As the slinky teenage girl attempts seduction, Gordon Brown makes an unwelcome intrusion into my thoughts. She is wearing a see-through dress, sexy but hardly classy. The villagers guess that she did not buy it locally. "No," she admits, "I got it in Kirkcaldy."
That "Lang Toun" of poetry - stretched out along Fife's coaly coastline, often shrouded by the haar rolling in from the Forth, reeking of linoleum and dour enough to have spawned our Chancellor of the Exchequer - is the girl's Mecca of fashion glamour. That puts things in context.
In the village where Sharman Macdonald has set The Girl With Red Hair, the limited local attractions have nothing to do with haute couture. There's the sunset, the beach and the sea. In winter, there's the sound of the surf.
Not surprisingly, the villagers turn their attention to sex or, failing that, to fantasy. The 18-year-old Matt gets enough of the former not to need the latter. He has that quiet aloofness that boys acquire when they discover that nothing attracts a girl more than moody indifference. Not that Matt is a philanderer. On the contrary, what disturbs Corinne is that he remains besotted with Roslyn a year after she perished in a car crash. Bare-chested, Matt barbecues on the shore unpertur- bed whether anyone comes to nibble his sausages or not. Corinne wears her near-transparent number from Kirkcaldy with a touch of desperation.
If you think Matt is obsessed with Roslyn's memory, you have to meet Izzy. This 13-year-old shares something with the occupant of 11 Downing Street, being the progeny of a church minister. Her two obsessions are the certainty of eternal damnation and the elusiveness of sexual intercourse.
Her overweening crush on Matt has led her to voyeurism and she has doggedly catalogued his trysts with Roslyn and now Corinne. As Izzy's friend Pam comments, most girls her age prefer MTV. Distur-bingly, Izzy forces Pam to act out scenes from Roslyn's life and death.
Another seduction is under way. Roslyn's mother, Cath, is emerging from a period of catatonic mourning, warmed by the attentions of Stuart, a truck driver passing through town. Here is a sophisticate, at ease talking about bouillabaisse, bourride and aioli.
And there is yet another love story. Two female pensioners are enjoying the summer evening's glow together, with fish and chips washed down with schooners of sherry.
After years of friendship, only now do they tipsily begin to tell the truth. There are secret bonds that tie them closer than Ina, for one, had realised.
Maybe the time has come for them to enter a new phase of their friendship in a different place. Sadie has received a bequest from a mystery man: a modest hotel in Woolacombe.
There is lots of charm in this short play. Each of the generations has been more or less pole-axed by Roslyn's untimely death. With the summer heat stirring their passions, each character experiences a sexual catharsis that frees them. Even Izzy does, symbolically at least. The director Mike Bradwell and designer Robin Don supply a versatile set that serves simultaneously as the minister's house, beach, graveyard, cafe and bedroom. Lighting and sound effects successfully transport us to the seaside.
Among the younger actors, Helen McAlpine shines as the weirdo Izzy, evidently acting out for the umpteenth time her little plays drawing on recollections and imaginings of Roslyn and Matt.
But it is Sheila Reid as Ina who steals the show, with an endearing display of elderly prickles and grumps. Sandra Voe is her excellent foil as Sadie, the more fun-loving of the pair, a woman who still wants "the moon from out of the sky . . . to play with in my hands before I go to my grave".
Macdonald has an ear for young and old talk alike, and skilfully shifts the action between a series of dialogues. The characterisation is simple but clear, and there are many funny lines. Like one of those spoofs that seeks to give us the complete works of Shakespeare in a single evening, this play is a whole soap opera in 90 minutes without interval. WestFifers, perhaps. The script is finer and more considered than any soap, but it still has the feeling of being slight.
The generation gap that is one of Macdonald's themes may be part of the trouble. She is sensitive to the sadness that comes with each of the ages of man, but whereas she succeeds in making the young whacky and sexy, she never quite makes them interesting. Like Izzy, we become illicit observers, but unlike her we are never gripped by what we overhear.
Gordon Brown is not Fife's only export. My mother grew up in a village there, too. This play reminded me why she might have wanted to move on: maybe to somewhere still more exotic than Woolacombe.
Booking on 020 7722 9301 until 16 April
