ROAD MOVIE

ROAD MOVIE

Traverse Theatre (venue 15), Cambridge St (0131-228 1404), times vary; to 2 Sept

Anglo-American gay duo Starving Artists return to form after last year's disappointing Kissing Marianne with a romantic elegiac piece about hard- bitten Joel's journey across the States to join his lover. Godfrey Hamilton's writing ripples with sensuousness and sensitivity as Joel encounters a series of people grieving for lost loved ones, from an elderly couple at the Vietnam Memorial to a mother in a Texan truckstop trying to come to terms with her daughter's suicide. Mark Pinkosh is an endearing, affecting performer with the knack of warmly engaging an audience; under Lorenzo Mele's direction, he even pulls off the difficult task of speaking both sides of a string of duologues. A piece of unabashedly gay theatre which neither bludgeons with its own agenda nor whirls in a miasma of self-indulgence: a glorious experience.