This week's theatre in Scotland: Variant, The Spark, Spin! reviews

Prolific playwright Peter Arnott has two new plays premiering in the next few months. In August, Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape opens at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. Before that, though, comes Variant (★★★★), a tricksy, hour-long two-hander co-produced by A Play, a Pie and a Pint and the Traverse Theatre. Arnott’s 50th play, it ran at Òran Mór last week and now arrives in Edinburgh.

There is something Beckettian – or Stoppardian – about its set-up: two nameless characters, a man and a woman, sat on swivelling chairs in the centre of a circle, have a cryptic and repetitive conversation about who they are and what they are doing there. This is far from purgatorial, though: the dialogue is dynamic, the tension taut and Arnott does eventually supply a satisfying solution.

Kolbrún Björt Sigfúsdóttir directs deftly on Gemma Patchett and Jonny Scott’s simple, circular set, and Simon Donaldson and Meghan Tyler supply two slick, slippery performances. It emerges as a quick, confusing and then compelling contemplation of how we can never really know each other.

Kathy McKean’s The Spark (★★★★) will follow it from Òran Mór to Edinburgh next week, and is equally entertaining. A three-hander, it focuses on a perimenopausal politician, who suddenly discovers she can wield supernatural powers when frustrated. She boils her pompous screenwriters’ pet fish in their tank, sweeps a sexual harasser off his feet and explodes a backstabbing colleague’s head.

McKean’s script cleverly combines magical realism and social satire; director Gordon Barr slickly and disorientingly overlaps scenes; Patchett and Scott (who are A Play, a Pie and a Pint’s resident designers) provide a tornado of office chairs for a set; and Nicole Cooper, Beth Marshall and Johnny Panchaud supply three strong performances as the mind-bending minister, her frank and funny therapist, and her conceited aide respectively.

Catriona MacLeod’s Spin! (★★★★), meanwhile, offers a light look at how technology is taking over our lives. Produced by Vanishing Point, as part of its easily transported touring programme Unplugged, and An Tobar, it follows a few weeks in the life of a lonely woman and her AI washing machine.

Things start innocently enough. The SuperMax 3000 only wants to help Pauline do her laundry. Soon, though, things get stranger. It wants to plan out her day. It wants to know who she is meeting. Then it comes to life, locks the doors, steals her phone and starts singing Frank Sinatra songs to her.

MacLeod’s direction is as wacky as her writing and she draws amusing turns from both Louise Haggerty as the unhappy Pauline and Andrew Keay as the omniscient SuperMax 3000. Hats off to designer Kenneth MacLeod, too, for the sparkly, supersized washing machine he plonks centre stage. There is a French Fancy and a Bay Breeze shot included with every ticket, too. Delicious.