★★★★

La Ronde, Arthur Schnitzler's fin de siecle Viennese bed-hopping romp through the classes, has spawned many adaptations, not all of them credited to the inspiration. Liz Lochhead's new two-hander not only acknowledges the source, but builds the chain of sexual liaisons from the starting point of two actors playing all the parts in a cut-price staging of the play. This is meta-theatre of a most unselfconscious kind, and for all its tricksiness, it is a tribute to Lochhead's skill that staying with the plot is never a stretch for the audience.

There is a flavour of Shirley Valentine in that first encounter between the Nicola Roy's ingenue in her first professional role and Keith Fleming's worldly-wise older thesp with a telly-fame past, and other theatrical echoes and tropes occur throughout Lochhead's script, which is - as you'd except - peppered with witty vernacular one-liners. When we return to the couple at the end for a sample of the technical rehearsals for their La Ronde under a martinet East European director, things steer more in the direction of Michael Frayn's Noises Off.

It is all a marvellous vehicle for Fleming and Roy, the latter also quick-changing as an academic and a working class single mum and the former hilarious as the awkward new-man online date Stephen and the Dundonian Scots-Italian musical director of the show. Director Tony Cownie and the performers match the clarity of Lochhead's complex narrative (far more multi-layered than Schnitzler's original work) with deceptive ease.

Nonetheless, the concoction does feel a little over-egged by the end, which dulls the edge of the piece a little. And if La Ronde was perceived as dangerous satire in its day, the tone of What Goes Around is ultimately more one of bitter cynicism, which perhaps says much about ours.