Variety, King's Theatre, Edinburgh

No thanks for the memories

Staging an elegy is not the most upbeat way of opening a festival – particularly when the elegy fails to convince you that the deceased was ever fully alive in the first place. That's one of the main problems with Variety, the new play by Douglas Maxwell which gets the Official Festival programme off to a pretty party-pooping start.

Set in 1929, the show homes in on a theatre in south-west Scotland, on its last day as a place of live entertainment before it is converted into a picture palace. The local company of variety artistes do not yet know that they are about to be made redundant, and mistake the nervous young man from the cinema company, who has arrived to oversee the takeover, for a Hollywood talent scout.

The manager (played by Peter Kelly), meanwhile, appears to have gone mad and veers between believing that the great comedian Harry Lauder is on his way to save the theatre and apocalyptic visions of pulling it down to free its ghosts. The drama is presented as a spectral retrospective, mediated to us by a mysterious technician (Jimmy Harvey) who seems to have got stuck in the building as a weird kind of purgatory.

In John Osborne's The Entertainer, music hall in its dying days emblematised a debased, post-imperial Britain. While there are some memorable images in Variety – with the artistes upstaged by flickering old newsreel footage – the metaphors are, by comparison, galumphingly generalised and obvious. Life rolls on, but the bill is always changing. No matter when we come in, we feel we've missed the best part of the show. There'll come a time when this present night won't even be a memory. We are treated to these truisms as if they were painfully hard-won wisdom.

To mourn the passing of a theatrical tradition, we need to be reminded of its former vibrancy. Stephen Sondheim cracked that problem in Follies, where the showbiz reunion at a soon-to-demolished theatre is poignantly infiltrated by the younger selves of the performers. But Maxwell's play and Ben Harrison's subdued production signally fail to conjure up any sense of the verve of variety in its heyday, as a contrast to the sour wranglings (homosexual and heterosexual) and current broodings on loss of its superannuated troupe.

The vulgar energy and audience-grabbing directness are nowhere in evidence, not even in the scene where, acting as stooge to the failing comic (John Kazek), the young man from the cinema company (David Ireland) suddenly discovers he can make people laugh and is thus converted to live entertainment.

The recorded nature of the music is an added embarrassment in a piece supposedly nostalgic for present-tense performance. Having come to praise music hall, Variety only succeeds in burying it.

To 17 August (0131-529 6000)