Theatre - Sheridan Morley on new appointments, a triumph and a game performance with zipp

This year, every London theatre and company from the National to the Almeida to Hampstead is changing its artistic director. After a season in which there has been an invasion of American film stars on the West End stage, with varying and often disastrous results, comes the announcement that Kevin Spacey is to be the new artistic director of the Old Vic. Like Jessica Lange before him, and Gwyneth Paltrow after, and unlike nearly all the others, he turned out to be the real thing, a stage actor of presence and strength, as well as a very fine movie actor.

This appointment will play well in Hollywood even with those who have never heard of the Old Vic, and even better in New York, where Broadway is starting to perk up and talk about co-production deals. He is a coup for the theatre's owner/ operator, Sally Greene, who noticed him when he first came to the Vic in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh a few years ago. Greene tapped him first for the board, and now for the leadership of one of London's true landmark theatres, recently fallen on hard times.

He is talking about an eclectic wish-list that includes at least two plays per season in which he will appear. Spacey wants to direct (who doesn't?), and your own theatre is the best route to a directorial career. I wish him luck, a sympathetic board and the kind of play that opened this week at the Royal Court.

Once in a very long while comes a play that genuinely illuminates some aspect of human nature. In Rona Munro's Iron, at the Royal Court, a young businesswoman visits her mother in jail for the first time after 15 years. She has come to learn about her father from the only person who knew him well - her mother, who is serving a life sentence for murdering him. As the relationship grows, week by week, they tell each other their stories. Josie finds that, far from hating the man she killed, her mother adored him. Fay learns that Josie, for all her apparent sophistication, is a lonely innocent in the world she herself will probably never see again and determines to live vicariously through her daughter. They have a lot to catch up on.

Rona Munro has written a subtle, delicate play about women who love not wisely but too well. The director Roxana Silbert and the designer Anthony Mac-Ilwaine have constructed an ambiance in which the actors and the playwright can shine. This production reaches us from its original home, the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Louise Ludgate as Josie is so ordinary (and I mean that as a compliment) that it's hard to imagine her playing any other role, while Sandy McDade's Fay has a febrile intensity, a nervousness so extreme that she doesn't appear to be quite sane.

In complete contrast, it is the sheer incompetence of Zipp! that makes it so endearing. Brainchild of the journalist Gyles Brandreth, it is an attempt to visit 100 musicals in 90 minutes, some with just a single word. Now let's be honest, the musical numbers are terrible, performed as they are by an untalented, though game, cast of three singers, a moderately talented pianist and the irrepressible Brandreth, over whose singing and dancing we should charitably draw a veil.

Brandreth was once a politician ("No show is complete without a former Conservative member of parliament and I'm the only one not in jail at the moment"), and that makes him particularly good at the politically incorrect. His script is much better than the performance, containing every good theatrical joke and a great many of the not-so-good ones. So what if he can't sing and dance? The sight of a former Lord Commissioner of the Treasury in a gold lame codpiece with black fishnet stockings held up by red suspenders is worth the price of admission alone. If you have the stomach for it.

The odd thing is that he really loves musicals and knows a good deal about them, something you'd never guess from the hash that he and his crew make of them. That said, one can't help but admire Brandreth and his willingness to make a fool of himself on a West End stage, and to enjoy the antic nonsense that is this weird but endlessly good-natured entertainment. He is having such a good time on-stage - a mix of Dame Edna, Forbidden Broadway and John Major with jokes - that you inevitably go along for the ride on what he describes as "the Ryanair of musical theatre".

Iron is at the Royal Court, London SW1 (020 7565 5050) until 1 March

Zipp! is at the Duchess Theatre, London WC2 (0870 890 1103) until 26 July

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