Stage-to-screen review: Lights Up - Adam

I'm one dose of vaccine down and restrictions are due to ease again, so all being well (something I'm still very much treating as an "if" rather than a "when," given last year's false starts,) I'm just over a month away from seeing theatre in person again. Until then, the BBC has provided another stage-to-screen season, Lights Up, this time highlighting new writing. I haven't looked at the full season in detail yet but I think it's a combination of completely new works and screen adaptations of recent stage shows - like the opener, Frances Poet's Adam, from the National Theatre of Scotland. Poet's play is based on the true story of Adam Kashmiry, an Egyptian trans man who sought asylum in Glasgow, and the real Adam plays himself in Cora Bissett and Louise Lockwood's production. In part narrated to a Mental Health Nurse (Stephen McCole) who's friendly but very limited in the practical help he can give, the focus is split between the life he needed to leave, and the red tape-filled contradictions of trying to prove his case for asylum.

Theatre review: Glasgow Girls

Cora Bissett, who starred in David Greig's Midsummer, is wearing her director's hat for her latest collaboration with Greig, which approaches political theatre in a way that's seldom seen. Glasgow Girls is a lively musical based on the true - and ongoing - story of a campaign against the deportation of asylum seekers' children. In 1999, empty flats in Glasgow were deemed a suitable place to house asylum seekers from Kosovo, Iraq, the Congo and elsewhere. Over the years the families settled into their new home and, despite the inevitable "they come here, steal our jobs" minority, were mostly accepted into the community. When the Home Office starts forcibly deporting families whose status has, almost arbitrarily, been changed to "safe," six teenage girls spearhead a campaign to protect the children, many of whom know no other home.