This year's Royal Court International Playwrights Season offers another bite of world theatre, including new plays from Cuba and Russia. First up comes a double bill from young Brazilian writer Marcos Barbosa.
I say a double bill, but both these offerings are so brief that they feel like scenes towards plays rather than real theatrical meat. You are left pondering that Brazilian new writing seems remarkably like lots of British new writing - predominantly naturalistic small plays set in small rooms.
In the first play, Almost Nothing, an affluent couple, Antonio and Sara, are living with the aftermath of a violent encounter with a child on the streets of their home city. The second, At the Table, consists of scenes set 20 years apart that show the effect a paedophile has on the lives of a group of boys he took camping.
The link between the plays is the casual, unthinking destruction of lives and families, and a refusal by the guilty to take responsibility for their actions. Antonio and Sara treat murder as if it were a minor inconvenience, on the same level as an unfortunate prang with the car. They are concerned not with the victim or his mother, but simply how it might derail their peaceful, pleasant lives. The inconvenient must be done away with - and Antonio and Sara have the money to do it.
At the Table sees Castro, who abused countless young boys, arguing that he has no responsibility to those he harmed because he loves his wife, pays his taxes and helps his neighbours.
Perhaps these scenarios are supposed to particularly reflect Brazilian society, but the production does little to suggest San Paulo over Basingstoke. This makes the plays universal, but not universally interesting, although even when little happens Barbosa is a good enough writer to make you want to know what might happen.
Some of the acting is very good, too, particularly Karl Johnson who as a smooth and shady private investigator in Almost Nothing and the child-abuser in At the Table succeeds in making the wrong choice seem like the moral choice.
· Until February 28. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
