Life's little tragedies

Birds of a Feather star Lesley Joseph has spread her wings to perform a one-woman show that covers everything from lesbianism to lime-fondue chocolates. The diminutive comedienne - familiar to most as a mascara-wearing man-eater - here reincarnates herself as four different individuals, each trying to balance the routine of everyday life against their own small tragedies.

The playwright Stewart Permutt most recently created the show Unsuspecting Susan, for Celia Imrie, showing a talent for Alan Bennett-style one-liners quivering with tea-time ironies. Bennett's influence looms large again here in an evening that seems like an exercise based on Talking Heads, but nuance and subtlety are missing as Joseph leaps from adulterous sophisticate to confectioner in a forbidding grey curly wig, or from little-girl-lost teacher to insane amateur actress.

On a minimalist white set, the spirited Joseph seems to relish the challenges thrown up by her conflicting and often dotty personae, yet where Bennett skilfully allows his characters to feed the audience clues about themselves unwittingly, Permutt's creations announce their absurdities up front. As Joseph relates such anecdotes as the pneumatic bosom that deflates when an orchid is pinned to it, you wish Permutt had dared to invest as much complex humanity as humour in sketches that ultimately boil down to caricature.

Complex humanity is certainly not short in supply in Tony Craze's daring new play, Squint. This drama links themes of drug addiction and self mutilation with a foray into Anglican spiritualism, looking at four young people who are at various stages in their quest for chemical or religious ecstasy.

Craze is no doubt aware of such self-mutilating modern artists as Franko B - for here former EastEnder Patsy Palmer plays Courtney, who cuts her body and bleeds for art. However, it is Rory Murray, who plays her boyfriend and fellow addict, Hugh, who has the charisma and credibility to drive the plot from the art scene in London to an Anglican retreat, where his search for miracles blurs myth and reality.

Squint grapples with huge provocative subjects, but needs more creative muscle to pull them off. Even so, his taste for unusual plotlines definitely makes Craze a writer to watch.

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