Put simply, David Greig’s new play is a limp, unsatisfying and tedious waste of two and a half hours. Damascus tells the story of a man who goes to Syria on a business trip, leaving his wife at home in Scotland on Valentine’s day. Paul, the central character, is presumably supposed to be endearing – a rather clueless but likeable Scottish chappy on the brink of mid-life crisis. Unfortunately both Greig’s writing and the performance from Paul Higgins completely undermine this intention, and as a result the focal point of the play is an irritating, insipid cliché of a character whose terrible comic timing and awkwardly delivered ‘gags’ are almost as cringe-worthy as his unconvincing moments of sincerity. The rest of the cast do a marginally better job than Higgins, but in general the acting is clumsy, uninspired and never compelling. The script is a horrible combination of pseudo-intellectual, politically superficial dialogue which manages to touch on all manner of current events but deal intelligently with none of them, and tacky, wistful speeches delivered with no finesse whatsoever. An insufferably weak ending comes out of nowhere to ice the cake of a wholly trite piece of theatre. Damascus is not a patch on Greig’s earlier work – it has none of the subtlety and captivating intelligence of Outlying Islands, nor any of the touching, abstract intrigue of The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union. It does have pretensions to be a politically discursive, modern comedy examining love, language, commitment and culture but in reality succeeds in being little more than banal, hackneyed and crucially very boring.