There are figurative and literal deserts in this play: the real desert is Tobruk, a port on the Mediterranean Coast, while the emotional deserts exist in the mind of Tom Robertson, a young exotic dancer at a gay nightclub in Toronto, and in the heart of Esther, his tart-tongued widowed mother who runs a Highland dance school.

As Kilt moves fluently between past and present, the North African desert port is the setting for the blossoming but surreptitious love between Mac, Tom’s Scottish grandfather, and his commanding officer Captain Lavery during the Second World War. Their love is interrupted by the vagaries of war and Mac’s marriage, fatherhood, and immigration to Canada. Despite the distance, the flame between the two men is never extinguished.

It is a difficult love, one that breeds bitter consternation in the heart of Mac’s daughter Esther, who, even as a girl, accurately read the homoerotic signals between her father and Lavery. Esther is further embittered by seeing her father’s imprint on her son, particularly when Tom performs his provocative dances in Mac’s old kilt.

When Mac dies, Esther is determined to bury the kilt along with the body in an effort to destroy the emblem of her son’s sexual orientation. But things don’t exactly go according to her plan. Her father’s old lover appears at the funeral, stirring up old memories and Tom’s curiosity, and this causes an intense family contretemps.

There is a skillful balancing of humour and drama, particularly in the domestic scenes between mother and son. The erotic encounters between Mac and Lavery are handled delicately, and Lavery’s later appearance as a lonely bachelor is poignant. But Kilt suffers from clichés about homosexuality and homophobia. It also suffers from attenuation, for the reader does not have a palpable sense of Mac’s life after the war. As Mac’s ashes are scattered along the banks of the Clyde, the wistfulness doesn’t completely transcend the feeling of a sensitive play that comes short of full, soaring flight.