The joint after-show party was going well as I dragged myself away at 2am, an early departure occasioned by my commitment to a day's walking with visiting Spanish friends.  I arrived at their cottage near Kippen at a relatively early hour and after a coffee and a catch-up on several years' news we set off for Callander and Balquidder.

We did a couple of lovely walks beside and above Loch Voil.  Coming back into the village we spotted a magnificent stag in woods by the lochside.  We were a couple of hundred yards away from him but I was nonetheless surprised at how unfazed he was by our presence.  He watched us for a fair while and then got back to the important business of grazing.  We continued on our way to some grazing of our own on scrumptious baking in the local tearoom.

Leaving Edinburgh for the day did not isolate me from all cultural activity since there was a concert in Balquidder church in the evening.  A duo from the Passacaglia Chamber Music Group  had brought a handful of flutes and recorders and a harpsichord 500 miles in the back of a van to set the Highlands on fire with some sparkling baroque pieces.  My image of the recorder as a squeaky tube was quite overturned by some lovely playing but I still can't warm completely to the harpsichard.

Before pitching up to the last performance of Dr Faustus I took in Edinburgh Theatre Arts production of Macbeth in Scots.  It wasn't an easy listen all the time and that venue gets tiringly hot but it was a very well presented production and although I dropped off now and then in the first half I saw enough to say that congratulations are in order.

That's not how I feel about everything I saw last week. I walked out of one dire production but they had had the good sense not to charge for admission so I'll return the compliment by refraining from naming and shaming.

A show that did have a name and star reviews to go with it, but which gave rise to a reaction no more exciting than boredom in me was And No More Shall We Part.  Someone a few seats away put my cold heart to shame by weeping as the play slowly ground through the business of  grappling with suicide in the face of the prospect of a certain and agonising death.

Blink and you'll miss it, which would be a shame because it's a great little play beautifully set and dressed and acted to perfection by a couple of young and talented performers.  It's a strange tale of how a relationship comes into being in a virtual sort of way and how it pans out in the physical world.

How things might pan out after Britain is destroyed by a nuclear attack is the subject of The Letter of Last Resort.  The four identical copies of the eponymous letter are held by the commanders of Britain's nuclear subs and contain the prime minister's instruction as to what whichever submarine is lurking in the depths at the time should do; retaliate or slink off to Australia and pretend it never happened.  The script has a lot of fun in a Yes Minister type of dialogue between the PM and a Sir Humphrey figure over the composition of the letter, for which alas a template does not exist.

That's paired with Good With People which I had seen in it's earlier appearnce in the A Play, A Pie and A Pint season and which I was delighted to see again.  There's a bit of a nuclear connection between the two plays because of GWP's Helensburgh setting and references to Faslane but the more important connection is that these are two excellent pieces of writing by contempory Scottish plawrights.