To the Traverse for a double bill of world premieres from Scottish Opera. Two short operas - 45 minutes and 60 minutes respectively - and each featuring emotional triangles. That, and their newness, is about all they have in common.

Composer Huw Watkins and poet David Harsent collaborated on In the Locked Room, based on a short story by Thomas Hardy. The director is Michael McCarthy.

Stephen (Paul Curievici) and Ella (Ruby Hughes) take a holiday home by the sea, only he is always rushing back to London to work on a big deal in the City. She is keen on poetry, and her imagination takes over when she finds that a poet (Pascoe - Håkan Vramsmo) whose work she admires has a room in the same house. The landlady Susan (Louise Winter) and the poet have a relationship - she tells him it is only sex, but we know she doesn't really mean it.

Hughes evokes the loneliness of her existence, absorbed by the poetry, she thinks Pascoe is describing her life. Curievici is not a bad husband, he understands what she gets out of poetry, it just doesn't do it for him - not least the way a deal energises him; the deflation when the deal is sealed is palpable. It is not surprising, given Vramsmo's Redford-esque looks, that women fall for him. Winter is clearly fond of him, but protecting herself.

The libretto is very poetic, and the music differentiates between the characters - more sprightly vocal lines for Stephen, ethereal for Ella, and downright down-to-earth for the clearly shy and reticent Pascoe.

Ghost Patrol inhabits an entirely different landscape - a pub in a garrison town. Louise Welsh and Stuart MacRae previously collaborated on Remembrance Day for Scottish Opera's second series of Five:Fifteen and, again, the concern is with What Really Happens in War. The director is Matthew Richardson.

Ex-officer Alasdair (James McOran-Campbell) is running the pub with his wife Vicki (Jane Harrington) when his ex-sergeant Sam (Nicholas Sharratt) breaks in one night. Alasdair recognises him and gives him a job. It becomes apparent that both men are dealing with an incident from the past in their own ways. Alasdair is drinking the profits, Sam is suffering flashbacks. Even the three large screen TVs in the bar register his flashbacks - the pictures in news reports of soldiers' deaths breaking up and multiplying. Tim Reid's video designs are highly effective and integrated with the story.

Vicki is more sympathetic to Sam's anguish than, by now, to her husband's and the inevitable happens - on Remembrance Day. The two men have different interpretations of what happened, and which is the truth - if either - is left to the audience. But it ends as it began, in a fight.

Vicki's song 'Out on a lonely highway walks a girl in a white gown' could have a life of its own outwith the opera. And I wonder which choir will be first to sing MacRae's setting of Laurence Binyon's poem 'For the fallen', so hauntingly sung off-stage. At other times, his music evokes the rotor blades of a helicopter, the rattle of gunfire.

Although the language is conversational - at times demotic - the singers have substantial arias in which their characters are developed. But this is no song-cycle. It needs the 'third dimension' of the action on stage. At the same time, Samal Blak's simple set - a bar, with stools, and TVs high on the wall behind the bar - is timeless.

Both operas are designed by Samal Blak, lighting by Ace McCarron, and Michael Rafferty conducting players from the Scottish Opera orchestra.