Pause with a Smile

As the title hints, this is a gentle, inoffensive little show that aims to charm and beguile, rather than incite or inspire.

Writer/director Gareth Nicholls, one of this season's winners of the Arches' Platform 18 award, has gathered a collection of apparent urban myths about extraordinary coincidences. Far-fetched tales of items lost and found are woven together with those of lives lost and saved in spooky circumstances.

The job of Gary McNair and Kieran Hurley is to relay these to the audience from a musty living-room set full of curios and jigsaw pieces. Bric-a-brac figurines are used to represent a man who saved a baby's life twice in the same spot, or a woman who learned by chance of her soldier husband's fate. The pair are engaging storytellers whose enthusiasm is enough to overcome the fact that their script is simply the stories linked with the phrase “Here's one...”

Every so often the performers break away from the tales to gauge how many of us believe them to be true, but there's little further investigation into the nature of belief, or the need we might have to repeat these neat narratives in an effort to deal with the fact that “the future is more random than the past”.

Most memorably, the cumulative effect of a dozen chance events is explained to a haunting soundtrack produced by as many different audio devices, played simultaneously. Elsewhere, an attempt to find two audience members with the same birthday builds quick, cheap suspense, but will be familiar to anyone who saw last year's Fringe comedy offering from stand-up Alex Horne – who, by coincidence, tried out exactly the same thing.

NB Traverse Theatre performances are of a double bill with Money ... The Game Show.