Coffee-Table Notes

Friendship means a lot to Stef Smith, whose new play, Enough, forms part of the Traverse Theatre’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme when it opens next week. More significantly, perhaps, following her recent radical reworking of Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, it is female friendship that the Stirlingshire-born writer is focused on. That, and aeroplane cabin crew, who probably aren’t quite as jet-setty as advertised. “I’ve always been fascinated by air stewards, both male and female,” says Smith. “I think it’s such an interesting performative role. I’ve always found it fascinating when you see them doing the drinks trolley or showing where the emergency exits are, and the in the middle of the flight you’d go up the back, and you see them all hanging out, and they’re all really relaxed and talking about what they’re going to have for lunch. It’s quite a different energy, and also very theatrical.” Enough focuses on two female best friends who spend half their lives up in the ai

In the summer of 1968, David Edgar came to Edinburgh as a twenty-year-old undergraduate to perform in a student production of The Mandrake, the only play by Italian renaissance philosopher and poet Niccolo Machiavelli, and here rewritten as a musical. Edgar played the Apothecary. Fifty-one years on, the veteran writer of epic state of the nation plays including Destiny and Maydays makes a belated return to the Edinburgh stage in his already successful solo piece, Trying it On. In the play, the now seventy-one year-old Edgar is confronted by his younger and arguably more radical self, who arrived in Edinburgh fired up by the seismic events of 1968. The student uprisings in Paris, London and elsewhere, the Prague Spring, anti-Vietnam protests and the assassination of civil rights giant Martin Luther King had all left their mark. For a young man just starting out in the world, it was a lot to take in. It also proved to be an inspiration for everything that followed. “There wasn’t

Gladstone’s Land, Edinburgh Three stars Some countries have all the luck. This is something made abundantly clear in this second theatrical excursion by the National Trust for Scotland, which, following on from Enlightenment House in Charlotte Square, moves into another of the capital’s most historically charged but largely unsung buildings. Originally built in 1550 in the Lawnmarket, the six-storey tenement was redeveloped in the seventeenth century to become home for a variety of tenants from across the social classes. In the hands of writer/director Ben Harrison, best known in these parts for his work with site-specific specialists Grid Iron, here working alongside co-director Allie Winton Butler, such a rich source becomes a series of thumbnail sketches of crucial moments in Scottish history. As the audience move from room to room in what feels like an Old Town approximation of the Chelsea Hotel, the twist here is that any one of three different stories can be presented