For Alexis and her friend Jimmy, both growing up in Harlem, there has been no time for childhood. It is all slaps, pinches, punches, hustles and gimmicks. A gimmick can mean many things: a shooting-up kit, a prostitute turning a trick or someone who is a fake. Alexis and Jimmy, respectively in love with words and painting, want to get away from gimmicks, the adults who have betrayed them by sinking into drink, dope and depression, and the streets that offer them no future. They dream of blue oceans and Paris, but only one of them makes it.
Dael Orlandersmith's one-woman show, clearly strongly autobiographical, contains no gimmicks. It is affectingly simple and true, shot through with the resigned acceptance, abrasive humour and gritty sense of purpose that took the fat, unloved little girl off the streets and into the library, where she discovered James Baldwin and the fact that she was not alone.
This is very straightforward storytelling and is not particularly theatrical. But both Orlandersmith's writing and stage presence are striking. At the end we are applauding not just the show but the woman herself, and in this instance, it seems absolutely right and proper that should be the case.
• Till August 13. Box office: 0131-228 1404.