Get Elvis in the title, Lee Hall must have reasoned when he came up with this much lauded black comedy a decade ago, and you can get away with murder. Or, if not quite murder, at least a quadriplegic Elvis impersonator (who springs to life between scenes), his bulimic sex-mad wife, his food-mad 15-year-old daughter and the nice-but-dim bakery manager who manages to have had sex, of a sort, with all three of them. It’s a good job, as the teenage Jill observes in the best joke of the night, that she had baked the family tortoise in a pie.

With or without Elvis, there was a time when it would have been a rash theatre manager who programmed anything in Glasgow during the last two weeks in July: every workshop and shipyard in the city used to close for what is still called the Glasgow Fair fortnight. But Andy Arnold — who is rapidly turning the Tron back into the essential venue it was when Michael Boyd, now director of the RSC, was cutting his theatrical teeth there 20 years ago — knows that things have changed.

Cue a short, sharp summer delight with this revival. That at least must have been the idea, with well known faces from BBC Scotland’s soap River City and long-running comedy Still Game in the cast, plenty of Elvis on the soundtrack and flashing lights and fireworks to finish.

The cadences of Hall’s native Newcastle translate effortlessly to the west of Scotland and there is a tender play buried in the brutality about unhappiness and how we deal with it, often by bingeing out on various appetites. Mum likes a drink as well as a shag and doesn’t really know to deal with either; Jill’s food obsession, a bit like Elvis’s, is making her plumper by the moment.

But right from the start Arnold’s production doesn’t quite reach the level of surreal hysteria it needs. They say you have to play comedy straightest of all, but the uneasy mix of naturalism and fantasy here neither reveals the truth of what lies beneath the comic madness nor makes it as funny as it should be.

It is still sporadically entertaining, if only by virtue of the sheer number of taboos it kicks out of its way. Deirdre Davis as Mum and Gavin Mitchell as the Elvis-impersonating Dad are both class acts, although Jayd Johnson in her stage debut as Jill, needs to learn a bit more about comic timing. But the whole thing needs to be a bit more — how can I put it? — all shook up. Uh-huh-huh.

Box office 0141-552 4267 to July 25

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