Coffee-Table Notes

It's probably not every nightclub waitress who gets her first Edinburgh Festival Fringe play directed by a star of seminal TV sit-com, Friends. That's exactly what happened to playwright and performer Sabrina Mahfouz in 2011, however, when David Schwimmer, who played Ross in the series for ten years, directed Mahfouz's own performance of Dry Ice, a solo piece about a young stripper. However much such an association may have helped catch an audience's eye, it was the writing that mattered in what was a raw mix of streetwise spoken-word delivered from the hip. Three years on, and Mahfouz is preparing for her new play, Chef. Another solo piece, Chef focuses on a high-flying haute cuisine cook who ends up as a convicted criminal running the prison kitchen. Such mixing and matching of contrasting worlds comes from Mahfouz's own first-hand observations. “I was working at this beautiful restaurant in London,” says the British-Egyptian writer/performer. “I was working in th

A soldier is murdered by Muslim extremists. Around the same time, a young gay man commits suicide. Somewhere inbetween the two events is Men In The Cities, Chris Goode's solo response to what it means to be male these days. Standing at a microphone flanked by an array of electric fans, Goode ushers in a series of criss-crossing lives, including the gay suicide victim and his partner, an older man taking stock, a punk and porn obsessed ten year old, and indeed Goode himself as his authorial voice dips in and out of the narrative. Goode's style is laid-back, with his patchwork of everyday ennui in Wendy Hubbard's production  being undercut by some deadly one-liners. That's what men do, you see. They make light of things, however serious in a piece that's about Goode's methodology as much as anything. He can play God, he says, and kill off any character he doesn't like. Eventually, all his and his characters bottled-up rage explodes in a torre

 Randolph House, 4 Charlotte Lane, EH2 4QZ 31 July - 8 August, 23-31 August, Mon-Sun, 11am-5pm   For his Edinburgh Art Festival show, Roderick Buchanan moves into Randolph House, a former accountant's office in the New Town, as the culmination of his residency at Edinburgh College of Art. Buchanan will present Number Crunching, a performative piece that aims to bring the life and work of eighteenth century radical and political reformer, Thomas Muir to wider notice. What's the thinking behind Charlotte Squared? The show is a sort of open studio. The audience is invited in during the first week and the last week of EAF. The students and I will be performing 'number crunching' which is close reading towards building an improved chronology based on the life and times of Thomas Muir. The atmosphere is sort of educational with four blackboards which are there for the audience to read. These explain bits and pieces surrounding this work What attracted you to Thomas Mui

When the forthcoming Scottish Independence Referendum was first mooted several years ago, John McCann wondered why no-one was talking about it. If such a potentially epoch-changing decision had been announced in the playwright's native Northern Ireland, he figured, there would have been what he describes as an explosion of a response. As it was, in Scotland, where McCann now lives in Dundee, McCann was “gobsmacked at the silence.” For anyone caught in the crossfire of social media slanging matches between assorted flag-wavers from both the Yes and No camps that erupt with increasing force as the day of the referendum gets nearer, McCann's observation of an apparent silence might sound odd. Coming from Northern Ireland, however, where the volatility of political debate makes Scotland look positively kitten-like by comparison, you can see his point. “Even before anything would've been announced,” says McCann, “in Northern Ireland it would've been on all the front pages,

Was the holocaust real? Some say not, despite all sensible evidence to the contrary. This is one of the uncomfortable questions Chris Thorpe squared up to in Confirmation, his investigation into something called confirmation bias, a behavioural tic which effectively allows us to justify any belief system we care to align ourselves with. The answers Thorpe gets from the white supremacist he makes contact with may be predictably shocking, but, as he restlessly paces the floor dressed in respectable white shirt and grey trousers, microphone in hand, he too runs the risk of becoming a demagogue in this blisteringly physical production directed by The T.E.A.M.'s Rachel Chavkin. Thorpe is a charismatic performer, unafraid of looking us in the eye as he plays the part of his charming nemesis while we are tasked to ask the awkward questions in a series of head to head exchanges that might make believers of us yet. In a co-production by Warwick Arts Centre and China Plate commissioned by K

Succession is never easy. Just ask Laurie Sansom, who took over as artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland in 2013 after his predecessor and the company's founding director Vicky Featherstone left to take over the Royal Court in London. When Sansom's appointment was made in 2012, questions were raised in some quarters regarding his appropriateness for the job. This appeared to have little to do with the Kent-born director's experience, both in the rehearsal room directing more than twenty new plays as a a trainee director at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round in Scarborough, or else running the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Northampton for six years. This included a hit production of the stage adaptation of Muriel Spark's Edinburgh-set novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which played throughout the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2009. Despite such a pedigree, Sansom was seen by some to be the latest in a long line of senior arts posts

Rona Munro was a little girl when she first fell in love with history. All those tales of kings and queens in castles besieged by invading armies fired her imagination.Then later, on summer holidays  in Scotland, Munro would let that imagination run wild. “I would be running round all these castles pretending I lived there,” the Aberdeen born playwright says on the eve of the Edinburgh International Festival's world premiere of The James Plays, her epic trilogy of Scottish history plays. “That's just what this has been like, being able to play like that.” The James Plays is a cross-border co-production between EIF, the National Theatre of Scotland and the National Theatre of Great Britain that charts the lives and loves of James I, James II and James III, who ruled Scotland in turn during the fifteenth century. In the first play, subtitled The Key Will Keep The Lock, James I attempts to rule after spending eighteen years in an English prison. James II: Day of Th