An elephant in the flowerbed? But that's just Absurd!

Absurdia

Donmar Warehouse

LONDON

The Enchantment

NT Cottesloe

LONDON

After seeing citizens of English towns canoeing up their high streets, some of us may feel we've had enough of the surreal for one summer. However, in the Absurdist realms of British suburbia - as envisaged by the playwright N F Simpson - an elephant is grazing in the flower-beds outside Mr Paradock's semi-detached; Uncle Ted has turned into a woman without anyone (except him) batting an eyelid, and a gent in a bowler hat is in Mrs Brandywine's living room. He is weirdly interrogating her about the whereabouts of the floor.

Absurdia is a triple bill of short off-beam comedies, staged by the Donmar's new associate director Douglas Hodge. It yokes together Simpson's A Resounding Tinkle (from 1958) and Gladly Otherwise (from 1959) with the premiere of an ontologically teasing farce by Michael Frayn. The last is called The Crimson Hotel and proves worth the wait. Meanwhile, the first two works are part of an apparent resurgence of interest in the octogenarian Simpson. He disappeared from the theatrical scene decades ago, but has suddenly resurfaced thanks to the Royal Court's recent 50th anniversary season of play readings.

In A Resounding Tinkle, the Paradocks (Peter Capaldi and Judith Scott) look like dowdy small-time conformists - all beige cardigans and net curtains - even as their conversation keeps heading off at nutty tangents, illogical as dreams. They bicker over whether they should call their latest elephant Mr Trench or Oedipus Rex - or maybe 'Tis-pity-she's-a-whore Hignett. Their anxious neighbour Mrs Stencil telephones, collecting charity subscriptions for eagles with vertigo. Finally, on the wireless, the afternoon play mirrors their lives, word for word.

Clearly, this is meant to be both funny-peculiar and funny-ha ha but, alas, much of the humour proves feeble. It is self-indulgently whimsical, at once prolix (even in this one-act format) and underdeveloped. In fact, it's peculiarly dull and darned nearly a resounding flop.

Still, it is spasmodically droll. Simpson's satirical impulse is re-enlivened, in these religiously sensitive times, as the Paradocks stand reverentially in front of the radio for some kind of daily ecclesiastical cobblers, spouting catechistic silly nonsense. Lyndsey Marshal's Uncle Ted is also delightfully ludicrous, mincing around and voguing like a mini-skirted 1960s dollybird. All the same, wouldn't Simpson's wackiness look more radical if the period setting had stuck more strictly to the Fifties?

Anyway, the evening improves and gathers momentum. As the bowler- hatted, house-inspecting inquisitor in Gladly Otherwise, John Hodgkinson has a hint of menace combined with laughable punctiliousness and fits of histrionics - lurching in horror at the sight of shelving. It's also interesting to see where Simpson fits into Absurdism's chain of influences. He discernibly harks back to Pirandello and to Thornton Wilder's 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth (which featured suburbia plus mammoths). He overlaps with early Pinter, and he has palpably seeped into the subconscious of Monty Python, Graham Fellows's The Shuttleworths and even Sam Shepard's Donmar play, The God of Hell.

The Crimson Hotel plays more intriguing Pirandellian and existential games, as well as paying tribute to Feydeau. What Frayn has penned here is a deliberately immaterial sex farce. Capaldi plays a randy Belle Epoque playwright, hoping for some covert rumpy- pumpy with his leading lady, Marshal's Lucienne. He has led her into the middle of nowhere where he assures her they won't be seen. However, she had imagined that he was taking her to a hotel, just like the one in his on-stage romp in which she stars.

So he pretends there are walls and numerous doors. And lo, as they mime the moves, we hear the squeak of hinges, the clunk of locks, the ridiculously Gothic creak of hidden panels. The confusions between reality and fancies then start to multiply and spiral as Lucienne insists on rehearsing what they will be seen to be rehearsing if her producer-husband suddenly materialises. This builds up into a small comic whirlwind, in which the adulterers begin to will themselves out of existence. Most entertainingly, they try to wobble themselves into a mirage then magically vanish into thin air.

In The Enchantment by Victoria Benedictsson (a Swedish contemporary of Ibsen's), the heroine's love for a celebrated sculptor and womaniser becomes all-consuming for her, but also tragically self-destructive. Having escaped family griefs and the staid tedium of backwater Sweden, Nancy Carroll's delicate Louise is recuperating from illness in Paris. She is being nursed by a more feisty female artist, Niamh Cusack's Erna, when she meets Zubin Varla's Alland. Erna knows, from bitter experience, how Alland twists women round his little finger, homing in on their vulnerabilities while insisting he is the victim.

This play is not perfectly formed but it is admirable, psychologically complex and poignantly autobiographical. Bendictsson was cold-shouldered by her own great love, the renowned modernist and critic Georg Brandes, and committed suicide before finishing The Enchantment. The NT programme does not clarify how much her writer- friend, Axel Lundegard, added post humously to complete the script, but Clare Bayley's new English version is unobtrusively eloquent. Paul Miller's finely detailed directing is potently absorbing.