Dr Steven Maxwell is bringing The Borrowed Room to Edinburgh Pride weekend, with the play set for Summerhall from 19 to 21 June. The staged development has only 40 seats available per show, so the run is as limited as the room it is written for.
Dr Steven Maxwell’s library room
Maxwell, a University of Glasgow researcher and playwright, wrote the piece and set it in a public library meeting room in a remote Scottish coastal town. Two men who grew up together meet there to talk about why some people leave small places and others stay, and the action unfolds in real time.
“The Borrowed Room is about the stories that small places tell about people, and what it costs to live inside those stories.” He also said, “At its centre is a simple question: what happens when one man tries to record a story, and the other refuses to let him tell it safely?”
Summerhall’s 40 seats
The 40-seat limit makes this a staged development, not a broad commercial run, and that scale fits the material: a tense, intimate chamber piece built around memory, shame, masculinity, sexuality and accountability. Sean Connor and Craig Hunter appear in the production, with Sam Pitcher directing.
That small audience number matters in practical terms. Anyone hoping to see it during Edinburgh Pride weekend has a narrow window and a hard capacity ceiling, which pushes the performance into the kind of quick sell-through that defines development work more than repertory theatre.
Research, real life, fiction
Maxwell said the play “comes from research, real life dynamics and close social observation - schools, clubs, churches, silence and shame, and the pressure to become the kind of man a place can recognise.” He added that it examines “how masculinity is taught and enforced, how difference is marked, and how identity can be suppressed through everyday rules, religious shame and conversion-style pressures.”
The play is fictional, but it is also presented as being informed by research, real life dynamics and close social observation. That combination suggests a work that is trying to do more than sketch atmosphere: it is testing how private feeling gets organised by public rules, and how a local setting can harden into a social script.
For readers deciding whether to book, the answer is straightforward: The Borrowed Room is a short, tightly limited Edinburgh Pride weekend engagement at Summerhall, and the 40-seat staging makes early planning the only sensible move.
