How do you just be yourself on stage? At the Pleasance, Stefan Golaszewski is the star of the one-man show Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved. Apparently it’s a true story, which makes you wonder how he’s ever going to get a date again.

This bittersweet piece of stand-up theatre is by a guy better known for his comedy – as one of the four-man Cambridge to Edinburgh to BBC group, Cowards. In the way most stand-up comedians make their own lives their material, this play does the same. As the lights snap up in the Pleasance portacabin, Stefan fires out a traditional opening line to many a British anecdote, ‘So I’m in the pub and I’m being a dick’. It’s a line that makes him sound like someone you probably know, and it sets the tone brilliantly for what follows. We’re somewhere in the late 1990s and Stefan is portraying his 18-year-old self – he’s out with his mates and he’s on the verge of going to university. Then he meets Betty: she walks into the pub, looking like a girl from a magazine, and our boy falls in love. In the ensuing decade, Stefan won’t meet anyone as perfect. Relationships will come and go, but no one will quite measure up to Betty, whom he knew for just 24 hours.

This play is romantic without being sentimental. You feel that both Stefan and director, Philip Breen, have honed and edited it into the finely balanced piece that it is. This is not a flabby or self-indulgent show, which a one-man play could easily become. It’s funny and poignant and fresh and surprising.

The Tailor of Inverness at the Assembly Rooms is the story of Mateusz Zajac, a Polish immigrant arriving in Scotland in the aftermath of World War Two. It’s also a one-man show. We meet Mateusz in his tailor’s shop - one of the best designed sets at the festival - a wall plastered with pale shirts climbs precipitously behind him, a work bench and a rail of uniforms is nearby. Mateusz tells us how he came to settle in Inverness; it’s an ebullient and joyful story, but it is intercut with flashbacks to a war-torn Europe.

While the structuring of this play is a little confused and over-long, it’s a subtle piece that reminds us the Second World War is far from a Leviathan history of good pitched against evil - it’s the story of tens of millions of individuals for whom survival and nationality competed, and often conflicted, with morality. In flashback and with the aid of projections, we see Mateusz’s journey charted through the war and across a scarred and changing Europe, a Europe of fluid borders. We learn Mateusz was, at different times, in the service of both the Russian and German armies. At one moment a beautiful visual question is left unanswered. Mateusz puts on arm bands and cloth badges emblazoned with differing national colours - Polish, Russian, Ukrainian - lastly he takes a yellow star of David from the box, but slowly puts it back. In Mateusz’s hometown, the tailors were all Jews - he learnt his trade from them.

The Tailor of Inverness has a point of revelation, when suddenly the character of Mateusz with his engaging Scots-Polish accent disappears and in his place stands Matthew Zajac, the actor and Mateusz’s son. What follows is then part play, part documentary, as recordings and projections chart a new journey backwards across Europe from Scotland to the east as Matthew searches for the truth about his father’s war.

The Tailor of Inverness and Stefan Golaszewski Talks About a Girl He Once Loved are one-man shows about personal histories. And both make use of the same device - at the end they break down the drama they’ve established in favour of something more ‘real’. While Matthew sheds the mask of his father and adopts the forms of documentary, Stefan drops his 18-year-old persona and becomes Stefan, 2008. In consequence of these structural breakdowns neither of these plays are emotionally neat pieces - they have complicated relationships to truth and honesty, and seem to be equally brimful with regret as with catharsis.