@ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, on Thu 28 May 2015

An initiative of Cumbernauld Theatre, the inaugural Scottish Short Play Award has seen 120 prospective dramatic snippets whittled down to the four winners presented tonight as a theatrical tapas selection. And tasty morsels they are too.

Emily Ashton’s Morven sees the titular protagonist plonked in a Big Brother-style Diary Room where she is interrogated about the death of her child by disembodied and emotionally detached voices from above. The character’s earthy vernacular is well scripted and there’s a satisfaction in the way her anger and paranoia crescendos, although the short format means there’s little that’s distinctive in the broken relationship/child death storyline for audiences to really get their teeth into.

Romance by Ross Dunsmore is an initially sweet and funny tale of teenage love. A schoolboy is dappily infatuated with his new squeeze for her pretty face and inner self (were that more teenage lads were so innocently inclined!) Also going against type, his inamorata actively wants to be sexualised. “Are you gay?” “Why don’t you look at me like that?” When she finally is, via a video leaked online by her new beau, things take an unpleasant turn. Exceedingly well-observed (inspired by an overheard bus conversation) and superbly acted by Joanne Thomson and Cristian Ortega, it leads neatly to an even more powerful drama of young love…

It Never Ends , written by Cameron Forbes, starts with simple boy-meets-girl in a nightclub, and morphs, through a fug of drink and drugs, into a confused, horrifying morning after. Its lyrical, stream of consciousness style works well in the hands of actors Jenny Hulse and John Scougall, who address their thoughts separately to the audience. The ebbs and flows of a heavy night clubbing are beautifully mapped, until we reach its disturbing and provocative conclusion. A potent fifteen minutes.

After that, it’s tough to immediately adjust to the surreal world of Martin McCormick‘s Potterrow which concludes. Gavin Jon Wright plays a delusional young father with a penchant for Gene Kelly. Gibbering about dogs and drunks and kids, he skips his way Singin’ In The Rain style from Bruntsfield on a mission to deal with an old lady in Potterrow. The acting is smart and there’s a nice atmosphere to the piece, even if its storyline is tricky to get hold of and its geographical references strictly parochial.

There’s much naval gazing in the post-show Q&A about whether the short play format works and whether it’s marketable to audiences. The answer is: it does and it is and with YouTube and Vine wrecking our attention spans… awww, look at that, a puppy.