Coffee-Table Notes

Chef Underbelly Four stars How does a high-flying young girl from the back-streets go from getting her big break working in a swanky restaurant to serving slops as a prison inmate working the kitchen? Sabrina Mahfouz's street-smart solo verse play tells all over several courses, in which a high-flying club kid from a troubled background goes on a rollercoaster ride, from being the emotional appendage of a wannabe gangster to getting sent down for something she didn't do. In the thick of all this, Mahfouz's heroine finds salvation for cooking up elaborate dishes that become a means of expression as much as anything else. In the thick of all this are comments on the penal system in all its slopped-out glory which our woman manages to transcend Onstage alone for an hour, Jade Anouka gives an uber-cool and thoroughly believable delivery of Mahfouz's dramatic poem which flows with a gregarious musicality. By the end of being served up such an overload of w

Comic genius Tony Hancock had been dead for almost a decade by the time Heathcote Williams' solo play, Hancock's Last Half Hour, first appeared in 1977. Since that first production at The Almost Free Theatre, in which stalwart of Harold Pinter plays Henry Woolf played The Lad Himself, as he prepared to commit suicide in a Sydney hotel room with only a scrap-book of newspaper cuttings, a telephone and a bottle of vodka for company. Like the legend of Hancock himself, however, Williams' play has lived on. The late Richard Briers played Hancock in a radio version ofd Hancock's Last Half Hour in 1988. At that time, Pip Utton, who revives Williams' play for this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was still working as a jeweller, and it would be several years before he picked up a copy of the play in a secondhand book shop and go on to launch his acting career with a portrayal of a man friends told him he resembled. Twenty-one years on, Utton has performed in solo play

Edinburgh International Book Festival Four stars The intimate art of letter writing may have given way to the impersonal pings of social media over the last decade or so, but this quartet of short works presented by site-specific maestros Grid Iron in a unique collaboration with Edinburgh International Book Festival goes some way to claiming it back. With the audience promenaded between a network of addresses in and around Charlotte Square, four short stories with themes of exile and the umbilical link with home are taken off the page and brought to life in this gentlest of fusions between forms. In Details, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie charts a long distance email love affair between a Nigerian woman and her American friend. Christos Tsiolkas' Eve and Cain brings the Bible's original dysfunctional family together in a mother and child reunion to end them all. In the first, Joe Douglas directs Muna Otaru and Rhoda Ofori-Attah through the womens' painful absence on a double bed

If Vicky Featherstone hadn't come to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe when a student at Manchester University, it's unlikely that the National Theatre of Scotland would exist as it does. Featherstone, after all, was the company's first artistic director of a company which had already opted for a radical 'theatre without walls' initiative, programming a body of work that drew from all aspects of Scottish theatre. During Featherstone's tenure, the NTS developed more left-field artists alongside big main stage plays, a tradition which Featherstone took over as artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre in London. Despite heading up such august institutions, it feels as though Featherstone has retained a Fringe sensibility sired during the 1980s and  early 1990s era of politically driven grassroots shoestring companies and alternative cabaret. Featherstone's first Edinburgh show in her own right was an adaptation of Gogol's short story, The Nose. “The then li

When over-anxious actresses get talking, great things can come from it. Take what happened when former star of E4's cult hit, Misfits, Karla Crome, met up with her friend Daniella Isaacs. “We were both feeling depressed about our careers,” Crome says, “because I'm a big worrier, and always think I'm never going to work again. Daniella was feeling the same way, and after we'd been to the theatre, we had a cup of tea, and she said she had this story about her 101 year old Great Aunt Nancy.” Nancy Yetzes grew up Jewish in the East End of London. When she was in her twenties, she fell in love with a non-Jewish man who proposed to her. Yetzes turned him down, worried about what her family and the local community might think. She has remained single ever since. Crome's friend interviewed her Great Aunt Nancy about the experience, which ended up inspiring Mush and Me. “Daniella's from the orthodox Jewish faith as well,” Crome points out, “and we wondered if there wa

Show 6 Summerhall Three stars In a sun-kissed land dripping with beautiful people in swimming costumes and shades, the lazy calm is about to be shattered by the aftermath of a fatal car crash in which the un-named golden boy who may have killed a chav who told him the truth just found out he's a cuckoo in the nest. What comes out of this mix of oedipal envy and Ballardian future-shock is an urgent three-hander in which revolutionary spirit is reborn in the shadows. This world premiere of an un-named work by Mark Ravenhill is the latest offering from the Lyric Hammersmith's Secret Theatre Company, in which audiences effectively go to see something blind and without any kind of marketing hype to tell them in advance what to think. The fact that the company have let slip that this is a Ravenhill play, however, is probably wise in the hurly-burly of the Fringe. Ravenhill's clipped, pared-down exchanges are invested with a classical weight in  Caroline Steinbe

How do you tell a real-life story that isn't yours? This question was one of the driving forces behind Lippy, the hit show of the 2013 Dublin Fringe which is currently playing at the Traverse Theatre. Initially inspired by events that took place at the turn of the century in Leixlip, County Kildare fourteen years ago when an aunt and three sisters boarded themselves into their home and entered into a forty-day suicide pact, the Dead Centre company's creation becomes less of a docudrama detective story and more a speculative voyage of discovery for the company's own methodology. “It's one of those stories that is so extraordinary that it reaches out into an entire collective consciousness,” says Bush Moukarzel, who created, co-directs and performs in Lippy. “There are events like 9/11, which change the whole world, and then there are other, more idiosyncratic and private events that gauge the temperature of something else. That's what this story had ab