Coffee-Table Notes

The last time David Hare brought a brand new play to Edinburgh was almost half a century ago, when he was in his early 20s. That was with Portable Theatre, the collective formed by Hare and fellow young radicals in the heat of the revolutionary possibilities fired by the events of 1968. Now, aged 72, Hare has just opened his epic reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the National Theatre of Great Britain in London prior to an Edinburgh International Festival run. This sees James McArdle leading a mainly Scots cast as the youthful fantasist who embarks on a series of adventures before his older self is forced to reconnect with everything he left behind. “It’s a massive undertaking,” says Hare. “With something like this you either go minimalist or maximalist, and we’ve gone maximalist. It’s a bit of a monster, but I think we’ve tamed it.” Hare begins his new version of the play in twenty-first century Scotland, with the action moving from Dunoon to Florida, Egypt, the Bay o

There are similarities to be found in the two plays by Nicola McCartney about to open in major theatres across the country over the next few weeks. In Heritage, the Belfast born writer decamps emigres from Ulster to Canada in 1914. Here, a young woman called Sarah attempts to build a new life, but love across the barricades is blighted by hand-me-down myths about an Ireland that never really existed, with barely understood age-old battles fought on foreign soil.   How Not to Drown, meanwhile, tells the real life story of Kosovan refugee Dritan Kastrati, who co-writes and plays himself to tell the story of how, in the aftermath of the Kosovan War, he survived a perilous voyage across the Adriatic for a new life in Europe. Once in the UK, he is put through further turmoil in the British care system, surviving it to become the now twenty-something bundle of charisma he is today. How Not to Drown is a brand new piece that forms one of the flagships of the Traverse Theatre’s Edinbu

North Edinburgh Arts, Edinburgh Three stars The grass is always greener on the other side of no-man’s-land for the two un-named young people at the centre of this short exploration of identity presented by Birds of Paradise theatre company, currently touring largely out of the way hamlets across the land. One lives at the centre of the big city’s throbbing heart, a rush of noisy life where nobody knows your name, which is fine sometimes. The other is struggling to fit in with the insular ways of a rural small town, where everybody’s business is public property. Both are in retreat from where they feel stuck and are looking for somewhere safe to land. Separately they stumble on an out-of-the-way tented idyll, where activism, artistry and good times go hand in hand. Accepted for who they are on their own terms, both young people have an epiphany en route to finding their voice inside a very special community. While this has been the life-changing way of things in summer ca