STORIES FOR THE WOBBLY HEARTED, TRAVERSE THEATRE 4/5

Being lonely and wanting to be alone aren't necessarily the same thing. Daniel Kitson's meticulously detailed series of short stories stays true to his obsessions, as he unravels a series of lost causes and last-chance attempts at something resembling true love in a dysfunctional age. That they ache so convincingly is testament to Kitson's observational skill, as well as to his facility for gallows humour.

Told in a simple Jackanory fashion somewhere between Ivor Cutler, Morrissey at his most maudlin and Dan Rhodes's equally charming set of lovelorn miniatures, Anthropology, each sorry tale is punctuated by a series of episodic films as well as some zen-like epithets of homespun wisdom forged from the annals of the terminally chucked. As heartbreaking as they are cuddlesome, the real-life romances here are the gentlest of bedtime stories for those who only ever sleep in single beds.

HACI GIUGO, AURORA NOVA 4/5

Auschwitz and Hiroshima have become bywords for atrocity way beyond their geographical locale. To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the atomic bomb's first fallout, Milan's Comuna Bares and Fare Anima companies have joined forces for this collage of sound and vision, which takes from sources as diverse as Stanley Kubrick and Leftfield in an attempt to evoke the full human horrors of a world gone mad. Beginning with an opening number from Cabaret, we're whirled across time and space, from train station to concentration camp and the final solution. While a plummy-voiced narration weaves the threads of destruction together in Irina Casali's production, Haci Giugo is most successful when it works with images alone, like the carefully choreographed sight of marching feet, or the near slapstick sketches in the concentration camp. Best of all is when all this combines during the last 20 minutes

of film, music and a final stunning image that leaves your nape-hair rigid with the truth of what you've just witnessed.

DIRTY WORKS, UNDERBELLY 2/5

Shocking. No, not for the reasons the venue sponsors removed their logo from all the publicity material of this nasty little dive down the U-bend of drug culture in a grim urban estate, but rather because Jamie Linley's play for the New York-based company of English ex-pats who make up Stiff Upper Lip isn't very good.

An everyday tale of users, losers and abusers in a debt-ridden nowheresville of cheap thrills, Linley attempts a streetsmart poetic that falls between A Clockwork Orange and Steven Berkoff's East, but actually comes on more like Guy Ritchie's rhyming dictionary of hackneyed slang.

TODAY'S CHOICE

DUBLIN BY LAMPLIGHT

Traverse Theatre, various times A ribald mix of commedia dell'arte tells the absurd tale of a turn-of-thecentury Ireland, where all manner of political plots and skulduggery are afoot as some attempt to set up a national theatre of Ireland. Michael West's play for The Corn Exchange is ingenious entertainment.