The Week Ahead

Coldplay's Chris Martin famously described himself as "a poor man's Fran Healy", while the real Healy has spent this summer on tour with Keane. The rich man's Chris Martin is now launching a solo career - a temporary break from his band, he insists - with an album, Wreckorder, out next month, and a series of live dates, beginning with a homecoming show at Oran Mor in Glasgow on Wednesday. www.franhealy.com

Television

Teenagers may obsess over Twilight's will-they-won't-they vampire romance, but True Blood's yes-they-do-frequently-with-complicated-repercussions formula is a more tempting proposition for grown-ups. Season two of the Deep South-set blood-sucking saga, which begins on Channel 4 on Thursday night, sees Sookie and Bill's relationship becoming more complicated, Jason Stackhouse joining an anti-vampire religious cult, and a fascinating vampire Jesus character called Godric. Later on it gets a bit silly and turns into a kind of MTV version of The Wicker Man, but there's still much to enjoy.

www.hbo.com/true-blood

Theatre

Can you convincingly perform The Importance Of Being Earnest and Romeo And Juliet on the same theatre set? That's the challenge Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre is setting itself this week as the same cast perform Shakespeare's love story and then Oscar Wilde's comedy on a set designed by Neil Murray - altered, for Romeo And Juliet, to look like a kind of post-war, battle-damaged version of the Wilde set. It's an intriguing artistic experiment - Romeo and Juliet has surely never been staged as a spiritual sequel to Earnest before. You can catch Romeo And Juliet from this Friday, and Earnest from 22 October. Book tickets for both and save 10. www.lyceum.org.uk

Books

Sandwiched between the end of the Edinburgh Book Festival and the long-established Wigtown Book Festival, Stirling's Off The Page has managed to carve out its own niche, with a quirky mix of the literary (Iain M Banks, Louise Welsh), the popular (Carmen Reid, Christopher Brookmyre) and the curious - an evening of "Great Adaptations" and "Blind Date with a Book" at Strathblane Library. It runs all week and details can be found at www.stirling.gov.uk/offthepage

Children

In The Night Garden, the BBC's slightly trippy TV show for toddlers, is now a live show, performed in a travelling dome especially tailored to the needs of its tiny audience. Instead of being crammed into the aisles of a conventional theatre, children in the show's igloo-like structure can wander around at will; the venue includes a buggy park, baby-changing facilities and microwaves for bottle warming. And the show itself? Expect an immersive, IMAX-like experience with puppets and projections. It's on Glasgow Green from this weekend until 26 September. www.nightgardenlive.comVisual art

A smoke drawing across the horizon, an airborne investigation of wind currents, 'suprematist kites'... all these tantalising sights are on offer at the Great Glen Artists Airshow, a new event celebrating art that uses the air around us. Artists from all over the world will congregate on Saturday at the Highland Institute for Contemporary Art at Loch Ruthven for two days of events on the loch, in the nearby woodlands and at the other end of the Glen at Outlandia, a treehouse studio overlooking Ben Nevis. For more information, visit www.artscatalyst.org

Film

Launched in 2008 - and won that year by Scotland's Luke Fowler - the Jarman Award is a 10,000 prize for video artists, inspired by the late, much-missed British film-maker Derek Jarman, director of Jubilee, Caravaggio and The Garden. The winner also gets a commission from Channel 4. You can see work by all four of this year's shortlisted artists, Spartacus Chetwynd, Ben Rivers, Zineb Sedira and Emily Wardill, at the CCA in Glasgow this Friday at 7pm. The winner will be announced on 5 October. www.cca-glasgow.com

This article first appeared in Scotland on Sunday, September 12, 2010