Scotsman critic's choice: Four must-see shows on this week

Glasgow Girls is showing at the Edinburgh Fringe. Picture: Robert Day

THEATRE: Glasgow Girls / Last Dream (On Earth)

The Edinburgh Fringe offers a chance to catch up with two brilliant recent Scottish shows which reflect on the current refugee crisis. Cora Bissett and David Greig’s Glasgow Girls, above, is a joyous, eclectic musical celebration of the seven schoolgirls who, a decade ago, fought to end the forced removal of asylum seekers from their Glasgow homes. And Kai Fischer’s Last Dream (On Earth) is a superb, meditative audio and visual drama about the human impulse to migrate to new worlds, whether in a tiny boat across the Mediterranean, or on humanity’s first-ever space flight. Joyce McMillan

• Both shows at Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, until 28 August; Glasgow Girls also on tour to Glasgow, Stirling and Dundee, until 15 October, www.edfringe.com

POP: Nothing Ever Happens Here

Now that the EIF is revelling in an embarrassment of contemporary and popular music riches, it is time for the Fringe to formulate its reply and Nothing Ever Happens Here, a year-round live music night in the atmospheric bowels of Summerhall, has stepped up to the plate with quite the spread of home and away talent, including local favourites Broken Records and Adam Stafford tonight and Withered Hand next Saturday but also international players such as Montreal art rockers Suuns tomorrow, cult Californian indie troupe Grandaddy (22 August), Texan singer/songwriter Kevin Morby (23 August) and South London soul diva Eska (26 August). Fiona Shepherd

• Summerhall, Edinburgh, 0131-560 1580

CLASSICAL: Steven Isserlis & Robert Levin

Cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Robert Levin have made a thing of regularly getting together to perform Beethoven’s Sonatas for Cello and Piano in America, with the Harvard musicologist Levin on fortepiano. They bring their magic to Edinburgh this week in two all-encompassing Queen’s Hall programmes. Should be illuminating. Ken Walton

• Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 22 and 23 August, 0131-473 2000, www.eif.co.uk

ART: Confined Spaces

Not so much a pop up exhibition as a lockdown, this imaginative temporary project sees cell-sized installations by artists in the Victorian prison building that still served as Campbeltown’s police station as recently as 2009. Among them, Helena Koumbouzis’ work is based on the childhood memories of her father-in-law, who lived in the Campbeltown prison as a child when his own father was the custody officer there. The artist has commissioned two wooden sculptures by the Glasgow social charity GalGael that reflect imprisonment from a child’s point of view. Moira Jeffrey

• Campbeltown Old Gaol, until tomorrow, www.confined-spaces.org