PLAYING all nine characters in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest at the tiny Tara Theatre in London, Kudzanayi Chiwawa and Ayesha Casely-Hayford took such liberties with its content and structure that one might have expected the whole venture to fall apart.

Yet the play was so lovingly bashed about that it came through the ordeal with flying colours, as did the pair themselves.

Operating within a minimalist set and dressed only in white T-shirts and black trousers, Chiwawa and Casely-Hayford offered up a deliberately unruly interpretation of Wilde’s farcical goings on, blurring time, space and boundaries in a way that added an extra dimension to the humour.

A year on from their superb production of Steven Berkoff’s East at the King’s Head Theatre in London, the Atticist company returned to the same venue with a revival of another challenging tale.

Outlying Islands, set by dramatist David Greig in the peaceful wilds of the Outer Hebrides, is in its own way every bit as unsettling as Berkoff’s consideration of life among the jostling streets of east London.

As they did with East, director Jessica Lazar and set designer Anna Lewis made the most of the tight space, simultaneously allowing the audience to envisage the soaring surrounds of craggy cliffs while enclosing the action in the damp, smoky confines of an abandoned chapel, buffeted by Christopher Preece’s soundscape of strong winds, waves crashing, rain falling and birds crying.

Following the fortunes of two young ornithologists (Tom Machell and Jack McMillan), flung together with a local woman (Rose Wardlaw) on a tiny, uninhabited island, the production and its players skilfully persuaded the audience to consider the opposing merits of rationality and irrationality, morality and immorality, conventionality and free thinking and, beneath all of that, the more loose-limbed, magical ways of paganism compared with the organised strictures of modern religion.

At London’s Donmar Warehouse, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat was equally gritty and disquieting. A gripping reflection on the debilitating consequences of austerity and deindustrialisation in the US today, it’s a tension-filled drama with a turbulent, consuming plot and a cast of engaging characters.

It’s a highly nuanced portrayal of how solidarity, empathy and friendship so quickly become unstuck in the face of economic stress, wholesome pride can feed into unthinking prejudice and how a natural human tendency for internecine strife is so often the downfall of working people when the chips are down.

Critics across the board gave it five stars — and rightly so.