We’re in (pretty much literally so in this most intimate of venues) an Edwardian sitting room, time hanging heavily in the air, gentility almost visibly fading before our eyes.

PLEASE LEAVE (a message), Underbelly, Cowgate ★★★★

With its throbbing crowds and its performers baying for attention (and for audiences), the Edinburgh Fringe can be a hectic, raucous place. But for anyone who needs a break from the crammed-full, in-your-face stand-up gigs, thankfully three shows provide far calmer, more intimate experiences – involving just you and one other.

Forty years ago, the world was very different for gay men. AIDS was devastating their communities, especially in the big cities where hard-won enclaves of acceptance were being hollowed out, one sunken-eyed friend after another. Media screamed “Gay Plague” and some politicians barely suppressed their glee at the “perverts’” comeuppance.

Allies were thin on the ground, the redtop press with their finger on the outing trigger never happier than when destroying lives for circulation.

The Grand Old Opera House Hotel, Traverse Theatre ★★★

Tennessee, Rose, Pleasance Dome ★★★

Clare Cockburn's new play posits the notion that all the women in Tennessee Williams' work were inspired in some way by his older sister, Rose, who spent most of her life in mental institutions after being lobotomised.

Adults, Traverse Theatre ★★★

Flat & the Curves, Pleasance Dome ★★★★

Flat & the Curves – Katy Baker, Charlotte Brooke, Issy Wroe Wright and Arabella Rodrigo – perform a gig-style musical comedy show with risqué material about what it means to be a modern woman. And there's a generous side helping about the inadequacy of men, too.

There are many things that you are not told about being a parent, a vast landscape of details that batter you with unwelcome difference from that comfortable life of Friday night prosecco and pizza. One is a whole new palette of garish colours barging into your eyeline – fluorescent yellow, eye-bleeding orange, vomity green.

Casting the Runes, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★