Two Step Almeida, London N1
Gompers Arcola Theatre, London E8
Bombshells Arts Theatre, London WC2
Josette Bushell-Mingo's aim is ambitious, clear and just. She wants to ensure black British artists are differently, more widely and more variously represented. She has set up Push, the black-led arts festival in the belief that communities' perceptions of themselves can be changed and that mainstream organisations will help. She's got the Almeida and Sadler's Wells on board, so one part of her plan has already succeeded.
But what a pity she's chosen to start her assault with the shuffling Two Step . It's hard to find a non-limp moment in Rhashan Stone's play. Two ex-lovers meet some 30 years after they parted. She is single and - therefore? - bitter. He left her; she had a miscarriage. He's reinvented himself, acquiring a degree, a white wife and a son, and is working his way through AA's 12-step programme; the eighth step is making amends to people you've wronged. The two of them clash.
AA's moral precepts swim uneasily through the dialogue, which begins by satirising their pulpit tone and ends up by endorsing it: 'A breakdown is a breakthrough,' the woman is patronisingly, albeit 'gently' told, as she begins to crack up. The mechanics of the plotting are clumsy: the miscarried child wafts around the couple as a reproachful ghost, speaking in semi-verse and, at one point, bewilderingly splashing out of a bath. And Dona Croll and Derek Griffiths don't have sufficient crackle between them.
There's a spurt of life with the entry of the man's furious teenage son, played by Ricci McLeod with just the right mulish outrage: 'Who you callin' half-caste? I'm bi-racial.' But it's a higgledy-piggledy production. Flying furniture - a bed stuck half-way up a wall, dangling window frames - litters the stage in Bernadette Roberts's confusing design. Snatches of jazz float arbitrarily around, promising something more sizzling and more desolating than what's on offer in the action.
It's strange that things should have gone so haywire. Bushell-Mingo's production of Simply Heavenly , the Langstone Hughes musical which opens next month at London's Trafalgar Studios, was glorious at the Young Vic, where its stars included Rhashan Stone. It had all the qualities that Two Step lacks: in Simply Heavenly, even the most sloshed barfly had an interest; in Two Step, watching someone else glug is about as exciting as it is in real life.
There's a far more vivacious drunk in Gompers: a middle-aged ex-stripper keeps a bottle of vodka under the cushions of her chair (she, too, is supposed to have found God and temperance) and when she's got liquor down her throat, performs fellatio on her daughter's boyfriend, as well as doing a manic, hyper-nimble dance, all waving legs and buckling knees and splits.
Adam Rapp's arresting new play is made up of wild fragments, telling its story of a rundown town in spurts, an American, jazz-driven way of putting a play together, this: Stephen Adly Guirgis used it in his tale of derelicts, In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings; and Langstone Hughes's method in Simply Heavenly is similar.
Gompers begins with a young man showing his friend (though not the audience) something so horrible about his stomach that his mate throws up his breakfast. It moves on to a coffee-addicted, trombone-playing major who can't quite remember his dead daughter's name (it was 'something girly'), a homeless 13-year-old who swaggers around waving a sword twice as long as his torso, and a desperate transvestite, secretly trysting with his suicidal partner.
There's one bod in extremis too many and a couple of poetic symbols too far - a golden greyhound and a blue Jesus who walks on water are hauled in to supply mystic resonance. But Róisín McBrinn's production broods away unim paired. Paul Wills's design overhangs the action with a huge iron bridge, whose girders throw shadows like the grid of a wire fence. Playing beneath, a sharp young cast shows that the Arcola is the ideal arena for creating urban dystopia.
Bombshells moves to London this week, having played to packed houses in Edinburgh. The title of the show says a lot about these monologues, written by Joanna Murray-Smith and performed by Caroline O'Connor. It's a winking, punning little irony: each of the four pieces contains a tiny explosion; each features a woman who worries that her goddess status is slipping or has slipped.
There's plenty of cutely observed domestic detail and O'Connor is extremely accomplished, darting around like a demented imp.
But a cajoling charm in writer and performer sugars up the apparent bitter-sweetness and undermines the frankness. There's too much dimpling going on.
Three to see
Stuff Happens Olivier, London SE1
David Hare's Iraq play.
Embedded Riverside Studios, London W6
Tim Robbins's Iraq play.
Dumb Show Royal Court, London SW1
Terry Johnson directs Joe Penhall's new drama.
