(A Drunk Woman Looks at the Thistle)

(The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer)

If I were forced to choose I would probably opt for the big theatrical spectacle rather than the perfectly formed chamber piece. But faced with two such sharply written, tremendously performed one-person, one-act shows, I'm glad I don't have to make the choice.

For a long time the idea of a drunk woman would have made Denise Mina's revisiting of Hugh MacDiarmid's famous 1926 rumination on Scottish identity unconscionable. If women were drunk, they were beyond the pale, just one more tiny addition to the scales of gender inequality. But since women do rather obviously get drunk on Scotland's streets, what do they have to say about their native heath?

Much the same as everyone else, it turns out. Mina goes a long way from the original (I don't suppose MacDiarmid would have contemplated inserting a limerick involving Sir Walter Scott, George IV and oral sex) but in other ways is quite faithful to it, considering Scotland's faults and foibles and triumphs with a clear and female eye and embracing them all.

But it is Karen Dunbar's performance, directed by another strong woman, Alison Peebles, lurching on in a pink Stetson, which makes this very much more than a literary exercise.

In the second play, the same might be said of John Bett, who plays the genteel, impoverished lawyer Enoch Dalmellington, an innocent among the knaves of 18th-century Glasgow's tobacco merchants and, whisper it, slave merchants.

The writer Iain Heggie has been working on translations of the Russian playwright Ostrovsky, who also wrote caustically about merchants - though in 19th-century Moscow. But this work has moved a long way from the play that inspired it, Ostrovsky's Jokers. The tenor of Glasgow at that time, when the city was making its first fortune, clearly attracts Heggie, as well as the moral shortcomings of its merchant class. Bringing it all back home also allows him to have fun with a soothsayer called Madame Zapatar and her preposterous prophesies - such as banning the smoking of tobacco in public places.

Skilfully wrought though Heggie's script is, with its plot of how Dalmellington is first ripped off by a merchant and then revenged by the interruption of trade with the Americas caused by the Declaration of Independence, it is Bett who brings it to life. Never hurried, but every gesture, every fiddling with his desk, every adjustment of his glasses, perfectly timed, it's a pleasure to watch.

Tobacco Merchant runs until Sat, 0141-357 6200

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