One of last year's great discoveries was a furious trilogy of forgotten plays from the first world war. Now the same team follows it up with another neglected great war threesome. Even if it doesn't have the same shock-value, it offers a fascinating portrait of the isolation felt by women, especially those who had neither son, husband or lover fighting at the front.
This is the theme of JM Barrie's moving The Old Lady Shows Her Medals - a study of an exiled Scots char who, plucking a name from the newspaper, pretends to have a hairy-legged son in the Black Watch. When the real soldier turns up, what follows is a characteristically Barriesque fable about the mutually obsessive needs of mothers and "sons". Mawkishness is kept at bay by sharp humour, not least the soldier's outrageous vaunt that "Being Scottish, there's almost nothing I don't know." In Ian Talbot's production, the piece is perfectly played by Jennifer Piercey as the char and Martin Ledwith as her fake son.
Women's need for emotional investment in the conflict is also the subject of Handmaidens of Death by Herbert Tremaine (a pseudonym for Mrs Deuchar). Here, munitions factory workers from both sides of the class divide lament the dearth of eligible men in Blighty and their lack of soldier boyfriends - a call chillingly answered in the ghostly climax. But what comes across most strongly, in Tricia Thorns's production, is something rarely touched on: the sexual ache of the wartime young and their hatred of war widows who remarried.
Ann, in Luck of War by Gwen John, is just such a one. Six months after her husband has been declared missing, she is driven by desperation to remarry only to have her original spouse turn up. Somerset Maugham dealt more wittily with a similar dilemma in Home and Beauty, and John wraps up the situation too neatly. But Clare Barrett endows the unwittingly bigamous heroine with a Lawrentian defiance and, as in all the plays, you get a vivid picture of the loneliness of a bereft female generation.
· Until October 9. Box office: 020-7620 3494.
