Ron Hutchinson is a chameleon figure. This summer in Chicago I saw his Moonlight and Magnolias which satirised the insanity of Hollywood. Now he has written Head/Case, which the Belgrade, Coventry has triumphantly imported to the RSC's new work festival and which examines the overlap between individual and national identity.
Hutchinson presents us with two brain-damaged women thrown together in an institutional halfway house. Tracy is a chunky, Northern Irish 35-year-old who has been hit on the head by a brick and is, in her own words, a "compulsive yakker". Julia, in contrast, is a middle-class Englishwoman who has suffered a car accident and finds it difficult to complete a sentence. The only other character is Jimmy, who tells Irish jokes, sings folksy ballads and who seems to be Tracy's counsellor and friend. By the end he has come to represent the false national identity she has to learn to reject.
Like Caryl Churchill in A Number, Hutchinson is asking searching questions about what constitutes our essential individuality. In particular, he asks how much our sense of "self" is determined by cultural, racial and linguistic differences: what it means, in fact, to be "Irish" or "English". But, although this sounds abstract, Hutchinson succeeds by making us care passionately about these two women and their personal plight; especially Tracy's fear of conforming to some inherited notion of Irishness and Julia's terror of being unable to experience emotions she cannot articulate. Even if Hutchinson's play omits the curative process, it is both a compelling human drama and an intellectually unsettling work. No praise is too high for Caroline Hunt's production or the performances of Claire Cogan, Sarah Cattle and Jonjo O'Neill.
While Hutchinson examines the nature of self, Pontius Pilate famously asked: "What is truth?" We certainly stay for an answer in The Pilate Workshop, a devised piece inspired by Ann Wroe's biography of the Prefect of Judea and staged by Michael Boyd in and around the Other Place. It starts with the audience wandering from room to room and listening to competing accounts of Pilate's origins. In the second, more closely structured half we watch as the imperial governor Pilate seeks to administer problematic Judea and finds himself eternally haunted by the subversive figure of Christ.
Wroe describes her book as "a collage of biographical scenes" and at the moment the show seems to be pulling in too many different directions. In the peripatetic first half, insistent parallels are drawn between modern America and imperial Rome with the administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, seen as a contemporary Pilate. In the second half, Pilate is portrayed as a decent, guilt-haunted man demonised by medieval theology. But, even if the multiple perspectives are self-cancelling, Clive Wood lends the eponymous hero a troubled dignity and Toby Stephens hovers memorably as a silently watchful Christ. It needs further work but this is one Pilate that emphatically shouldn't be dropped.
Which is more than one can say for the late-night performance in the Other Place by Douglas Coupland, the fashionable Canadian author and anatomist of the soundbite era who, as part of the RSC festival, offers a personal "testimony". The idea is a good one, but Coupland's memories of the pre 9/11 decade turn out to be self-serving, largely inaudible and highly contentious. At one point, for instance, he tells us that "technology creates decades" and that no one thought in such terms before the 1920s: clearly he has never heard of "the naughty 90s". But listening to this rambling, roadshow Marshall McLuhan, I felt some authors are best appreciated through their books.
· Head/Case is at the Swan until tomorrow. Box office: 0870 609 1110. Then at the Belgrade, Coventry from October 20 to 23. Box office: 024-7655 3055.
