Paul Auster's fiction makes people do very strange things. In response to his writing, French artist Sophie Calle once followed strangers through city streets letting her destiny be led by them; she also set up home in a New York phone box and forced herself to smile at strangers.
Julie Fuller was so entranced by the postmodern enigma of his New York Trilogy that she has written her new play in the spirit of it - it is full of chance encounters, and there is a thin line between fiction and reality.
Greta is being sent copies of Paul Auster books from New York. Intrigued, she travels to the city. Instead of finding Auster, she finds Hope, a Polish immigrant. He had an Aunt Greta, killed in a road accident. Greta's mother met a similar fate. They talk about life, chance, bagels. After a while, Hope disappears. "It didn't mean anything," he says, before exiting through a fridge- freezer.
And it doesn't mean anything. Auster's ideas are being toyed with here. The elegance and depth of his writing is sadly lacking, as is any real sense of intrigue. We are supposed to believe that Greta is under surveillance, that she is lost in a labyrinthine existential maze. To suggest this, a man lurks behind the set, pushing Post-it notes and books on to the stage. At what is meant to be a dramatic climax, a cascade of notes come flying out of the freezer compartment, and your interest is suddenly gripped by the possibility that some oven chips might follow, or maybe some peas.
Greta does a lot of lying on her bed with books and saying trite things about them. By the time Moby's Porcelain comes on as one of the musical interludes, any sense of enigma has been squashed. This is all too obvious, too cliched.
There is a glimmer of dramatic possibility in the unlikely friendship between the two strangers, and you can't help wishing Fuller had dumped the Auster framework and explored the bizarre connections and disconnections of city life in her own way. "The question is the story itself," she quotes from Auster. As it stands, the story isn't strong enough to make you care about its answers.
Until Saturday. Box office: 0141-221 4001.
