Jackie Kay says that being adopted "is a writer's paradise - your life is already a story". And her unique upbringing - born to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, then adopted by two white Glaswegian communists - has certainly not left her short of material.
Kay first wrote about the experience in an award-winning poetry collection, The Adoption Papers, and returned to it in a children's novel, Strawgirl, which director Sarah Franckom has chosen to stage as a revealing double bill.
The Adoption Papers is a candid, confessional work which uses chatty humour to convey the insecurities of having been given away. It is funny and endearing but inescapably untheatrical. Franckom separates the actors behind clear plastic screens, which only emphasises the transparency of the performance - it is little more than a static poetry recital.
Strawgirl, by contrast, is a visual and conceptual treat. Molly Macpherson is a 12-year-old girl living on a Highland dairy farm who is in awe of her dad, a proud Ibo tribesman, and devoted to the "coos", as she calls them (which rhymes with the sound they make).
The death of Molly's father and threatened loss of the farm makes pretty dour material for a children's play. But Amanda Dalton's adaptation is a fast-moving Ibo-Hibernian fantasy in which corn dollies become animated with Nigerian spirits and Highland cattle jump over the moon.
Liz Ashcroft's bucolic set features real straw and real dung - I found myself brushing off real biting insects - but Franckom's direction is playful and inventive, and Lisa Livingstone as Molly gives the kind of unaffectedly natural performance you would happily watch until the coos come home.
· Until November 24. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
