Up until the final 15 minutes it’s a curiosity, an experiment for experimentation’s sake. We, the audience, are both stage and set dressing. Adrian , the archetypal gushing theatre enthusiast, speaks up from among our ranks, encouraging conversation, an exchange of views. Other performers, including Crouch himself, playing himself, reveal themselves in our midst one by one. Between them they recount a story surrounding a fictional production staged by Crouch.

Except they aren’t just relating their experiences of this notional production: an in-yer-face affair crammed with violence and abuse that has caused audience members both to walk and to pass out. They’re apologising for their part in it. Apologising to us, the audience, because theatre makers are beholden to their audiences. They need us, the consumers of their art, to understand their intentions and to forgive them.

And until those final 15 minutes that’s all The Author is: an acknowledgement of the absolute power the audience wields, seasoned with interrogations of the audience’s ingrained reluctance to exercise that power, to intervene in events onstage, however reprehensible they find them. It’s all necessary to prime us for what comes next, but it takes its sweet time doing so, and in the meantime it all feels a bit insular, a bit inconsequential, even a bit masturbatory: the mores of the theatre being discussed, by theatre makers, through the medium of theatre, using a fictional piece of theatre as an allegory, to theatregoers.

Then comes the turnaround, and in those final 15 minutes The Author is revealed for what it has really been all along: a daring act of self-flagellation by Crouch on behalf of provocative art and controversial artists. Personally present, without the ablative armour of a fictional character, and having questioned for over an hour why audiences choose not to act against onstage villainy, the playwright reveals himself as the worst kind of villain, or at least the most easily demonised. There’s nothing insular or inconsequential about his closing monologue, delivered to a pitch-dark auditorium – and yes, people sitting close to him do plead with him to stop, though not forcefully enough for him actually to do so.

The medicinal value of this bitter little pill remains to be seen. If next month The Stage reports mass walk-outs and stage invasions at Sarah Kane revivals, we’ll know it had some effect; but I suspect the thick sugary coating may well interfere with the active ingredients, and a few patients will undoubtedly refuse to swallow the pill at all.

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?

Luckily – or rather, shrewdly on Shinn’s part – the play’s setting neatly excuses this kind of soapbox declamation. It takes place on US presidential election night, in a hotel room occupied by the Democrat candidate’s son, John Jr. It’s a politically charged environment inhabited by politically eloquent people (campaign staff and the potential President’s immediate family), so informed debates about the issues du jour are realistic, if not always totally theatrical.

The tangents at which the play’s many debates diverge look suspiciously like excuses for Shinn to hawk his many (and considered) political theories to the audience, but they’re interwoven in a way that suggests the personal is political, the political can border on religious, the religious is personal and issues from domestic disputes to public relations to party politics to the Middle East to Islam to Christian fundamentalism to Evangelism to literalism to homophobia and back again are so tightly knotted together that discussion of one will inevitably lead to debates on all the rest. Every tangent is painstakingly anchored in the point from which it branches; politics, Shinn seems to say, cannot help but cover every one of these issues and more. It’s impossible to discuss one topic in isolation. What matters is how it fits into the big picture.

The production has been timed to coincide with the real Presidential race, but benefits also from some serendipitous parallels with real life. The controversial Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad feature heavily and risk dating the play considerably; but they’re mentioned in relation to John Jr’s indiscretions at a college party, evoking Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s own filial improprieties in ways Shinn could not possibly have foreseen, but which add immediacy to an already consciously topical production.

All seats at the Royal Court http://www.royalcourttheatre.com cost £10 on a Monday; concessions (£5 off top price) are available on other days. Now Or Later ends 18 October.

Image Top: Eddie Redmayne in Now or Later at the Royal Court Theatre. Photograph by Keith Pattison.

Image Bottom: Matthew Marsh and Eddie Redmayne in Now or Later at the Royal Court Theatre. Photograph by Keith Pattison.

It’s a dangerous directorial decision. The stage is left knee-deep in day-to-day theatre clutter – half-built scaffolding towers, power tools and stacks of gaffer tape – with a small performance space marked out using electrical tape. The cast lounge on grubby waiting-room benches, forsaking visual business almost entirely: when asked, “What are you doing?” Simon Paisley Day deadpans, “I’m peeling fruit,” his hands clasped motionless in his lap.

Theatre being an essentially visual medium, all this suggests a play completely lacking in theatricality or anything capable of holding an audience’s interest. Director Ramin Gray has put all his faith in von Mayenburg’s (or Zade’s) script to colour in his pencil-sketch production. It’s a gamble, and it pays off. The interesting theatrical clutter in the background might threaten to pull focus from the generally static performance, but the dialogue is rapid-fire and non-stop; get distracted by a cordless drill and you’ll miss a whole scene. Mayenburg’s comedy thrives on the kind of deadpan delivery around which Gray has built his production.

All the performers bar Michael Gould (Lette, the titular Ugly One) play multiple roles, and this is where Gray crosses the line and places his concept above theatricality. Stripped of visual performance elements there’s little to differentiate between each performer’s various characters.

In places this adds to the comedy. It’s funny to discover halfway through a conversation that Lette is speaking not to his wife but to his mistress (both Amanda Drew). It also resonates with the play’s themes of conformity. Pressured by society’s concept of beauty, ugly Lette resorts to cosmetic surgery; his impossibly handsome new face becomes a benchmark of attractiveness, and soon every fashionable man in the world is wearing the same face. Our confusion at being unable to differentiate between wife and mistress gives an insight into the mistress’ confusion at being unable to differentiate between Lette, Christian the pianist and her son Karlmann (Frank McCusker). But people don’t start wearing Lette’s face until halfway through, so for half an hour the lack of differentiation is a purely comic device, and the script doesn’t always oblige the relevant scenes with comic dialogue. In these instances, when it’s near impossible to tell Paisley Day’s plastic surgeon from his office boss character, the device is merely confusing or distracting.

The Ugly One delights in treading a fine line between deliberate understatement and a lack of theatricality, and while it reaches reaches the other side standing confidently upright, it isn’t without a few worrying wobbles in the wrong direction.

The plot in Vassily Sigarev’s Plasticine revolves around the life of a teenage delinquent called Maksim. He lives with his grandmother in a dilapidated apartment block and moves from place to place in search of a fast buck, a quick fuck and the possibility of missing another day at school. Along with his friend Lyoka, the pair get involved in trouble deeper than they can handle. They follow a girl back to her flat, drawn in by the prospect of sex, but on arrival they are confronted by a much starker reality than they had bargained for. The occupants are three rancid middle-aged men who take sadistic pleasure in dominating and frightening the two youths before gang raping them. The overall sense you get from the play is that this is the boys’ fate; that sooner or later in the environment they live in, with the values they live by, they will be subject to some form of violence that outweighs that which they inflict on others. Call it twisted divine retribution.

Plasticine is a play that depicts a world where human energy and resources are channeled through violence and aggression; sometimes administered in groups, sometimes individually; and though the list of violent acts in the play is long, including beatings, rape, murder, verbal abuse, exploitation and humiliation, there is a redemptive, hopeful quality that comes across at key moments. Take Maksim’s emotional outburst towards his dying grandmother for example, or the girl known as ‘SHE’ who shows the world her pristine new shoes in a brief gesture of pride. These are moments when even in the bleakest of situations the characters find ways of rekindling compassion.

The short sharp shock tactics in Sigarev’s dramaturgy are by no means new, but the vibrancy he brings to the landscapes and its characters, his ability to breathe life into this hell hole and decay and retain its complexity makes for a compelling read. What I found striking from the very beginning was the enormous scope of the play, just in terms of its setting alone. From the opening scene with a crane that lowers a coffin from an apartment building onto a hearse, to derelict blocks of flats, a sports stadium, a meat market and a school, Sigarev tries hard to evade the single-room-anxiety syndrome endemic to other plays on a similar register. This is an unusually large-scale vision for the type of intimate, visceral theatre at play.

The weaknesses I picked out in the play were largely to do with a lack of clarity or underdeveloped themes. A clear example of this is the relationship between Maksim and his friend Lyoka. In a scene about half way through the play they turn up at the side door of a cinema trying to catch a glimpse of a porno film. Lyoka moves in close to Maksim and there is a moment of intimacy between the two young men, but before there is time to react the scene is over an the incident is left untouched, disconnected from the rest of the play. Another example is the recurring presence of a ‘Boy’, perhaps the ghost of the young boy who’s coffin being lifted from the apartment at the beginning. The boy tries to interact with Maksim on several occasions, but Maksim brushes him aside saying ‘not now, later’, but again the later never happens and we never know who the boy is. Not all loose ends in a story need to be tied up, but ends that fizzle with intrigue, like these do, need attention.

The opening two scenes of the play focus on two teenage brothers, Ignacio and Bruno and their relationships with their summer camp leader (Castro) and their father. Ignacio is extremely shy but is nonetheless entrusted with the responsibility of becoming camp leader by Castro. Castro plays the role of a father-figure to the boy and wants him to gain the confidence that he seems to lack. The boys’ real father on the hand comes across as compassionate and understanding, he has to take care of his sick wife as well as bring up the two boys. Bruno is the elder brother, very much assertive and dominant in his ways and holds little esteem for Ignacio.

Our first encounter with this sense of trauma in the play comes in scene 3. It is a scene set twenty years after the opening two scenes and it is a conversation between two men, two old friends who were somehow implicated in the event, but how, where, when and why remains unclear. There is mention of an ‘old queer’ who has been released from prison, then further allusions are made to abuse, and suggestions of rape that the two men went through. But again, we are not told who the perpetrators were, whether it was the father, the camp leader or the boys.

The final scene of the play goes back to where scene two left off and shows the conversation between the father and the two boys. The father suspects something has happened to them while they were away at camp but that they are keeping it secret. He grills Ignacio for evidence but to no immediate avail. Only at the very end when Bruno is threatening his brother to keep quiet, does Ignacio come out and call his father. The finishing line is Ignacio saying ‘Something did happen at the camp’.

The rhythm of this play, as in Almost Nothing is measured and winding, we meander through scenes and characters, catching fragments of a story along the way. As readers/audience we are left to use our imagination, to fill in the gaps. Whereas gaps and incongruencies in new plays are often pointed out as structural weaknesses, with Barbosa it is quite the opposite, the unspoken or ’subtext’ is his forte. I strongly recommend his work for an egoless, humbling experience.

The story is in effect quite simple but not without its emotional impact. In the beginning a family of three which includes a mother and father (Frank and Claudia married for 19 years) and their son Andi, are packing boxes, preparing to move to a far away destination. Andi is troubled because it is the last time he will see his girlfriend Tina, a situation that mirrors his father’s teenage years, as Andi vows never to forget his love for Tina. In the same way, his father Frank pledged his love to teenage heartthrob Romy Vogtländer some 24 years before in a summer of love. It just so happens that the same Romy Vogtlander arrives at Frank’s doorstep some 24 years later insisting, much to the disgust of Claudia, that Frank must keep his vow and go off to live with her. Though the story is simple, its fragmentation through the playwright’s use of time makes for a fascinating distortion, since as readers/audience members we are no longer subject to the linear narrative form in which we instinctively try to discern the outcome of a story before it happens.

The weaker elements of the play for me, come from the gaps in transition, and to a small extent from an underdeveloped emotional side to the mother’s character. What is the source of her compulsive jealousy? The ending is also something I hold in contention and though I will not reveal it in detail here, lest I should spoil it for others, suffice to say that it is radical, but radical all too late.