Trevor Griffiths is the godfather of British political theatre. While it is good to see this collection of his shorter pieces - Thermidor and Apricots from 1971, along with the more recent Camel Station - it would be even better to see one of his longer plays. How about that gripping account of Gramsci's conflict with Soviet pragmatism, Occupations?
Although not on the same scale, Thermidor similarly deals with brutal political realities. Set in a Moscow office in 1937, it shows a Stalinist apparatchik investigating a female ex-history teacher falsely accused of Trotskyist sympathies. What emerges is not just the forensic myopia of Stalinism but its degradation of human relationships. The most poignant moment comes when Imogen Smith's victim reminds Alexander McConnell's stony-eyed interrogator of their friendly past encounter at a Moscow Youth Conference.
On the surface, Apricots, set in an English family garden, could hardly be more different. Yet it too, in its portrait of the terminal stages of a marriage, is pervaded by a sense of lost illusions. Sam and Anna engage in mutual recrimination, joyless coupling and masturbatory fantasy. The play is almost excessively cryptic, but, ruefully played by Andrea Sadler and Daniel James, it reminds us that Griffiths has always been a sexual, as well as a political, realist and was an exponent of In Yer Face Theatre long before it had a name.
Camel Station, written in 2001 for a New York protest movement called Not in Our Name, proves that Griffiths was alert to the coming catastrophe in Iraq. The setting is north Iraq, where a 14-year-old shepherd boy recounts to his cousin a tale he hopes to tell on a storytellers' course in Nineveh. It turns out to be a subversive, shaggy-camel story in which Saddam Hussein is the humiliated victim. You suspect that the story would get the boy executed - but an even greater threat is posed by the American jet planes that constantly buzz overhead. The final dream-image of the boy brandishing a rifle and crying "No more Yankees, no more stories" carries its own powerful prophetic charge.
Directed, like all the plays, by Tamara Hinchco and passionately performed by Fenar Mohammed-Ali and Lisa Came, it confirms Griffiths' status as our foremost socialist dramatist.
· Until April 23. Box office: 020-7943 4750.
