Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars
In the city there are eight million stories. Edinburgh being Edinburgh, it would probably like to boast it has a fair few more. Given the Athens of the North’s Jekyll and Hyde style credentials, whereby it puts on a pretty facade for the tourists, while the real tall tales emerge from more intimate exchanges out of sight behind closed doors, this might well be the case.
So it goes with Lyceum at Home, an initiative spearheaded by the capital theatre’s artistic director James Brining, who commissioned four writers to create a quartet of thirty-minute monologues. With each set in Edinburgh, in a project led by outgoing associate director Zinnie Harris, these were then performed around town in people’s living rooms, where sofa bound audiences were unavoidably up close to the action. Now the mini tour is over, the quartet of new works were brought back home to the theatre that sired them, where they were performed on the stage back to back over a night long compendium.
First up was Dylan’s Big Day, Stephen Greenhorn’s wild ride of a show in Eve Nicol’s production, as a young tearaway played by Ryan Hunter relates his chaotic life in a day that led him to having to get his phone charged in a stranger’s house. The Sights sees Isla Cowan’s tour guide played by Katrina Allen in Shilpa T-Hyland’s production throw away her witches hat and cowl and take a leap beyond her grief.
Loved Too Hard is Apphia Campbell’s portrait of a house sitting cuckoo in the nest brought to vivid life in Harris’s production by Natali McCleary. Finally, Love Letter to a City is Alexander McCall Smith’s heartfelt paean to Edinburgh that starts off in Ben Harrison’s production as a portrait of Graham Mackay-Bruce’s artist as a young man in the 1990s before becoming a full on epiphany from the ultimate Edinburgh man.
If Greenhorn’s tale comes from Dumbiedykes with love in a street smart demotic, Cowan’s tour guide doesn’t shy away from the frustrations of those living in a city fuelled, it seems, by over tourism, rapacious landlords and a cost of living beyond the means of many. McCall Smith, meanwhile, taps into Edinburgh as a living thing, awash with culture enough to inspire any wide-eyed and poetic young shaver.
Only Campbell’s piece could fully stand alone beyond the city walls without any Edinburgh influence. As McCleary’s house sitter swans through the des-res her influencer employers call home, she does so with an infectious swagger that flows from her words with the panache of a lifestyle guide before things take a more troubling turn. It is she, however, who recognises Edinburgh as ‘a place to reinvent yourself or disappear.’
With some of the audience seated on sofas onstage in a mock-up of a well rugged up suburban interior, all four pieces embrace the joys and contradictions of the city as it becomes an emotional backdrop to the dramas that flow out of it. These go beyond mere talking heads style presentations to tap into bigger worlds beyond their four walls. It is here where each life co-exists in the same multi-faceted storybook that makes up Edinburgh’s rich tapestry of myth and magic.
The Herald, June 22nd 2026
ends
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