The experience is so intimate - at the furthest, the musicians are 10 rows away - and so lovingly delivered that it is impossible to leave without that particular piece of music remaining with you for some time, if not for ever.And thus, as the boat gently rocks and Manhattan slumbers around it, BargeMusic has, once again, worked its particular magic.BargeMusic (00 1 718 624 4061; www.bargemusic ). As The White Stripes' latest tour rolls into western Europe and the venues they play keep getting bigger, one can't help wondering how long their magic can last. How much can you do with only two people on stage and no trickery? Isn't there going to come a time when we wish they would bring on a bass player, wear something that isn't black, white or red? Perhaps But so far, megastardom only makes the duo more impressive. Jack White marches on in a top hat, and the first, distorted chord of his guitar brings the curtain down behind him, revealing a huge apple hovering menacingly above a tropical bay - the Garden of Eden?

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It's an appropriate framing for the psychodrama to be played out across Meg's bright red drumkit. In the past, the tension between the pair seemed immediate and real Inevitably, it's more of a show now. But when Jack sweetly intones the closing lines of Bob Dylan's "Love Sick" to Meg's face, and she deigns to hit her drum softly, for once, you can't fault the acting.To start, Jack appears bionically attached to his guitar. Grinding out the riff to "Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground", every stroke of his right hand has its corresponding jolt of the head as he moonwalks from Meg.This year's Get Behind Me Satan album, light on guitars, proved the Stripes' ability to vary their sound within their own constraints.

The swiftly recorded album was criticised for sounding undercooked, and live performance does nothing to remedy that. Ever restless, Jack is constantly experimenting with new ways to sing his songs - some of which make him sound like a small dog in pain.But what songs they are: "Forever for Her (Is Over for Me)", "Little Ghost", "Red Rain" - to name only the cuts from Get Behind Me Satan - combine inspired tunes with wonderfully skewed takes on love and morality. Then there are the classic rockers from 2003's Elephant: "The Hardest Button To Button" and "Seven Nation Army" both set an arena of fists a-pounding.There are still moments when it doesn't come together and the chaotic noise gets wearing. But even these seem to fit the package: unrehearsed passion and stylised performance, nostalgia and modernity, Jack's machismo and vulnerability. In rock music today, there is nothing even remotely like them.The White Stripes tour Britain from 5 to 17 November. Derby Playhouse's Macbeth reunites the director Karen Louise Hebden and the designer Rosie Alabaster.

Alabaster's glowering set is superb, with its look of torn metal and beaten copper. As a relief from dry ice - and a gloriously grim and ghoulish banquet ghosting - we encounter Craig Purnell's pearl of a Porter: a side-splitting, genital-obsessed tour de force that helps to turn this show around. Till the crowning, Brian Protheroe's Macbeth sounds, frankly, a bit of a wimp He moves abysmally, speaks and gestures flatly Yet put a metal circle on his head and he transforms. Protheroe's second half is genuinely good: he shows a real cocky nastiness. Aoife McMahon's Lady Macbeth also launches ropily. Her letter scene, all actorial gestures, wouldn't earn her a place in drama school. She, too, picks up - by "infirm of purpose", we can believe she might have wielded the dagger herself - but, arguably, the real stars are Matt McKenzie's sound score and Martin Allen's subliminally nasty background thrumming.Youth should have been on the side of Bill Bryden's staging of Romeo and Juliet for Birmingham Repertory Theatre Alas, this production was a damp squib.