It's all very well for Rebecca Loos and Darren Day to make like the opposite sex for an afternoon in Channel 5's Gender Swap, but could anyone do it permanently? In Jackie Kay's 1998 novel Trumpet, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Joss Moody is a celebrated black jazz-man, whose death brings to light a bizarre secret: the coroner unravels the bandages to reveal his all- too-female breasts. The novel, set in the aftermath of Moody's death, is less about cross-dressing than about grief. Moody's wife Millie, the one person to share his secret, is forbidden to grieve by a society convinced she's been "living a lie". Their adopted son, Colman, is too traumatised by the news that his dad was a woman to be able to lament his passing.
By introducing uncertainties about sex, race and adoption, Kay questions the importance of the characteristics - parentage, skin colour, gender - we hold so dear.
It's this aspect of grief that you miss in Grace Barnes's otherwise handsome studio adaptation for Shetland's Skeklers Theatre Company. In the book, Moody is characterised by an absence; on stage he is necessarily a presence, making it harder to project the sense of loss.
But Barnes does a good job at restructuring the novel into a patchwork of monologues and conversations, finding a powerful theatrical moment when Ellen O'Grady's Moody strips before Bridget McCann's Millie and adding to the atmosphere with the live trumpet playing of Johan Hentze.
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 0141-552 4267.
