I'm always a man for seasons, and it is an excellent idea for the Theatre Upstairs, as an addendum to Caryl Churchill's A Number (currently playing in the main house), to offer a trio of little-known Churchill plays in spare productions. What they prove is that the playwright's preoccupation with human identity and dystopian nightmare, evident in her latest play and Far Away, was there right from the start.
The pick of the trio is undoubtedly Identical Twins, written for radio in 1968 and originally played by a single actor. On stage the twins are mesmerisingly embodied by real-life brothers, John and Martin Marquez. And what Churchill brings out is the way psychologically antithetical individuals lead curiously parallel lives.
Teddy is urban, extrovert and resilient while Clive is rural, introvert and self-destructive. Yet in youth they date and hate together, and in maturity simultaneously wreck their marriages. What makes the play so haunting, exactly as in A Number, are the questions Churchill poses about the mysterious source of individual personality and whether it stems from genes or social circumstance. Sharply directed by Dominic Cooke, this is the best play about twins since Twelfth Night.
The dark side of Churchill, evident in the cosmic chaos of Far Away, also emerges in Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen (1971), also written for radio. The setting is a London tower block in 2010, when the inner city is choked with pollution, fanatic gangs roam the streets and the gap between rich and poor has grown into an obscene chasm. But what might be a stock Road to Dystopia is given vibrant emotional life by an uneasy father-son reunion and the hesitant love between Karl Johnson's hermetic elder and Sophie Okonedo's stammering neighbour. The play reminds us of Churchill's constant ability to personalise social and political unease, and there is an extraordinary moment in Ian Rickson's production when the windows are opened onto today's traffic-clogged Sloane Square and Johnson wistfully recalls once seeing a sparrow.
Oddly, the play that looks most dated is This Is a Chair (1997). Churchill's intention is, I guess, to chart the surreal disparity between media headlines and diurnal reality. Thus, a caption on The Crisis in the Middle East is followed by a domestic scene in which a father nags his daughter to eat up her supper. I would dispute Churchill's premise, in that the curse of modern life is more the media's obsession with the goldfish-bowl world of celebrity than with global crisis. But that in no way impairs a rich evening, one that reminds us that Churchill, while constantly reinventing the wheel in terms of structure, has always been haunted by individual and societal breakdown.
· Until October 12. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
