Coffee-Table Notes

Uh-oh. Julie's in the news again. Julie Burchill, that is, the one-time hip young gun-slinger on a punky 1970s NME turned self-styled 1980s cocaine-caked queen of the Groucho club, whose barbed and bitchy opinions on anything and everything still has the knack of offending readers on both right and left. Then there are the public spats with assorted ex husbands and fellow female columnists, the flirtations with lesbianism, the sex-soaked novels, the pro Israeli provocations and the seemingly endless power to annoy. Burchill's latest brush with the media hand that still sometimes feeds her comes with a plethora of high-profile speculation that she may or may not have been offered £300,000 to take part in the annual circus of Celebrity Big Brother. Such speculation arrived just as Burchill was announced as the new agony aunt for one time lad's mag bible, Loaded magazine. Given the seeming decline in both parties fortunes, this seems a curiously apt if inherently odd alliance.

Cuckooed - Traverse Theatre Four stars When Mark Thomas' best mate and comrade in arms in exposing international arms dealers turned out to be a spy, the result was this very personal show which remains hilariously foresnsic in its exposure of dodgy corporate practices. On a filing cabinet lined set, Thomas regales the audience with his assorted adventures on the frontline with his usual blokeish charm, about how he and his mate Martin took a coach-load of arms dealers for a ride, then shows a film of an Indonesian general who admits to torturing prisoners on camera. Thomas' tactics are both hilarious and provocative, but where his duplicity is righteous, Martin's becomes increasingly heart-breaking as footage of other campaigners and close friends is shown on screens that slide out of the filing cabinets as the penny slowly starts to drop. Emma Callander's production navigates Thomas through what in other hands might end up a dense tale of paranoia,

Horizontal Collaboration Traverse Theatre Four stars The audience becomes the public gallery in Horizontal Collaboration, David Leddy's latest set of dark imaginings for his Fire Exit company. Four actors who sit at a long table with laptops lined up in front of them are the judges. With a different cast for each performance – sometimes all men, sometimes all women, sometimes a mix of both – the quartet read the words on the screen for the first time as they take on the roles of United Nations lawyers at a tribunal in an un-named African state. The story they unveil is of Judith K, the widow of an assassinated warlord who is accused of having sex with an enemy soldier is one of institutionalised misogyny in a volatile country where women in power are barely tolerated. With the actors as much in the dark as the audience, the mixing and matching of genders may or may not be crucial to how the text is both delivered and perceived depending on their reactions. With an

It is plain from the title of Owen McCafferty's new play as to what it's about. Unfaithful focuses on two couples, one younger, the other older, who are woken from their domestic torpor when they are forced to come to terms with the consequences of different kinds of betrayal. For McCafferty, wrestling for words as he sits on the sofa of the Traverse Theatre's Leith warehouse rehearsal space, it's not always easy to explain where his play came from. “In the society we live in,” McCafferty says in his staccato Belfast accent, “things like somebody being unfaithful, especially as seen through the media, looks like a very black and white world, whereas we all live in a far greyer area than that nowadays, and I wanted to write something to show that. If somebody was to be unfaithful, what comes out of that isn' t necessarily a bad thing. It can have a good consequence. That's what we're looking at in the play. Everything in it is about being unfaithful, whether

Donald Robertson Is Not A Stand-Up Comedian Traverse Theatre Four stars Traverse 2 is reconfigured as an up close and personal brick wall club complete with cabaret tables for Gary McNair's pithy and personal deconstruction of comedy. First seen in work-in-progress form at the Arches in Glasgow, McNair dons the fantasy-wish-fulfilment mantle of the sort of cheeky chappie act who you could see any night of the week in Edinburgh throughout August. Using this device, McNair gradually unravels a shaggy dog story about a wise-cracking kid he meets on the bus before risking being upstaged by the show's post-modern finale. It's a fascinating shtick which gives nods to everything from Trevor Griffiths' dramatic exposure of the comedy of hate in Comedians, to the relationship between stand-up and live art bridged by the likes of Lenny Bruce and Eric Bogosian. McNair cuts an altogether more chipper dash than all of those, however, in a knowing study of one of the

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