O'Casey's tragedies are famously imbued with comedy. But these two farcical burlesques prove that even the great man's lighter pieces connect to his tragic plays: what they offer, respectively, is an attack on the fake piety and infantile dependence of the typical Irish male.
Bedtime Story, written in 1950, is the more substantial of the two. It shows a young Catholic bachelor desperately trying to conceal from his landlady and fellow-lodger the girl with whom he has spent the night: thus, in one deft stroke, O'Casey sends up both the stifling puritanism of 1950s Ireland and the timid hypocrisy of the earnest Catholic. Self-preservation is the only thought on the mind of the panic-stricken hero as he declares "the very day after my novena too!" and we rejoice in his comeuppance. Nicely played by Michael Colgan as the pious charlatan, Elaine Symons as his flighty date and Nora Connolly as his tyrannical landlady, it is a richly comic piece with a satirical point.
The director Tiffany Watt-Smith and her Shunt-based designer Lizzie Clachan give it a faintly expressionist twist by staging it in a narrow V-shaped room. But they really push the boat out with The End of the Beginning. Written in 1932, this is an extravagantly farcical piece about a bungling farmer who takes on his wife's housework with disastrous results: crockery gets smashed, an oil drum gets spilled and a heifer tethered to a chair drags the hero up the chimney.
It is all suitably riotous: a spectator is deprived of his seat and clanking pans descend on the audience's heads. Admittedly, by putting David Ganly's smallholder and Jean-Paul Van Cauwelaert as his mandolin-playing sidekick into clownish wigs, Watt-Smith overplays the piece's circus and pantomime origins. I'd have liked more rustic realism to emphasise the point - reinforced by O'Casey's tenement tragedies - that it is really women who hold Irish family life together. But, taken in tandem, the two plays remind us that, even at his most exuberantly funny, O'Casey was always Ireland's sternest critic.
· Until April 1. Box office: 020 7261 9876.
