The resignation last week of the Tron Theatre's artistic director, Gregory Thompson, was, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, very much a case of losing one director being a misfortune, but losing two appearing careless.

Thompson's departure comes almost a year to the day since he succeeded Ali Curran, who herself only stayed in the post for just under 12 months. Citing the expanding programme of his own company, coupled with the obligations of a young family, Thompson's announcement came immediately after a two-month tour of America that was nothing to do with the Tron. Given such ongoing commitments, last week's events were easy to predict and, while there seems to be genuine regret at Thompson's going among the staff, in the wider theatre community there is little surprise.

Both he and Curran arrived at The Tron promising long-term visions for the theatre, and both left abruptly, with their announcements leaving much room for speculation.

Curran was a producer, like her predecessor, Neil Murray (now at the National Theatre of Scotland), and Thompson marked a return to the organisation being led by a rehearsal room leader in the mould of Michael Boyd and Irina Brown, but neither was in the post long enough for their plans to make any significant impact.

Thompson's first and last season will be remembered for his production of Grae Cleugh's play, The Patriot, generally regarded as a disaster. A second show to be directed by Thompson was cancelled and he is scheduled to direct a Tron show in February 2008, while the current production of Antigone, directed by visiting director David Levin, is a sturdy and ambitious enough effort which suggests how Thompson's long-term programming may have gone. But his departure raises serious questions about how appointments are made in the Merchant City.

The chair of the Tron board, Peter Lawson, remains chipper about the theatre's future. "It's disappointing for us," he admits, "but these things happen and you just have to get on with it. The Tron is in a fortunate and very enviable position. We've got great staff, but people have artistic ambitions, and you've just got to deal with it. For us, it's business as usual."

That business will again include the task of advertising, recruiting and appointing an artistic director, the third in as many years - and the board might wish to ask themselves why Thompson and Curran couldn't fulfil the commitments they set out to achieve.

One man who might have an opinion is the adapter, director and designer of the next show at the theatre, a co-production with Glasgay of Louise Welsh's novella, Tamburlaine Must Die.

Kenny Miller is sitting in the foyer bar of the Citizens' Theatre, just across the river from the Tron, 15 minutes after the Tron's announcement concerning Thompson has been made. His sole concern is getting his production into shape for its opening next month and he isn't aware of the announcement when we meet. He receives formal notice of it via text message at the close of our meeting.

Whether or not he has any ambition to succeed Thompson as the theatre's head, he must be considered a serious contender for the post. Here is a man, after all, who spent 20 years at the Citz as part of one of the most internationally renowned artistic partnerships in a theatre building this country has ever produced. While never on an equal footing with the theatre's triumvirate of Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and the late Robert David Macdonald, Miller became a crucial part of the theatre's artistic leadership. Miller only stepped aside from the Gorbals to become freelance to allow incoming directors Jeremy Raison and Guy Hollands a free hand.

Tamburlaine Must Die is Miller's second outing on an adaptation of a Louise Welsh work following his production of Tam Dean Burn's stage version of Welsh's debut, The Cutting Room. This follow-up is an Elizabethan pulp noir which follows playwright Christopher Marlowe's imagined travails through the back streets of a very murky London.

"I fell in love with it", Miller says. "I love the play Tamburlaine and the opera Tamburlaine anyway. This still has the same flavour of the play, and because it's about Marlowe, and because his short life was so interesting, I love that thing that he can write the most beautiful heart-wrenching poetry, and then write a play that is so disgusting, violent and sexist it's ridiculous. You'd think the man was a complete psychopath, which in a way he was."

Perfect material, then, for Miller, whose work as associate director and head of design at the Citz included small-scale but gory compendiums of true-life Glasgow murder stories, Blood On The Thistle, the equally bloody Ten Rillington Place and a devastating production of Sarah Kane's Blasted.

With the old guard moving on from The Citz after 30 glorious years, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? was Miller's Citizens' swan-song, and his defining statement the A Little Bit of Ruff season.

The five-play mini repertory season featured an ensemble cast. Miller's own production of D B C Pierre's novel, Vernon God Little, adapted by Andrea Hart, was just one of the highlights of an outing which didn't so much revive a spirit of theatrical experimentalism as reinvent it with verve and vision for the 21st century. Miller's style is flamboyantly gothic, with a clinical but deranged edge. Where do such unsavoury predilections come from?

"I have no idea," Miller chuckles. "I've always been interested in those different kind of juxtapositions that make something really fascinating. In this there's love, murder, sex, everything all rolled into one. That's what I'm interested in."

Originally from Manchester, Miller stumbled into a theatre career. Disillusioned by fashion while a design student, he fell in love with the theatre design department while on a day-trip to Central St Martin's College. His degree show attracted the attention of Philip Prowse, responsible for some of the Citizens' more audacious creative moves. Like Prowse, Miller began his tenure at the theatre as a designer for five years before moving into direction on returning after a break in the early 1990s, when the theatre's two studio spaces were opened.

"Directing was something I never knew I could do," Miller admits, "but Philip encouraged me, saying that the way I designed controlled what happened onstage, so I was as well going that stage further, working with actors and bringing that total vision to it."

As well as designing Jonathan Harvey's new pantomime of Jack And The Beanstalk for The Barbican, directed by former colleague Havergal, he's designing the Christmas show for the Tron, and a one-man drag queen show for London's Drill Hall. Long-term, he's planning an adaptation of Black Narcissus and is "desperate" to do a studio take on Antony and Cleopatra.

"I'm not scared any more about what I want to do in a way that in the early days I was," he says. "You've got to be passionate about getting something on and doing it well, and you can see all my obsessions in this play. It's grubby and full of murder, sex, romance and gothic swagger, with a little bit of modernist anachronism thrown in."

If there was a theatre which could do with some of that right now, it might just be the Tron.

  • Tamburlaine Must Die plays the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, as part of Glasgay. Previews are on November 3 and 4, then it runs from November 6 until 11.