Imagine you’ve had a really, really, really bad day. After immense emotional turmoil, you, a sophisticated Londoner – and proud of it, have gone to a pub in a little Welsh town that feels like a foreign country. You’ve got rolling drunk, and only escaped from the local Lothario – chief characteristic that he spits when he talks – when scooped up by a strange woman, perhaps a madwoman. She misunderstands you, you misunderstand her, and she ends up chasing you around her living room with a cross and a knife, trying, perhaps, to kill you.

These are the rib-rattlingly funny opening scenes of Cariad, by the first-time playwright Sophie Stanton, who also plays the meaty role of the fey, rambling Blodwen, left. She’s stayed in the town she was born in but, it emerges, her drunken visitor Jayne (also beautifully played by Rachel Sanders, who manages an entirely controlled drunken stagger with great vermisilitude), was here until the age of nine. She’s come back only to spread the ashes of her mother.
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That a play written in 1920 should still feel entirely fresh and relevant 85 years later is either the sign of a fine drama, or of a failure of the human race to progress. In the case of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, both statements are true.

When Brutus Jones (Paterson Joseph) swaggers muscularly into the Gate Theatre, revealing within seconds the nature of his regime, built entirely on brutality and bombast, recent parallels are obvious. Robert Mugabe sweeps into mind, then Ceascescu, Mobutu … the list could go on and on.

And as America struggles to find “leadership material” in Iraq, O’Neill’s play presents a society entirely corrupted by the exercise of absolute, violent power. There are no heroes here – it is the power of the Emperor’s own conscience that will really get to him.
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You are sitting in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In the intimate space of the Courtyard Theatre at King’s Cross, you’re not just watching, you are in the meeting.

Seven alcoholics are telling their harrowing life stories – simply, naturally, with only as much melodrama as comes naturally to their characters.

Jack (Riley Stewart), from an Irish background, comes from a family of alcoholics, his mother dying at the age of 13 left him an orphan. (Earlier, his father had drowned in a puddle while in an alcoholic stupor.) Jack drank to forget; he drank to find a family. Of course both efforts failed.

Then there’s Tim (Gary Lawrence) who cries as he talks of his family – led by his macho football coach father – refusing to accept his homosexuality; he still can’t use the word “gay”. Then his story gets even darker.
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George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, written 1896, has a curiously modern storyline; you could easily imagine a Fathers4Justice Batman figure swooping down on the scene as the three children of the formidable Mrs Lanfrey Clandon start to lay claim to the father whose existence has previously been unmentionable.

In almost two decades of exile she has raised her children to sturdy independence, according to the principles of “20th-century child-rearing” she’s set out in her books. But now back in England, they collide with the old traditions and the tactics the unscrupulous have developed to deal with the “New Woman”.

Peter Hall’s revival at the Garrick (London) – moving from Bath – is emphatically Traditional Theatre. The sets are elaborate, as are the costumes, and lines are delivered not to the other characters, but clearly to the audience, the often ponderous wit sounded out syllable by syllable for effect. The storyline might be entirely modern – progressive woman clashes with regressive, repressive males – but nothing else is.
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