe Douglas snips and moulds a ream of interviews into a witty, charming and quietly poignant collage of a city held hostage by over-reaching ambition and incompetent realisation. Two performers stand with iPhones in their hands, feeding scraps of interviews to their ears which they then perform in immaculate, quick-change impersonations.

There’s a laid-back, lounge-bar vibe to proceedings, with performer David Paul Jones resting at an exposed upright piano, allowing the interviews to sway into song. It shaves off the rougher edges of the performance, and stops it from sinking into whining or self-indulgence.

As strong as the performances are, it’s the stats that really impress – the fact that it cost less to put a man on the moon than to run a tramline from Leith to the airport. There’s also a hint of something deeper here, a suggestion that failures such as the tram and the bloated Scottish Parliament building impact on grander questions of Scottish identity and even independence.

It’s a shame that Bloody Trams doesn’t go a little further down this route, because as enchanting and enraging as it is, without a destination to head towards, this journey can’t help feel a little anticlimactic.