MY EYES Went Dark is the Scottish premiere of Matthew Wilkinson’s powerful two-hander exploring the interacting emotions of grief and revenge.

In it, Cal MacAninch brings a quiet and almost wordless agony to Russian architect Nicolai Koslov, who has lost his wife and children in an unexplained plane collision.

He must have an answer — or construct one — and identify a culprit. His search for an unattainable justice drives him towards insanity and when the courts clear the air traffic controller, who was left alone on duty when the crash happens, he murders him.

After serving a prison sentence Koslov returns home to be received as a hero, having made some kind of “sacrifice” in the name of a just revenge.

The play takes place on a bare, darkened stage with only two chairs as props. We see Koslov with his therapist, who's played magnificently by Thusitha Jayasundera and who assumes all the other roles, including Koslov’s wife and finally his victim’s daughter.

We realise that Koslov’s desperate need for revenge is subconsciously motivated by guilt. His family were travelling unwillingly to join him in Nice, where he has been commissioned to build a hotel.
Here is a play which raises complex questions beyond an apparently simple formula of grief and revenge.

Al Smith’s Diary of a Madman, based loosely on Nikolai Gogol’s short story of the same title, merges the themes of individual and national identity — both under considerable stress in the current political scene.

In Smith’s reworking, Pop Sheeran is a middle-aged Scottish family man, the proud descendant of a line of Forth Bridge painters. The security and timelessness of the job is threatened when he takes on Mat, a young English assistant.

He’s hoping to research the effects of a new paint which could last for 70 years, to solve what could be a disastrous problem. He calculates that the successive layers of traditional paint the bridge has received from Pop and his forebears must weigh far more than the structure was designed safely to bear.

When he gets together with Pop’s teenage daughter, the latter’s world begins to break apart. The strain of psychological fragility in his family — his son is in treatment in a mental home — begins to assert itself and Pop, like Gogol’s protagonist, starts to converse with an animal.

But not as, in Gogol, with real dogs. He talks to a puppet of Greyfriars Bobby, who supposedly spent 14 years of his life watching over the grave of his owner in Edinburgh. Funny, yes, but at the same time frightening — even more so when he understands his role to be a reincarnation of Braveheart, a last Scottish resister to English dominance.

The triumph of the Traverse programme was Mark Thomas’s touring show The Red Shed. Thomas’s spiritual and political home since his student days, the Wakefield shed is the town’s Labour Club, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. With characteristic high-octane energy, quick-fire wit and engaging humour, Thomas holds his audience with a personal and a political history lesson.

The story of his exhaustive search to find the reality behind a distant memory of a march supporting the 1980s miners’ strike, when he saw primary-school children singing their support behind the railings of their playground, lies at the core of the show.

Memory, Thomas knows, is deceptive and as he tracks down those who were involved he finds different and contradictory accounts. But in the process he rekindles the fires that burnt so fiercely at the time.

The pair of red doors on stage represents the club while six volunteers from the audience, complete with masks, represent the characters along the way. Thomas even gets the audience singing a version of the Red Flag.

At a time when there seems to be a new gleam of socialism on the horizon, make sure you catch this show as it tours the nation after Edinburgh.