© Eoin Carey

The Scotsman 18 March 2025

When Martin O’Connor first talked to director Lu Kemp about his latest play, he thought she was using some unfamiliar theatrical terminology. What she liked about the script, she told him, was its “versioning”.

Perhaps she had coined the word, perhaps she had borrowed it; either way, it works well to describe Through the Shortbread Tin, a play that fields alternate versions of existing stories. If the same story is told in different ways, whose version should we believe?

The ambiguity is deliberate. O’Connor’s theme is the uncertainty created by Scotland’s greatest literary forgery, a hoax that makes the line between fact and fiction impossible to draw. [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).