By the time the anticipated act of violence occurs, Stephens has laid out a whole smorgasbord of potential contributing factors: unrequited teenage love; body image issues; the spectre of trouble at home; alcohol; an environment in which parents and teachers allow sixth formers to believe a C grade in an English mock means they’ll “never get out of Stockport”; plus Bennet Francis (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), a bully whose aloof disregard for those he hurts is worse by far than actual malice, and whose effect on the group debunks with ease that maxim about sticks and stones so beloved of adult authority figures.

Yet Stephens’ real achievement is that despite all the factors presented to us, when our minds reach, as they tend to do, for a simple, catch-all way to explain the tragedy, there isn’t one. It doesn’t even feel satisfactory to conclude, “it was probably a combination of all those things”.

As an examination of the overly simplistic adult tendency to classify teenage behaviour as the direct result of easily identifiable causes like alcohol, pornography and violent media, Punk Rock delivers; though no alternative theory is forthcoming, unless you count, “some people are just broken”.

Stephens’ love of language carries him away into the odd overwrought line, and Director Sarah Frankcom’s love of Stephens’ language leads to characters delivering extended passages straight out front, while the characters they’re supposedly addressing slouch behind them in a symmetrical chorus-line chevron. The script is excellent – funny in a terrifying and guilt-ridden kind of way – and it deserves to be placed centre stage, but such unnatural blocking actually distracts from the words. Or is that too simple, too immediate an explanation…?

Benedetti’s interpretation of the text, with a single female actor onstage, speaking directly to the audience, focuses on the rhythms and cycles of Kane’s writing to access different states of the character’s emotions. The direction draws attention to the resonance of the writing, questioning the nature of humanity now. As 4:48 progresses from time of desperation to time of sanity, the play becomes a symbol of human malady.

Anamaria Marinca embodies both despair and wit, speaking from only one point onstage throughout the performance, with two open doors behind her. Her eyes are warm, and her rare smile offers a pleasant shift in texture. The silences, stillness and sincerity are the most powerful elements in this production. It’s an ongoing discussion between Anamaria and the audience, not so much an appeal but a dialogue. Under the austere lighting, she sometimes appears like an insect, vulnerable, angry; and it is in her posture and her mode of address that we access thoughts, feelings, states of being, not a whole person but the myriad facets that make up that person.

For those who have seen Anamaria Marinca in the film 4 Luni, 3 Săptămâni, 2 Zile (4 Months,3 Weeks and 2 Days) , there is a strong parallel between her character in the film and the way she communicates with the audience in 4:48: dangerous and vulnerable at the same time, confrontational, trying to reach a state of normality.

This production of 4:48 Psychosis toys with human nature and theatrical convention. While Anamaria Marinca seems to face her own dark side – natural and, at times, impulsive – Benedetti asks us to rethink Kane’s writing once more. So that maybe now, in light of our times, we can understand a different side of her. In the director’s own words, ‘It’s an attempt at an answer, the temptation of a winking eye’.

The man in the King’s shoes is David Harewood, who seems to be aiming for a career playing inspirational black leaders (he’ll soon appear on TV as Nelson Mandela). Harewood convincingly recreates the booms, swoops and tremulous vibrato of King’s legendary oratory, maintaining the vocal cadence of a preacher even alone in the privacy of his motel room. He evokes a man consumed continually by a struggle he ironically believes he alone can carry to conclusion.

He’s matched and challenged by Lorraine Burroughs as motel maid Camae, who surprises King with her views – rooted in the same beliefs as his own, but a step removed in their conclusions – and by proving no mean orator herself. Her presence brings out King’s roving eye and patriarchal views to contrast his civil rights work, which makes for much more interesting theatre than a blindly reverent onstage beatification.

Camae is also the crux of that sudden supernatural gear-change, which, far from derailing the play, not only provides some unexpectedly surreal and comic moments (mostly involving one-sided telephone conversations) but also allows us to experience anew through King’s eyes events he didn’t live to see. Thus The Mountaintop is upgraded from period character study to a history with an immediate bearing on the modern world, drawing causal links between the life and death of King and the appointment of Barack Obama to the White House.

Either individually or combined, On the Beach and Resilience – the independent but complementary constituent plays of Waters’ double bill – trumpet an uncompromising challenge to conventional, optimistic projections regarding the results of our effect on the climate.

In On the Beach, glaciologist Will Paxton (Geoffrey Streatfeild) returns home to Norfolk after an extended stint in Antarctica, to present his new girlfriend Sarika (Stephanie Street) to his parents, and to confront his reclusive father Robin (Robin Soans), who gave up glaciology two decades ago to observe sea birds on the salt marshes.

In Resilience, Sarika likewise presents Will to the Ministry for Climate Change, where he faces off against Colin (also Robin Soans), the colleague that discredited his father, in an attempt to convince the new Conservative government to legislate according to his own radically pessimistic predictions of coastal flooding in Britain.

If you can see both (highly recommended), see On the Beach first. If you can’t, see Resilience: though its focus is squarely on the policy makers and not those affected first hand by the crisis, it contains not only the best laughs (mostly courtesy of David Bark-Jones’ dangerously clueless Minister), but also the most important science.

Will’s solution is that there is no solution; there’s nothing left to do but retreat inland and abandon the coast to the North Sea. Before Resilience’s interval he reels off a list of draconian-sounding measures, including compulsory purchase and demolition of non-carbon neutral homes. Waters and his agent are adamant that the science used in the play is sound and rigorously up to date.

Downers don’t come much bigger, but neither play ever ceases to entertain, even when Soans’ characters show their similarities by breaking out the visual aids. Hard science and the accompanying pessimism are counterbalanced by dramatic flair in both the text and the performances. While the big issue naturally and rightly dominates, Will’s relationship with his father gets nearly as much exposure; and Street, along with Susan Brown as both Will’s mother and Tessa, Minister for Resilience, fly the flag for women finding footholds in predominantly male arenas. Soans’ portrayal of two similar but distinct obsessives, one comical, one eventually somewhat sinister, particularly stands out.

The only ray of hope in Waters’ predicted stormfront is that both plays are set a few years in the future. If the science is as solid as he claims, we can only hope the policy makers don’t greet him as Chris greets Will – at first jovially, then later bitterly, as “Nostradamus”.

In Wall, David Hare conjures a vision of the future; drawing on history that is being written as we speak, his journies make faraway lands feel less distant, less foreign than we’d have them be. He speaks of a wall. Not of a particular point in time, but of a repeated event split by perspective; a solid structure separating Israel from Palestine. And Hare, as he states, has ‘acquaintances on both sides’.

His speech oscillates from the factual to the personal. Like a book, whose form certifies its text, he physicalizes his discourse and its affront on popular opinion through the subtle sliding of spectacles on and off his nose.

His expressions are amplified by the white cube that forms the stage. It becomes a space of projection, a sculpture of speech as he drops his papers one by one to the floor. This space could be anywhere. Its walls could divide anything the audience imagined that night – except one thing: the wall between us and him.

Hare talks of the wall as a social phenomenon, a geographic and political one. An architectural feature that turns rigid and real when soldiers guard its openings; faced with a barrage of fiery thoughts from single-file citizens within and without. You build a wall and suddenly you find yourself caught up in the barbed wire, watching shadows on both sides.

Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, two decades of globalisation and lightning cultural change. Yet in the Middle East another wall has been built, cutting through newly formed identities and developments. Of what significance is Hare’s story in this intercultural dialogue? Perhaps it is his exposition of ambivalence and complexity – the wall as symbol of religion, faith and destruction at the same time. A wall built on ancient, sacred ground; concrete roots under a shifting topsoil.

So I wonder – where will all this lead in a century of global noise, of wars fought on other people’s lands, of tensions that wrinkle the fabric of time?

The reason for this phenomenon lies in the play’s main theme. Its protagonist Jacob (Edmund Dehn) is suffering from Alzheimers, and the performance charts his decline. We witness the first stages of the illness when Jacob is still trying to hold on to his energetic life and his successful career as a head-hunter. Once this turns out to be impossible, he decides to capture his remaining memories on a tape-recorder. The play ends with his daughter Gracie (Rebecca Stevenson) and her ex-boyfriend Michael (Jim Fish) taking him on a tour of his own past based on his recorded memories. In the course of this development, Gracie manages to rekindle her relationship with her father, and also comes closer to Michael, the only person to help her through difficult times.

Cooper cleverly represents the collapse of past and present in Jacob’s mind through a fragmented chronology. With the use of two blackboards, on which the different moments in time are indicated, and the tape-recorder from which key memories are replayed, we see a poignant juxtaposition of these two time frames. Director Steve Harper enforces this mirroring effect by running many of these incidents in parallel. Harper is able to elude the duplication of storyline by exploring differences in tone and rhythm between the narration and the action: a memory that causes pain for Gracie and Michael for example, could have been a joyful experience for Jacob.

Through all of these changes of time and emotion, it is the actors’ versatility and subtlety that makes this performance special. Story and structure are well-conceived, but without Rebecca Stevenson’s ability to change from schoolgirl Gracie to a prematurely grown-up woman in a heartbeat, and Edmund Dehn’s harrowing juxtaposition of energetic businessman and a dumb, pitiable wreck of a man, the play would remain just that – an interesting story well told. Harper rightly identified Cooper’s ability to create nuanced characters as the strongest point of For Once I Was, and found actors that live up to the demands. Even characters that could have been seen as minor, such as Jacob’s girlfriend Eleanor, or Gracie’s ex-boyfriend Michael, are given depth by Victoria Kruger and Jim Fish. Strong as the main pull of empathy towards Jacob and his plight is, I never stopped thinking about the feelings of the people around him.

Consequently, plot was secondary, while relationships and reactions took centre-stage – a simple smile, the turning away of a face. I was surprised to see Annabel Pemberton’s Laura (Jacob’s wife) in the spotlight given her relatively small part. She infused every gesture with a special significance, but due to the intimacy of the play this came across as rather heavy-handed. It raises the question as to whether the script would not be more suited to the medium of film; particularly in its ability for close-ups, match cuts, and cross-fades. Even the dissolving of time, the bleeding of one character into another (Jacob increasingly confuses his girlfriend Eleanor with his ex-wife Laura), would be more effective on screen. Despite this minor imbalance, the fact remains that the performance sucked me into a bitter-sweet world of emotional conflict and confusion.

Covering four waves of immigration – French Huguenots, Irish, Jews and Bangladeshis – Bean points a flashing neon finger the size of
the Olivier Theatre at our national tendency towards intolerance.

The play does a great job putting the problems of today’s multicultural London in perpsective, as each generation of immigrants eventually integrates into British life and then takes its turn oppressing the next. It’s enough to make anyone wonder why we’re still considered a go-to nation for anyone fleeing persecution and adversity.

Yet Bean somehow houses this damning admonishment in an epic, centuries-spanning romantic comedy, throughout which the successive reincarnations of a pair of lovers try again and again to love one another despite cultural divides and running gags. And as if that plot weren’t enough, it is itself embedded in a fairly iffy piece of metatheatre.

The immigrants in the detention centre in 2009, you see, have devised the centuries-spanning romantic comedy while waiting on their applications for leave to remain. At its best, this framing device salts the open wound of British hypocrisy: citizenship exams, testing the loyalty of potential immigrants to the nation that banged them up as soon as they arrived? Such exquisite irony. So quintessentially British.

But the cynic in me can’t help seeing the play-within-a-play as a Get Out Of Jail Free card Bean dealt to himself under the table, allowing him to neatly sidestep criticism with the excuse, “that’s how the characters would have devised it.” And at its worst, the device is a megaphone through which Bean can announce (in case we’re a little slow on the uptake) that it doesn’t matter if a character lives through the Blitz and still looks twenty-five in 2009, because that’s the magic of theatre.

The comedy does work. It tempers the worthier observations and keeps the play from turning into art as social work for the nation. So does the star-cross’d romance. After all, the truest measure of a country’s receptiveness to new cultures is the rate of intermarriage. But I don’t need Olivia Colman’s immigration officer Philippa to face front and tell me so before I can appreciate the point.

Bean could do with worrying a little less about whether people will pick up on his meaning. It’s clear enough without all the highlighting, and in overclarifying himself, he runs the risk of closing down alternative interpretations, yanking the subtext into the foreground and robbing the play of depth.

Tonight it’s the turn of Mile End playwright Dan Rebellato to curate, and the result is a rehearsed reading of Fear and Misery in the Third Term, a new piece written especially for the evening by Rebellato, Paines Plough writer in residence Duncan Macmillan and three others. Inspired by Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, the play examines today’s Labour government through a series of short scenes.

Less Epic Theatre and more Simon Stephens, the scenes portray their tenuously linked characters’ experiences of the credit crunch and evaporating Arts Council funding as symptoms of a more pervasive British malaise, embodied in a teenager on a high ledge, leaving messages on his unfaithful girlfriend’s voicemail. There are some excellent moments of black humour: a couple gets bogged down with explanations of global economics in the process of telling their son why they can’t go to Disneyworld; and two investment bankers, livid at being painted as villainous orchestrators of the credit crisis, attempt to outdo each other, Four Yorkshiremen style, with tales of their painful, neglected childhoods.

But it’s only the boy on the ledge who, from his commanding vantage point, can see the big picture: the erosion of fundamental human kindness and decency. It’s something that underlies the comparatively petty complaints of the other characters; which forces the government (as the boy points out) to place adverts on public transport reminding people how to behave; and which leads the boy, originally only on his ledge for some peace, to actually consider jumping, at the behest of unfeeling onlookers interested only in a big spectacle.

Of course, Fear and Misery in the Third Term has now had its airing and may well never be seen again; the point of providing all this detail is only to indicate the level of quality you can expect at Later. What exactly you might experience on other occasions is something you can only discover by going.

Fear and Misery in the Third Term: written by Mike Bartlett, Chloe Moss, Ben Musgrave, Dan Rebellato and Duncan Macmillan; performed by Fred Ridgeway, Kirsty Bushell, David Sibley, Pippa Nixon, Richard Atwill, Jonathan McGuinness, Frances Grey, Rosie Thomson and Danny Lee Wynter.

Later: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10:00 p.m. until 24 October. All tickets £5. £4 multi-buy offer when you book three or more shows. 20% bar discount with ticket. Details of future performances, including curators and approximate content, can be found on Paines Plough’s website.

The Holloway end of the story is left to be upheld by in suitably indomitable fashion by Susan Engel as professional suffragist Florence Boorman, braving the hunger-strike with steely conviction and flashes of wise, waspish humour. And as the show progresses, subdued rituals of sympathetic solidarity develop between vast-bosomed, monosyllabic wardresses, frigidly compliant nurses and frightened, stubborn, suffering prisoners.

There was a discernible split in the audience, between those who knew exactly what was coming when a doctor enters holding a rubber tube, and those who didn’t. Several of the latter responded to the ensuing scene of force-feeding by fainting theatrically all over the auditorium. This bout of audience histrionics did nothing to clarify the play’s denouement, but it did suggest that the National is quite right to be putting on a play that revisits this inglorious chapter of British political history.

The play is impressively even-handed with its historical materials, reminding us that men as well as women were still agitating for enfranchisement at the beginning of the twentieth century. And Adrian Rawlins gives a compelling portrait of disintegrating tolerance as Celia’s frustrated, hard-drinking, emotionally isolated husband. But as Her Naked Skin increasingly focuses on the pleasures and price of sexual rather than political liberation, the show’s suffragette narrative often feels like a dutiful appendix to a more seductive central story.

The show’s split-focus also leads to rather wearisome dramatic sprawl, and after a couple of hours some of the audience around me were starting to manifest the despairing camaraderie of prisoners a long way from their release date. In the end, Her Naked Skin is a bit like its heroine: courageous, demanding, articulate, divided, unpredictable and – despite good intentions – ultimately alienating.

On Sunday 3 August 2008, Edinburgh becomes the theatre capital of the United Kingdom. The annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe attracts the best and the barmiest of companies to show off, experiment and network for three weeks of non-stop plays and parties.

I’m a Fringe virgin. I’d never set foot in Edinburgh until last Friday. I’m here this year as company technician for Royal Holloway Theatre’s Darning Jilly, a modern re-imagining of the myths and legends surrounding Jack the Ripper. When I’m not pushing faders in the C SoCo Basement I’ll be seeing shows, walking the Royal Mile, talking to the public and the theatre community and reporting it all back home to the London Theatre Blog.

With over 2,000 shows playing over three weeks it’s near impossible to predict which will take off and which will ditch headfirst into the drink. At this stage all you can do is stick pins in the Fringe brochure or put your faith in big names. When the pin method can easily turn up Worst-Show-Title contenders like Kiddy-Fiddler on the Roof or I Kissed a Frog and it Gave me Herpes, I’m inclined to bet instead on Simon Stephens. He seems to hold the British monopoly on plays that answer big questions while also tenderly exploring the interpersonal lives of believable and subtly observed characters. His new play, Pornography, deals with the 2012 Olympics, the 7/7 Tube bombings and the growing gulfs between people in Britain today; it premieres at the Traverse Theatre on Saturday 2 August.

Also considered a guarantee of quality is The TEAM – they’ve won two Fringe First Awards in the past and great things are expected of their Architecting, also premiering at the Traverse.

The Royal Mile – a straight, cobbled street joining Edinburgh Castle to Holyrood Abbey – is the traditional home of Fringe publicity. It’s impossible to beat the competition without showing your face to flyer on the Mile. When it comes to methods of promotion I’m expecting innovation and lunacy in equal measure – anything goes as long as it persuades bums onto seats. The Festival doesn’t officially start until Sunday 2 August, and most shows aren’t even previewing until Wednesday 30 July, yet some companies are already putting in the hours, hoping to beat the rush for punters’ attention. A group of people spotted on Saturday, sticking posters in shop windows while dressed in kimonos, turned out to be Mugensha Theatre Company, publicising their Japanese black comedy The Feast of the Ants at Rocket. Two lonesome members of the Alcock Players had the privilege of being the only people flyering the Mile on Monday; their show, Alcock Improv, is Cambridge’s answer to Whose Line Is It Anyway?, though how a show dependent on audience participation will fare with the average audience of 3 remains to be seen.

Those two Alcock flyerers had one last pre-Festival tip for me: Roy Walker, formerly of Catchphrase fame, is performing stand-up at Assembly on George Street. If his show, Goodbye, Mr Chips turns out to be the surprise hit of this year’s Fringe, don’t forget: Alcock Improv are to blame!