Girls who are determined to wear the trousers must, eventually, feel

Saint Joan

NT Olivier

LONDON

Glass Eels

Hampstead

LONDON

W omen are f i g h t i n g their way to the top of the pile. Of course, the twist in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan is that his dogged action heroine ends up being burnt at the stake by infuriated patriarchs. They punish the Maid of Orleans not just for insisting the voices in her head are celestial rather than satanic, but also for emancipating herself and believing she is on a mission with a God-given right to wear the trousers (both metaphorically and literally). In her final scene she looks down, supposedly from heaven, to behold the very types who damned her and only now revere her when she is safely out of their hair.

Director Marianne Elliott's revival of this Shavian history play - first staged in 1924 - proves remarkably gripping, with some whittling of the text helping to rescue GBS from the accusation of long-windedness. Crucially, the core casting is superb.

Anne-Marie Duff 's pale, gaunt and gamine Joan is intriguingly ambiguous. As she sets out on her personal crusade to inspire French battalions with her zealous faith, she looks fragile yet with obduracy in the set of her bony jaw. She first appears with an air of smiling rustic simplicity, speaking with an Irish lilt. Then that is qualified by wary, possibly canny or even impish glances at the army commanders and the Dauphin whose hearts and minds she wants to win. Stretching her arms out wide for her silver armour, she becomes iconic, resembling a crucified martyr but with a hint of power lust.

Performed in medieval costume-going-on-modern khaki, the play gains in moral complexity because of its imperfect fit with our own contemporary worries about fundamentalists, war, torture and religious (or irreligious) dress codes.

The most riveting scenes are Shaw's darkly satirical ones, depicting the verbal manoeuvres of the ecclesiastical and state leaders who see Joan put on trial. Angus Wright is horribly funny as the suave, lethally diplomatic Earl of Warwick, just nudging the negotiations on with, "But you do burn people occasionally?" Paterson Joseph is electrifying as the crimson-robed bishop, Cauchon, who desperately tries to stop Joan condemning herself in court where she is harangued, increasingly terrified and naively belligerent. The production gets off to a stilted start with Brendan O'Hea's mannered impression of military thuggishness - all nose-to- nose aggro. Elliott comes perilously close to pumping this play up into some epic musical with a rising and revolving stage, bursts of Enyalike choiring, and choreographed battles involving the rhythmic hammering of corrugated iron. But she pulls this off and manages the Olivier's vast size with ease. The burning of Joan, where chapter house chairs are piled up like a pyre and the choiring drowns out Duff 's silent screams is searing. Recommended.

Nell Leyshon's new, quietly intense play Glass Eels, set in backwater Somerset, also features a young woman whose father - like Joan's - tries to keep her at home. Phillip Joseph's self-absorbed Mervyn assumes it is the job of Laura Elphinstone's gangly, bridling Lily to make tea for the menfolk. Her mother has died and everyone is still obsessively grieving. Lily is also kicking around in adolescent boredom with no company except her grandfather, Tom Georgeson's grouchy yet tender Harold. That is until she starts meeting - down by the river at night - a nervous, taciturn and normally reclusive neighbour (Tom Burke). A potential stepmother also enters the picture, causing confused rage and jealousy. Glass Eels could have been written anywhere between the late 1950s and now. It is an archetypal rite of passage drama which, out of the corner of its eye, glances at all those old folk tales and ballads about nave rural maids finding a sweetheart or, maybe, running into a murderous rotter.

Leyshon could do well to pare down her use of poetic symbols, with repeated talk about the river's eels unfurling and a fly trapped in glass. But she also has a lovely ear for dialect. Her oddball characters are closely observed with poignant sensitivity, humour and harsh truthfulness. The dramatic tensions and resolutions are never hyped up and Lucy Bailey's cast is beautifully understated too, on a dream-like set where water laps around the kitchen's table and Lily's bed. Well worth seeing.

'Saint Joan' (020-7452 3000) to 4 September; 'Glass Eels' (020- 7722 9301) to 23 July

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