The Guardian 25 February 2026

Milly Sweeney is a young writer gaining traction. Staged in Pitlochry last year, her play Water Colour, about the changing states of mind of two Glaswegians, earned her the Stage debut award for best writer. Here, she kicks off the lunchtime spring season of A Play, a Pie and a Pint with a sweet-natured two-hander that turns a family anecdote into a quiet study of love, ambition and the pain of growing apart.

It is about Jack and Kathy, who log in separately to online chats with their granddaughter to help with a school assignment about “untold Scottish stories”. They have a particularly good one: on a holiday to Campbeltown in the hot summer of 1976, they made an impromptu attempt to find Paul McCartney’s rural retreat. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).