Theatre - Sheridan Morley enjoys a week of new arrivals and one-person performances

The new Hampstead Theatre is very glamorous. Or maybe that was just the stars who turned out on opening night. Hampstead's director, Jenny Topper, bravely chose to open her sparkling new space not with a play, but with a piece of performance art. Station House Opera provided a tour of the premises, which was illuminating for some, irritating for others and left the rest of us delighted that the new theatre is beautiful, functional and a pleasant change from the Nissen hut where Hampstead Theatre has been housed for much of our lives.

The rest of the week brought two one-person plays, normally not a crowd-pleaser, but both playing to full houses, and with very good reason.

It helps to see A Night in November, as I did, among an all-Irish audience at the Tricycle Theatre, where the locals are well served by plays that represent their largely Irish community. The English among us were careful to keep our voices low when ordering our interval fruit juice because it clearly wasn't our night.

This new-ish play - it has already been produced in New York and in California - is by Marie Jones, who had a huge international success with Stones in His Pockets, where two actors played 30 or so roles. In A Night in November, one actor, the hyperactive but engaging Marty Maguire, plays Kenneth Norman McCallister, a Belfast Protestant everyman, and everybody he knows, from his ghastly wife, to his sympathetic Catholic boss and other clearly defined friends and family.

One evening, he realises that in an entire lifetime in Belfast he has never been to the other side of town - "bandit country" - let alone to the Republic of Ireland or beyond, and he embarks on a spiritual, emotional and physical journey which will take him much further than New York. This ordinary little man is suddenly aware of the inequities and idiocies of sectarian hatreds - convinced that he and his like are "ugly bloodthirsty barbarians" - but powerless to address them.

Maguire plays a simple man with a conscience, the anguished voice of most Belfast citizens on both sides of the divide. Marie Jones has a conscience, an ear and an eye for a detail or a joke, but the arguments have been rehearsed far too often for this worthy retelling to resonate for an English audience.

Madeleine Sami is only 22 years old, but her performance in No 2 at the King's Head is astonishing. With tremendous confidence, she plays all the members of an enormous New Zealand family of Fijian origin. Nana Maria, the matriarch of the family, convinced that her children are a waste of space, invites her grandchildren to a feast at which she will choose her successor.

The playwright, Toa Fraser, explains in a programme note that the play is set in a suburb of Auckland where the natives are being beguiled by the government into accepting grants in return for support in building motorways and skyscrapers to compete with Sydney, Australia. He fears that the world depicted in No 2 is fast disappearing. This play is his attempt to document this way of life before it vanishes.

He may be right, but what is certain is that he shows us, on the other side of the world, what it means to be a Fijian New Zealander through the eyes of just one family. There's Moses, the dopey one, Charlene, the hard worker, Tyson, the favourite grandson who brings his English girlfriend to the feast, much to the resentment of Hibiscus, the pretty one. There's Amos, and Erasmus, and all the rest, each brought to life by this remarkable young actress.

Madeleine Sami plays all of them with a versatility that almost seems to be a trick. Although none of the characters is particularly interesting individually, all are recognisable and immediately accessible, no matter how often she moves between them.

During the long day's preparation for the feast, Nana Maria sits in the middle drinking a lethal combination of grog and gin. As she presides over the shopping, the cooking, the music, the invitations, lighting the barbecue pit for the pig, she cogitates about whom she should choose.

What is most important about No 2 is that it has brought a real talent to our attention. Madeleine Sami is not perfect, not yet, and although the intent of her characters is always clear her diction often isn't. Never mind, she's only 22. Some bright producer should instantly make her an offer to stay here that she can't refuse.

A Night in November is at the Tricycle Theatre, London NW6 (020 7328 1000) until 8 March

No 2 is at the King's Head, London N1 (020 7226 1916) until 16 March

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