At a time when both the National and the RSC have shamefully and, in my view, unnecessarily abandoned one of the central reasons for their existence - the maintenance of a permanent company through a season of widely different work - it has been left, as so often, to Alan Ayckbourn as both writer and director to remind us of what theatre is really meant to be all about. Working at his home base with limited Scarborough resources, and a company of only seven, he has created three dark new comedies in which they all appear in very different roles: beyond that, the only thing that connects the plays is their setting, a Docklands flat intriguingly similar to the one where Ayckbourn himself has long lived when in London.
Best of the three plays is GamePlan, which tells the tale of two teenage schoolgirls who decide to turn the flat into an internet brothel in order to make some quick money, and thereby save one of the families from bankruptcy and having to move to a less desirable neighbourhood after the father has run out on them.
As so often in Ayckbourn, terrible things happen to people who are fundamentally trying to do good, in this case however immorally. The girls' first client turns out to be a portly dry-cleaner (hilariously played by one of the Ayckbourn stalwarts, Robert Austin), who unfortunately dies on the job, as it were, thereby turning the play into a murder mystery, complete with investigating police, one of whom (Beth Tuckey) is no less hilariously inclined to come up with biblical quotations for all murderous occasions.
It has been Ayckbourn's usual practice, after opening all his work at Scarborough, to transfer his plays to London with starrier casts, even though sometimes the stars are less well-suited to the roles than the original players. By keeping this group of actors intact for more than a year, first in Yorkshire and then on the road and now in the West End, he celebrates both their versatility and their company spirit: like a rep company in the golden days of regional theatre, they benefit by switching roles and yet staying together. It is high time our better-funded theatres took the hint and returned to an ensemble tradition, but in the meantime we have Ayckbourn times three times seven, if you are still with me, and the result is a superb equation.
It is also all too typical of the current management meltdown of the RSC that when they do get a rare hit, such as Michael Attenborough's Antony and Cleopatra, as strong a revival as they have managed in these past five years or so, they bring it to London from Stratford for all of three weeks. Fewer than 30 Haymarket performances of a show that, in the old days of the Barbican, would have been allowed to run for an entire six-month season.
Like his father Richard in films, Michael Attenborough is a narrative director: he believes in the text, in the tale, and sees no need to add the "concept" that his Stratford colleagues so often impose on Shakespeare while trying to make their own names. This production simply celebrates the play as written: Stuart Wilson, after far too long away, is a fine and tragic Antony, already over the hill and destroyed by his passion for Sinead Cusack's randy if also now somewhat raddled Cleopatra. Both have the courage to play the characters for what they are: once all-majestic, but now united only really by the memory of their passion and their power.
Around them, on a spectacular set by Es Devlin, Attenborough has assembled some very strong character players led by Clive Wood as an Enobarbus only faintly less charismatic than his leader, an ice-cold Octavius, played by Stephen Campbell-Moore, and Trevor Martin as a soothsayer straight out of the Addams Family.
At a time when far too many writers and indeed directors, especially at the Royal Court Upstairs, are still inclined to regard the idea of a well-made play as something of a reactionary insult rather than an ambition, it is good to welcome David Greig to London. Though well-established in Scotland, Greig is - at least on the evidence of Outlying Islands - an unfashionable writer, in that he believes in craft and coherence and a strong sense of narrative discipline.
He also has a great story to tell: it is 1939, and two young Cambridge ornithologists are sent by the government to the remotest of all Scottish islands, there ostensibly to survey the island's bird population.
Thriller addicts from John Buchan to Ian Fleming will not be surprised to find that there is a hidden scenario: the young men discover, from an over-talkative local landowner or "tacksman", that the island may also now be designated, since it is virtually uninhabited except by thousands of birds, as a testing ground to discover the military possibilities of anthrax.
Inevitably, perhaps, this is a rite-of-passage piece in which one of the young men discovers the meaning of sex: but what of the other, a thinly suppressed gay who now has to watch as the others make love? It would be unfair to reveal the fate that awaits him out on the stormy cliffs.
Damsels in Distress is at the Duchess Theatre (0870 890 1103) until 30 November; Antony and Cleopatra is at Theatre Royal Haymarket (020 7930 8890); Outlying Islands is at the Royal Court Upstairs (020 7565 5000) until 28 September
