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How does one make an evening of one act plays sound appealing? Maybe a bit like a short story collection (even though that would be by one author), it rarely sells in quite the same way.

The National Theatre's idea of Double Feature in the Paintframe, is as good as any..

And maybe like starting with a short story collectdion very near the end of the book, we watched the second pair of shows and frankly loved it.  And here we are trawling the Internet trying to find a good review … and failing. But sticking to our guns (and there were plenty of those in the second play) we reckon that maybe the mistake is with the planning committee. Perhaps the order of the two sets of plays didn't quite work.  Without having seen DF1 we can't argue with the reviews, but we take issue with a couple of notices for DF2.

Stephanie Street in Nightwatchman

Nightwatchman by Prasanna Puwanarajah (who incidentally is appearing next door at the National in Emperor and Galilean) is a one woman performance by Stephanie Street playing Abirami who has been called up for the British Women's Cricket team at Lords. Practising against a bowling machine in the indoor nets, the 45 minute speech tells of a British Sri Lankan  yougster growing up in a troubled relationship with her father and her passion for the game. Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard argues that the monologue is "steeped in recondite references and packs in too much". I disagree. Yes a working knowledge of the Tamil Tigers' war against the Sri Lankan government would have helped, but there is nothing that your average NT theatre goer wouldn't have been able to cope with. Stephanie Street's performance was terrific, full of wit and flashes of brilliant timing although a few quieter moments would have meant more light and shade for this theatre goer.

Nightwatchman might have seen the light of day as a radio play. Did playwright Puwanarajah have personal experience of a parent who had trouble with his Tamil/British identity and a brother who committed atrocities with the Tigers? Possibly not, yet in the white middle class audience it was difficult to bring up the conversation about Tamil identity in the interval.

And let's hear it for the sound team at the National! Imaginary balls are bowled at great speed, it's perfectly obvious where they pitch and how she plays each one to different parts of the field. Even when ball beats bat, the nets magically react.  Fabulous stagecraft - can anyone tell us how it was done? We found ourselves sitting dangerously at forward short leg. (So my husband tells me).

Second half brought us to There is War by Tom Basden -  about the futility of conflict which for me at least had a "Good soldier Svejk meets Alice in Wonderland"  feel to it. The country is at War. The Greys are fighting the Blues. That's all one needs to know. OK, perhaps once the idea is set, ("Do you think it will help my career if I kill myself?") it did drive the point home with a unsubtle hammer, and might have come straight from the Edinburgh Fringe but it's an idea the director Lyndsey Turner had enormous fun with. The black comedy is surreal as Dr. Anne (Phoebe Fox) goes on a picaresque attempt to find the hospital where she can actually do some work - and when she gets there?

Oliver Birch in There is War

Well that would be giving away a satisfying ending. It would be slightly unfair to highlight one performance but Oliver Birch's troop entertaining Stewart de Lune, was delightfully daft and simultaneously tragic.

Don't be put off by the benches. Unless you have a serious back problem or are over 2 metres tall,they fine.

Double feature 1 & 2 runs  in The Paintframe  until 10^th September

Photos - Johann Persson

When we haven't got our noses in several books, we try and get to the theatre as much as time and budget allows. We were recently at the Press Night of David Hare's new Play  The Power of Yes at the National Theatre.

This was surely a play that theatre land was waiting for. Following Lucy Prebble huge success at the Royal Court in London with Enron, London's theatre goers were collectively holding their breath to see what veteran playwright David Hare would do with the financial crisi. Yet somehow Hare failed and succeeded in equal measures. On the one hand he managed beautifully to explain the intricacies of the financial disaster in a simple technique of Hare creating himself as a character asking the questions we all needed answered. Where this was a disappointment was the staging. Yes it was simple - 20 actors walking on and off an all but bare stage to explain to the playwright what had happened. What I wanted to know was why I had paid the best part of £30 to hear something which could have been delivered just as well on radio. Indeed at many points in the play David Hare used a clichéd technique employed by lazy radio script writers in the form of simply introducing a speaker (and yes I do mean speaker) as "George Soros (or whoever) again"

That said, it was an entertaining evening. As Michael Billington highlighted in his review, David Hare introduced some lovely touches such as pointing out that those much photographed boxes Lehman Brothers (ex) employees were carrying out of the building contained nothing more significant than sandwiches and Milky Bars which their canteen credit cards still owed them. They were too upmarket to call it looting. Special mention though to Bob Crowley and the design team who invented some innovative effects to highlight the intracte problems of finance.

Does one expect more from theatre? No new playwright would have had this work staged yet if nothing else it does explain the financial crisis particularly well.

At the first night audience I spied ex-CBI chief Howard Davies sharing his thoughts with a small huddle. If one wanted to extend the journalism theme, perhaps a second half would have given him the right to reply.