There's something surprisingly light about The Events, David Greig's new play set in the aftermath of a mass shooting of a community choir by a boy who appears to believe he holds the moral highground to commit such an act.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing in a piece that focuses on Claire the liberal priest and leader of the choir who survives, possibly because she is white.

As traumatised as she is by the experience, she remains desperate to understand the rationale behind the Boy's actions. She sees his face in everybody she meets, from her increasingly estranged female lover, to members of the extreme right wing party the Boy was a member of, and, in a final attempt at closure, she visits the Boy in his cell.

This is achieved by having Rudi Dharmalingam play all key parts other than Claire, while, as the Boy himself, he relates his story not as some unhinged monster, but with an intelligence and a levity that humanises him. Greig isn't letting anyone off the hook here.

Rather, like Claire, he's questioning the troubling back- story behind the reason such atrocities happen.

In some ways, the Boy seems to have more faith than Claire, played by Neve McIntosh with a nervy intensity that lays bare just how fragile faith can be.

Ramin Gray's co-production between Actors Touring Company, the Young Vic and two Norwegian theatres puts a real choir onstage, which punctuates the action with some real community spirit that helps the play to truly soar.

As with so much of the serious end of popular culture at the moment, The Events is about loss, grieving and letting go. It is also a complexly realised and deeply serious inquiry into its subject that says that, no matter what happens, healing is possible, through song, through dance, and, most of all, through living.

A Scotsman, an Englishman, a Welshman and a Northern Irishman are in The Union and on their last legs in I'm With The Band, Tim Price's audacious and irreverent take on the perennially ongoing Scottish independence debate.

The VAT-man hasn't been paid for 12 years, a crisis that prompts Andy Clark's Scots guitarist Barry to go solo, leaving James Hillier's increasingly control freakish singer Damo to boss Matthew Bulgo's Welsh bassist Gruff and Declan Rodgers's Northern Irish drummer Aaron about.

While Damo struggles with unreconstructed indie-pop, Barry gets himself a laptop and looks to the future with some forward-thinking electronica designed to get people together, even though he too isn't sure what he's doing. While Gruff is all too willing to acquiesce, without any kind of anchor, Aaron's self-destructive streak returns.

It's unlikely the metaphors for the current state of the nations could be spelled out more obviously in Hamish Pirie's co-production between the Traverse and Wales Millennium Centre. With songs and musical direction by Ballboy's Gordon McIntyre, all four actors play their instruments for real in a cartoon-strip style musical that reinvents 1970s alternative theatre for the 21st century.

As Damo attempts to find a new direction via a conceptual cacophony that sounds like torture, it's clear from the toy instruments at the end that a back to basics approach is required. Rip it up and start again? Only time will tell.

David Harrower might just have written his finest work yet with Ciara, a heart-dropping solo play written for actress Blythe Duff. Duff plays a nouveau riche gallery owner whose father was a major figure in Glasgow's underworld. As Ciara holds court in the sort of dilapidated warehouse space that looks like the sort of place where young men got their knee-caps broken, a picture gradually unravels of a protected little girl who managed to create a world of beauty for herself.

Whether she can truly get away from her father's legacy remains to be seen. Here, then, is a tale of two cities brought vividly to life by Harrower's richly nuanced text, which mesmerises even as it peppers each scenario with deadly one-liners.

Duff's riveting performance in Orla O'Loughlin's co-production between the Traverse and Datum Point makes it truly exquisite.

Daniel Padden's sound design and Philip Gladwell's lighting both add mood to a beautiful piece of work in which a woman attempts to fill the void with a flash of something that might just resemble love, but instead makes her brittle, even as she tries to protect a child the way she was once protected in this homage to a cityscape in all its contrary glory.

South Africa's apartheid era may be over, but the scars linger on, as Cadre, Omphile Molusi's play for the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, testifies to. In it we see how a young boy is radicalised after his activist brother is killed, while he also loses his teenage sweetheart, who the law forces to move away. By the 1970s he's informing on the establishment from the inside, though a brief reunion rips his life asunder a second time, and the end of apartheid seems to make things even more complicated.

Molussi himself appears in his own production of a very telling play which, as with some other plays in the Traverse programme, suggests a nation forcing out its old masters in order to foster self-determination can create a brand new set of problems.

All this is told in a gloriously roughshod style, with the action played out on a messy network of hung-out washing behind which assorted shadowplays take place. With Molussi appearing alongside Sello Motloung and Lillian Tshabalala, who also provides the music, this is a timely reminder that political upheavals when they come are complex, messy affairs which can damage individuals just as much as they may wreck the system.

All shows run until August 25