Armitage's northern rag-bag is an entertaining excursion through both memory and landscape. Armitage is better at being a poet than a probation officer (after rushing a baby to hospital with a suspected cigarette burn, a doctor pointed out "That's his nipple"), though his career switch was not without drawbacks.

Something's exploded," quipped Morrissey in response to some minor onstage technical crisis, "and it's not my emotions, for once." There followed a Moriartyish cackle, a jagged "ha!" of the kind reserved for pantomime villains. It's a brave soul who would describe Britain's favourite revenant miserablist in such a fashion, but he clearly enjoys his current role of potentially combustible anti-hero.

Debut novelist Nick Harkaway, son of John Le Carré, shares none of his father's Cold War cool, though he has created his own alternative universe.

Dr David Kelly, the Iraq weapons expert who has become a kind of political fable, has been at the centre of a play, a television drama and now an opera. The husband and wife team of Zinnie and John Harris, writer and composer respectively, have created a 15-minute operatic snapshot Death of a Scientist as part of Scottish Opera's series of bite-sized pieces of new music-theatre, Five:15.

The "sept planches" are the seven pieces of the Chinese game Tangram, a set of geometrical shapes that can be arranged into different patterns. This show uses giant versions of the pieces – big enough for performers to clamber up, around and inside, holding balances or sliding down angles. Shapes unfold with peaceful grace and dashes of comedy.

If one harpsichord sounds like "two skeletons copulating on a tin roof", this is a veritable orgy.

The next general election is hurtling towards us with the force of a damp sponge. We have, at most, 20 months until Decision Day– but who expects there to be a great fizzing debate? Who thinks we, the people, will have a chance to dig deep into our country's problems and tell our leaders how to put them right? Nobody. Instead it will be like an X-Factor final in a bad, bad year: which empty shell sounds sweetest? It's a bleak thought: in one of the world's oldest democracies, none of us expects democracy to work as it should.

In Laurent Pelly's new production of Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, deforestation is already advanced: plastic bags hang from denuded trees, and the ground is strewn with the discarded waste of our overindulgent society.

The nearest we get to chatting about culture in the pub, usually, is discussing last night's telly. So it came as a bit of a shock when someone said they had been to the theatre the other day. It was the lady with the green/brown hairdo. (She has recently reverted to whisky mac as her favourite winter tipple, and tinted her hair accordingly. Or at least given her coiffeuse some imprecise instructions to tint her hair accordingly.) She had been to Bristol for an evening out.