Pinter and paranoia

As critics pack extra jumpers and sort out sturdy walking shoes to seek new talent in Edinburgh over the next month, the James Menzies-Kitchin Memorial season proves that some of the brightest new stars can be found in Battersea.

Menzies-Kitchin was a talented director who died suddenly from heart failure aged 28, and the award set up in his name aims to cherry-pick the Deborah Warners and the Sam Mendes of tomorrow.

The award has already proved its pedigree by spotting such meteors as Southwark Playhouse artistic director Thea Sharrock - whose Top Girls transferred from the BAC to the West End - and Mark Rosenblatt, whose prize-winning The Dybbuk has been succeeded by a series of fringe and West End productions that have maintained the buzz surrounding his name. Now this year's winner, Bijan Sheibani, takes on two of Pinter's most overtly political plays and makes an engaging case for their menacing humour and relevance in today's paranoid political climate.

Party Time and One For The Road - brought together here for the first time - suffered a certain amount of derision when initially written in 1991 and 1984 respectively. Yet in a post 9/11 world, where the Americans feel able to impose the death sentence on terrorist-suspects following trials without jury in Guantanamo Bay, and an eminent scientist has committed suicide following pressure from the Government, both One For The Road's psychological torture scenes and Party Time's juxtaposition of smiling social protocol and lurking savagery at a "tennis club" seem extraordinarily apt.

Sheibani's fascination with dystopian double standards was demonstrated in his production of Edward Bond's Have I None last year. In his Pinter double bill, such preoccupations have come to full fruition: beautifully cast and aesthetically vibrant, both plays demonstrate how language can simultaneously dissemble and carry oppression in every syllable.

Kristin Hutchinson is gruesomely mesmerising as the tortured wife, and Colin McCormack proves a master of subtle brutality as the inquisitor in One For The Road. A small, but perfectly - and darkly - formed evening.

Until 17 August. Box office: 020 7223 2223.

Party Time & One For The Road