The Weegies Have Pokled Edinburgh's Pandas

Robin Cairns, Glasgow’s affable poet-cum-standup, is the sole navigator through tonight’s pandanapping caper, told through several of his broadly-brushed Scottish stereotypes, each with a closetful of secrets to hide.

There’s an overly zealous charity auction and our mild-mannered antihero, Morningside Malcolm, cops the blame when a pair of Corstorphine’s finest monochrome bears go missing from the local zoo. Before long, the whole of Edinburgh is crawling with giant mammals, Malcolm’s suffering his own existential crisis and something mysterious is going down in his shed. And just when is it right to broach the subject of perineum stimulation with your wife?

It’s all nicely weird, in a lurid brainsplurge way, with some inoffensive pokes at Central Belt class tensions and resident political ineptitude; but it’s all so mired in home-patch colloquialism that it’s easy to feel you’re on the outside of a joke looking in. Neds, trams, the local press and the Canny Mans pub are all plundered for easy gags, but even with a few ready-won laughs, the shallow pond of characters quickly runs dry and the plot—which begins with promisingly oblique daftness—fizzles out fast.

There’s plenty of potential here: that disarming penchant for the absurd, a chest-puffing (Glas)Weegian gangster called Big Urquie who feels like he should be in the lead role, and Cairns’s own undeniable twinkly-eyed mischievousness all hold court, but it doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts.

In the end, like one of our poor panda’s overly chewed bamboo roots, it all feels a bit samey and soon goes limp.