How could any man care so much about either Sting or Nick Nolte – or indeed any of the other detritus of popular culture – that he would throw over his imminent wedding to a perfectly nice woman who clearly adores him because she likes the wrong one? Tom W. Lister might have written a more interesting play about male vanity if he had asked that question of his philosophy lecturer hero, Allen, rather than taking it for granted that irrational behaviour on this scale is something that men do all the time.

In this case, Allen’s fiancée gives him tickets for a Sting concert for his birthday. Big mistake; he doesn’t want to offend her by refusing them but he hates Sting so much that he can only contemplate going if he can get Sting to turn into his hero Nick Nolte, by remaking all Nolte’s action movies with Sting in the lead role. This deliberately absurd premise will no doubt amuse some, but Allen’s obsessive, delusional pursuit of it drives his girlfriend away. Frankly I was with her.

That said, Sting for Nolte is neatly and pacily done, cutting between an increasingly insane philosophy lecture at Edinburgh University (the venue is the student union building in term-time; the audience become the students) and the flat of the two lovers.

With warm support from Kati Markkanen, Daniel Pirrie is convincing as the cocky young academic who turns into a wild, staring-eyed obsessive, eventually kidnapping Sting from the Edinburgh Film Festival and hiding him in a cupboard.

Lister attempts to justify his premise in terms of the paper on Cartesian philosophy that Allen is writing – whether it was possible for something inconceivable to exist. But Descartes was worrying about the nature of God rather than popular culture. Lister would probably claim that it’s the irrationality that is important, not how plausible it is. Still, it does all feel a bit of a fuss about nothing.

Box office 0131-688 1633. To Aug 27