Game of Thrones: The Mad King review – an action-packed saga of dry ice and fire

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh A researcher encounters an isolated community in thrall to a mysterious religious leader in Jack MacGregor’s atmospheric but elusive drama What impresses about Jack MacGregor as a playwright is their willingness to take us into the wider world. Nightlands was set in a deserted Russian research base in Svalbard; Everything Under the Sun concerned militias in Mali; and Our Brother played out in the Cambodia of Pol Pot. So it is with Prophets, which begins with the arrival of Kerris, a Scottish researcher, on the sparsely populated island of Saint John, a fictional British Overseas Territory in the South Pacific. Played by Rebecca Wilkie, she is as curious about the religious activities of the islanders as she is the archaeological record of plant life she is supposedly there to study. Welcomed by Joe, a former merchant seaman played by a multitasking Xander Cowan, she senses something is amiss in the nightly church services led by an elusive man they call the prophet. Her job is about the dawn of time, but the locals are readying themselves for the end of days...

Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh The SNL UK star’s romantic failures and house-share humiliations make for a fun hour of downbeat yet twinkling comedy A recent star of Saturday Night Live UK, Paddy Young is enjoying a moment of life-changing fulfilment and success. But “I’ve brought the worst plus-one to the party,” he says – by which he means himself. If ever the truism that money can’t buy you happiness needed demonstration, look no further than Young’s new show, Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? It finds the 35-year-old lamenting (as ever) the circularity of his domestic life, a luckless perma-bachelor doomed for ever to watch on as his housemates graduate to more grown-up, loved-up lives elsewhere. Young has cultivated the perfect persona to sell this sorry tale: a plangent northerner, half-turned away from the audience and side-eyeing us coyly with this or that tale of hapless manboyishness. Is it an act? Well, no, it’s an exaggeration, and part of the fun is to work out how sincere sad-sack Paddy really is, halfway through his three score years and 10, stuck in a house share with “three PS2s and not a lamp in sight”. He’s bothered not that his flatmate is having sex too noisily, but that it’s not audible enough (“Let me in!”). Ghosted by a recent date, he has resorted to stalking his first teenage kiss on Facebook, then all the way to Copenhagen, fantasising about inserting himself into her wholesome family life...

Molly O’Brien responds to an article by Natalie Morris about her five-day labour, while an NHS doctor shares her personal experience of feeling ‘othered’ It is not clear whether Natalie Morris’s labour began spontaneously or was induced (By day five of my labour, I didn’t want an ‘ideal birth’. I only wanted to survive, 6 August). Nevertheless, what is described is not a debate about “ideal birth”, but an account of undiagnosed labour dystocia. By day four she had contractions but no cervical dilatation, was exhausted, unable to sit down, and knew instinctively she needed help. These are features of pathophysiology that should have prompted reassessment. That failure was not ideology. It was a lack of education and training among both midwives and doctors in recognising difficult labour, also known as labour dystocia. This same issue, with tragic consequences, was highlighted in the Nottingham maternity review. That system’s failure receives far less attention than the “culture wars” surrounding birth...