<DIV>Storm clouds are gathering above the bar of the less-than-exclusive Thistle Hotel.<BR>Stuart Ransom, a jet-setting, supermodel-chasing pro golfer with an extravagant<BR>ego and a career nearing the end of a spectacular decline, is drinking his way<BR>through the night. Desperate for attention, he strikes up free-flowing<BR>conversations with anyone who will listen. But as he banters with Jen, the impish<BR>barmaid with a talent for telling tall tales rivaled only by Stuart’s own, the night<BR>takes an extraordinary turn.<BR> <BR>Among those caught up in the unfolding drama are a tattooist with a mad mother<BR>and a love of anything from the 1940s; a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist and his<BR>considerably more conservative wife; the mysterious Vicki, the sister of Stuart’s<BR>defiant yet curiously devoted manager; and a misguided female vicar of the Church<BR>of England and her husband, Gene, the Thistle’s hapless bartender.<BR> <BR>They are a highly entertaining and eccentric bunch, but there’s more to them than<BR>meets the eye. “There enter in questions of what it is to be consumed by love or<BR>lust, by shame, by the longing to be someone else or nobody” (The Guardian), and<BR><I>The Yips</I> unites them in an absorbing, exhilarating tour de force.<BR></div>