Phil Nichol has become one of those Edinburgh regulars whose next production is always eagerly anticipated.

Last year his role in Edward Albee’s Zoo Story won him The Stage’s Best Actor award. This year, he returns with his stand up show, with the play Talk Radio and with this production of Sam Shepard’s play.

Perhaps Shepard doesn’t travel well but his plays tend to meander through the same situation time and time again - someone getting on with their life, someone else coming in to potentially ruin it, the conflict therein, and generally there’s some sort of family connection too.

True West fits the bill. Nichol plays Austin, an Ivy League educated writer who is looking after his mother’s house in California while she holidays in Alaska and who is spending the time writing a television screenplay for an interested producer.

Enter brother Lee, a small-time criminal and general hobo, who batters and bullies his younger sibling dominating all his relationships including that with the producer.

But Shepard’s characters are a little too under-developed. Lee’s domination of the television producer a little too unbelievable, his brother’s descent into alcoholic despair - contrively mirroring Lee’s becoming a scriptwriter - is a little too sudden.

That’s not to say performances aren’t good. Tom Stade has a brooding malevolence as Lee, a powerful personality who dominates the stage. Nichol, however, seems a little underwhelmed as Austin.

While, as ever, he immerses himself in the part, perhaps that immersion can never be as deep as it should because of a shortfall in Shepard’s writing.

This is most evident when Lee turns to his Austin and says: “You never really knew me, did you?”

Certainly there’s a feeling that both brothers are trying to reach out and connect to one another and this is compounded by the fact that both actors, Nichol particularly, still seem to be attempting to connect to their own characters.