Steak Out – Gilded Balloon ★★★

Christmas is supposed to be a season of goodwill. In Steak Out, it feels more like a freezer left slightly ajar: cold, chaotic and full of things slowly going bad.Ruaraidh Murray’s dark comedy follows an Edinburgh family attempting an audacious festive heist, robbing a Stockbridge butcher of its finest cuts in the hope of salvaging Christmas. It is a wonderfully Scottish premise, balancing petty criminality with genuine desperation. Beneath the caper lies a story about poverty, family and the increasingly frantic things people do when the walls begin closing in. The problem is that the play never quite decides how seriously it wants to take itself. One moment it plays like a broad comedy populated by eccentric figures and increasingly absurd circumstances. The next it reaches towards something darker, exploring grief, disappointment and the compromises people make in order to survive. Neither mode is unsuccessful, but they do not always sit comfortably alongside one another. The…