Truth hurts

The Royal Court's International Playwrights' Season, which this year embraces plays from Brazil, Cuba and Russia, makes the National Theatre's repertoire look parochial by comparison. This wonderful double bill by Brazilian Marcos Barbosa, casts disturbing light upon a far away country.

Barbosa's two plays are thematically linked by their portrayal of people who seek to suppress the truth and cannot face it. In Almost Nothing and At the Table some terrible things occur off-stage, which the characters involved shrink from frankly discussing. They tiptoe around the daunting subject, in Roxana Gilbert's taut, finely acted production, like thieves sizing up the building into which they will break.

Barbosa, whose cryptic diction in Mark O'Thomas's translations is faintly reminiscent of Harold Pinter's, introduces us to behaviour which seems Anglo-Saxon but emerges as quite different.

At the Table views in veiled terms the dangerous, male tendency to camouflage deep feelings and an unassuageable sense of pain. These emotions are powerfully filtered through the perspective of teenage brothers complicit with Karl Johnson's wily paedophile, Castro, and the embarrassed reunion of two of the brothers' equally abused friends, 20 years later. It is only

Castro, freed from prison, who talks with facile, self-justifying assurance.

Almost Nothing, a model of theatrical compression, deepens and darkens a mood of simmering unease until a private detective calls and disposes of a married couple's serious dilemma with lordly ease. It gradually emerges from the suspenseful, oblique dialogue that

Ewan Stewart's gentlemanly Antonio, sounding as Scottish as haggis and looking old enough to be the father of his wife Sara (Nina Sosanya), has shot dead a youth who approached their car window. After a visit from the boy's mother - pained, inscrutable Lorna Gayle - the detective, presented by Karl Johnson as a master of sinister bonhomie, offers a final solution to their problems. It chillingly comes to seem as if in Brazil murders are as nonchalantly passed over or arranged as a trip to the local supermarket. Barbosa strikes me as a hot, highly individual new talent.

Until 28 February. Information 020 7565 5000.

Almost Nothing (Quase Nada)/At The Table (A Mesa)