Coffee-Table Notes

The room upstairs feels like a bed-sit. The sloping ceiling, flecked wallpaper and the small trestle table writer Andrew O'Hagan sits behind are all familiar to him from his time researching his 1995 book, The Missing. O'Hagan spent a lot of time in kitchens during that period, in Glasgow, Ayrshire, Liverpool and Gloucester, asking grieving parents what it was like to lose a child who'd either been murdered or else simply vanished into thin air. As it is, the room we're sitting in is on the top floor of The Glue Factory, the former industrial space turned arts hub now used as an occasional rehearsal room by the National Theatre of Scotland among others. Downstairs, through a windowed door, director John Tiffany is working with his cast on O'Hagan's stage adaptation of The Missing, a book that is part journalese, part social history and part autobiography, which makes forensic inquiries into serial killers Bible John and Fred and Rosemary West. The

Allan Ross, Musician, Sculptor, Painter Born, September 13th 1940; died September 5th 2011. Without Allan Ross, who has died after a long illness aged 70, this newspaper's Herald Angel awards, which are given weekly throughout Edinburgh's August festival season, would be infinitely less colourful. Because the numerous winged statuettes, lovingly created by Ross in all their fragile, sepulchral glory alongside the Archangel, Little Devil and Wee Cherub Awards, are works of art in themselves which have become treasured by those gifted them, even if they might not always be aware of the modest, gentle giant of a man who created them. It's unlikely too, that they would make the connection with Ross as the fiddler extraordinaire in the 7:84 company's original 1973 production of The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil, John McGrath's legendary ceilidh-play, which told Scotland's real story through an array of loose-knit popular theatrical forms,

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars If one's memory plays rose-tinted tricks, as D.C. Jackson's extended 'non-rom-com' suggests, then this speedy revival of a work first seen during the 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe appears now to be this most wilfully adolescent writer's coming of age play. Tom, the hero of Jackson's yarn, is a feckless and somewhat gormless rake who finds himself thrown together in the Friday night sack with Amy, a just-met colleague from his new office job. Like the responsible adult he isn't, Tom, still carrying a torch for his first schoolboy crush, tries to make-believe nothing ever happened. But in a world where drunken sex is “smashin'!”, there are two sides to every story, and the play's stylistic back-flip so we see things from Amy's point of view shows she has history too. All of this may have been textually intact last year, but Jemima Levick's new production for Borderline seems infinitely less madcap

If things had worked out differently, writer Ena Lamont Stewart would have lived long enough to bask in the overdue success of her 1947 play, Men Should Weep. As it is, by the time her searing depiction of Glasgow tenement poverty during the depression was first rediscovered by John McGrath's 7:84 company in 1982 as part of their legendary Clydebuilt season of lost working class masterpieces that also included Joe Corrie's In Time O' Strife and Robert McLeish's The Gorbals Story, Lamont Stewart was already seventy years old. Any sustained drive for writing she may have harboured would soon be lost with the onset of Alzheimer's Disease and her eventual death in 2006. By that time, Men Should Weep had long been regarded as a modern classic, and had been named as one of the hundred most important plays of the twentieth century in a list compiled by the National Theatre in London. If that company's 2010 production went some way to prove that Lamont St

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars Asylum seeking, as only those in the thick of things can fully realise, is a minefield. Just when you think you've found the UK's apparently promised land as a haven from whichever brutal regime you're on the run from, a brand new set of oppressions appear. So it goes in this semi-verbatim piece by director Sam Rowe, which looks at the hitherto unexplored complexities of seeking refuge on the grounds of sexual orientation rather than race or religion. Based on interviews with real-life refugees, through a trio of criss-crossing monologues Rowe's play lays bare a litany of institutionalised homophobia in countries which would rather sweep such ills under the carpet along with the rest of their human rights records. Where such true stories could be delivered with understandable anger, Rowe has his cast relate things with a matter-of-factness so calm it borders on meditation. In a piece too where simply putting a Senegalese,

Kings Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Eighty years ago this Monday past, Celtic Football Club's twenty-two year old goal-keeper Johnny Thomson died from injuries sustained while saving a ball kicked by Rangers centre forward Sam English during an Old Firm game at Ibrox. This new work co-produced by CFC aims not only to homage one of the finest footballing talents of his generation, but to appeal for some display of unity as Scotland's sectarian shame is at last being challenged. Thomson, after all, was a Protestant. Opening with a coffin sitting at the centre of an otherwise empty, green-bathed stage, The Prince serves up a loose-knit biography of Fife-born Thomson, from his heroic rise to the tragic nature of his death. Our guides for this are a couple of likely lads called Billy and Tim, who help punctuate each sketch-like scene with a series of cabaret-style club anthem singalongs as a series of big-screen action replays are beamed out. Some might call it padding.

Oran Mor, Glasgow 3 stars You know you're a literary legend when you're referenced in the titles of other writers works. It happened to Alice B. Toklas and Virginia Woolf, and now, on the eve of a revival of her 1987 play, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Scotland's Makar receives similar treatment in Martin McCardie's new play. As you might imagine, this first of A Play, A Pie and a Pint's autumn season of lunchtime theatre is as appropriately theatrical as its title implies. Taking as its cue the reunion of three survivors of a fictional Highland tour of Lochhead's now classic Scots verse take on Moliere's Tartuffe a quarter of a century earlier, McCardie proceeds to unwrap a big daft post-modern in-joke tailor-made for west end thesps that takes in reality TV, the pecadilloes of arts funding and the ongoing promiscuity of insecure theatre types both in and out of work. Andy Gray's past-his-best Danny opts to play Tartuffe