Theatre - Sheridan Morley enjoys three very different attempts at retranslating the past

When David Hare updated Schnitzler's La Ronde a few years ago to create The Blue Room, my objection (admittedly shared by few other critics), was that the so-called "theatrical Viagra" of a fleetingly nude Nicole Kidman did not compensate for Hare's failure to do very much with the play, or give us any real insight into why he chose to update it.

Happily the same cannot be said of Carlo Gebler, who comes to us at the Tricycle with an altogether more intelligent and enthralling makeover. He has chosen to set La Ronde, under the title 10 Rounds, in and around Belfast during the summer of 1999, just after the ceasefire and the official report into the Omagh bombing.

So, a century after Schnitzler, we still have the ten scenes, each involving one couple, of whom one member moves into the next scene with a new sexual partner. Lust and odd couplings are still at the heart of this merry-go-round, but unlike Hare, Gebler gives us much more: in the first scene we meet a former terrorist who, ceasefire or no ceasefire, still has the smell of a bomb on him. In the final scene, horribly, that bomb explodes: but along the way we meet a cross-section of the current Northern Irish community, nearly all of whom could be said to be tainted with blood because in various ways they all fail to prevent yet another deadly explosion.

The director of both the play and the theatre, Nicolas Kent, has assembled one of the strongest casts ever seen at the Tricycle: Stephen Boxer as the suave Northern Ireland official, Brid Brennan as the IRA spokeswoman, Tim Woodward as a disenchanted journalist and especially Victoria Smurfit (of Ballykissangel and Cold Feet), touching and enchanting as a model condemned to dressing up in rubber crisp packets, all give sometimes multiple performances of considerable depth and complexity. It is a tribute to Gebler's writing that there are no heroes or villains or fall guys here, just people trying as best they can to make sense out of Ulster's chaos. And, in the end, failing as usual.

What would happen if you took Noel Coward's Still Life (source of Brief Encounter), deleted the two central, mismatched, melancholy lovers and inserted two characters on the run from Chekhov? What would happen is Brian Friel's 80-minute sketch, Afterplay, at the Gielgud.

Having recently translated Uncle Vanya for the triumphant Donmar production, which also opened in the past few weeks, Friel has lifted the unhappy Sonya from that script and set her down some years later in a Moscow bar, of which the only other occupant just happens to be the equally unfortunate Prozorov from Chekhov's Three Sisters.

Just in case you don't have those plays at your fingertips (and if you don't then Afterplay will make precious little sense), Sonya is the niece of Uncle Vanya, still hopelessly in love with the doctor, Astrov, who has ended up unhappily married to her greedy stepmother.

Prozorov is the brother of the three sisters who wanted to get to Moscow: one of them has committed suicide, and the other two have settled for lives far from their golden city. Only Andrey has made it there, and then only as an alcoholic busker.

So now, the lovelorn spinster and the middle-aged wimp find themselves thrown together with a bottle of vodka and their memories, each recalling the "endless tundra of loneliness" that has been their lives. Friel is very good at creating the dispossessed, and this brief, fragile duologue has moments of haunting tenderness. Penelope Wilton and John Hurt give performances of magnificent, semi-detached isolation in Robin Lefevre's gentle, touching and thoughtful staging.

Of all the celebrations of the Richard Rodgers centenary, the most interesting and impressive is out at the little Watermill near Newbury, a theatre already triumphantly celebrating the greatest number of nominations in the new regional theatre awards. John Doyle (director of the breathtaking small-scale rediscoveries of Irma La Douce and Carmen) now gives us, in Ten Cents a Dance, a Rodgers-Hart singalong.

What makes this cabaret celebration, wonderfully placed within the intimacy of the Watermill, so unusual is Doyle's trademark: five women who not only sing but play all the instruments in the band from saxophone to percussion. In a series of solos and segues, they miraculously recreate those melancholy songs from the Twenties and Thirties of love and loss amid the Manhattan skyscrapers. Ten Cents a Dance goes on to the International Festival of Musical Theatre in Cardiff later this month, and then, if there is any justice, to the West End for Christmas.

10 Rounds is at the Tricycle Theatre, London NW6 (020 7328 1000), until 19 October; Afterplay is at the Gielgud Theatre, London W1 (0870 890 1105), until 1 December; Ten Cents a Dance is at the Watermill, Newbury (01635 46044) until 26 October

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