Swallow (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh)

Playwright Stef Smith made a big impact with Roadkill at the Traverse a few years ago. The anger and passion of that debut has settled into something more skilled, yet more self-consciously formulaic, in the tale of three girls re-building shattered lives and egos.

It's a kind of automatic feminist writing that ticks so many boxes, with a layer of naked symbolism and cringe-making sentimentality, that you (or rather, I) feel like screaming, or at least banging all their heads together, as Orla O'Loughlin's production stutters to a close, eventually.

Anna (Emily Wachter) hasn't been out of her room for two years, building her nest, going crazy, smashing things up. In the same apartment block, Rebecca (Anita Vettesse) is moaning about a failed love affair, a situation partly remedied when the third girl, Sam (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), decides she's really a boy, tapes her breasts and gets fiddling with her fingers.

Did you hear the one about the woman who lodged her mobile in an intimate enclave of her anatomy and rang the number to see if it, or she, was turned on? Even Jim Davidson might pass on that one, but in the Traverse it's girl talk. And Anna's idea of her own victim status is to identify herself as an all purpose harbinger of bad news, from Auschwitz and Chernobyl to the Twin Towers and bird flu. You could hear the silent audience cry of, "puh-lease!"

The monologues eventually entwine, but then the pelican stuff starts, the bird flying through Anna's window without breaking it and Anna herself gymnastically reaching for a phone cord, not to strangle herself, alas, but to speak to her long-suffering brother. Oh, and when they all finally get in touch with each other, it snows.

Swallow runs at the Traverse Theatre until 30 August.