Absolutely! (perhaps), Wyndham's, London<br></br> Flesh Wound, Royal Court Upstairs, London<br></br>News from the Seventh Floor, Clements, Watford

Franco Zeffirelli is a tease. Italy's famed veteran director has come to the West End to play mind games with us. Pirandello's social comedy Absolutely! (perhaps) - aka Così è (se vi pare) - is an anti-detective yarn demonstrating a philosophical theorem. It might as well be called Objective Truth? I Don't Think So! - though that probably wouldn't pull in the punters. Scribbling away at his desk in a baggy cardigan, Oliver Ford Davies is playing Laudisi, a subjectivist thinker-cum-author. He is (perhaps) a version of Pirandello himself, who studied philosophy and literature. Or you may prefer to regard him as small-town Sicily's answer to Karl Popper, crossed with Prospero. He's soon stage-managing the action - an investigation which involves the police but comes to the (pretty categoric) conclusion that our reality is just layers of illusion.

Laudisi's bourgeois sister and other nosy neighbours are desperate to know why Signora Frola - the lady next door - is kept apart from her daughter by her son-in-law, Signor Ponza. A parlour game-going-on-inquisition begins when Joan Plowright's dignified but frail Frola drops in and tells her side of the story. Then Darrell D'Silva's smart-suited Ponza takes the hot seat and explains that his mother-in-law is, sadly, insane and won't acknowledge her daughter is dead and he's married again. With further plot twists, disentangling fact from fantasy proves impossible, and that's Laudisi's point. You might claim Pirandello was the Michael Frayn of 1917 and that Absolutely! (perhaps) is like Copenhagen (without the nuclear physics), since it explores uncertainty on multiple levels. Not only do Pirandello's characters debate the issue. Beyond that, we're watching actors "being" those "pretend" people - who, just to complicate matters, were based on real-life cases including Pirandello's own mad wife (apparently). The theatricality is highlighted, when, as the curtain rises, we discover some of the audience seated on the stage, blurring with the dramatis personae.

This show is really quite enjoyable (no, really). All right, Pirandello's plot is arid and convoluted. Martin Sherman's translation and the acting can be stiff, here and there. Zeffirelli's set is gaudily ugly, with a gold grill, mosaics and mirrors. Some might wish the mood would darken more too, though D'Silva forcefully conveys Ponza's outrage at intrusions into his privacy. Ford Davies also has one riveting soliloquy, staring into an imaginary mirror contemplating his refracted, vanishing sense of identity. Meanwhile, there's wittily observed comic behaviour, not least from Barry Stanton as the puffed-up town councillor and Bríd Brennan as the scrawny wallflower Signora Cini - smiling and twitching with irritation every time her name is forgotten. Laudisi's observation that we may be happiest living with our invented versions of each other strikes me as poignant and, in some ways, the antithesis of the truism that plays help us understand people. What's most winning in this staging is the combination of the intellectual and the entertaining. Pirandello stimulates the old grey matter far more than most of the West End's current pulp.

The grim realities of London's Camden Town are also infused with fantasies and uncertain identities in Flesh Wound. Ché Walker's new play is set in Deirdra's cruddy council flat, on the 20th floor of a tower block. Her long-lost dad Joseph has just showed up, but she doesn't recognise him: he's meant to be dead. Michael Attwell's Joseph blocks her doorway: huge, menacing, smoking a fag. Tamzin Outhwaite's welcome, as Deidra, involves waving a carving knife. But Joseph talks as if he's some kind of reformed angel, come to save her delinquent brother Vincent from the local mafia.

Sometimes this looks like the Royal Court's riposte to Our House - the Madness musical set in Camden with an ex-bad dad watching over his son. Walker's characters certainly aren't hugely original. Yet their dialogue is explosively funny and stylistically quirky.

Wilson Milam's production gets off to an awkward start. Outhwaite overacts aggression and fear - all jabbing fingers and jumpy feet - before hitting her stride. Also, Dick Bird's set is such a narrow strip, the fourth wall is broken in ways even Pirandello wouldn't have risked: on press night, the knife skidded off stage into the audience. But Bird's low-roofed hutch is also terrifically shabby and claustrophobic, with an ominous balcony at one end. The blackly comic climax is rather crude, but en route the jolts in tone are bold and unsettling, with echoes of Christian mythology. The dream of finding a loving father becomes surprisingly touching, with powerful moments of physical contact, and Andrew Tiernan is superb as the loping, ridiculously dim and dangerous Vincent.

After closing time in Clements - Watford's 100-year-old department store - eerie and adventurous things are going on. Devised by the excellent experimental duo Wilson&Wilson (with the Palace Theatre), News from the Seventh Floor is a ghostly promenade. Nip down the alley by Clements' car park and through an unmarked side door, and soon you're descending in a clanking lift to one man's inferno. Our guide is the pallid, gothic Sidney Glock (Deka Walmsley), who starts off weeping in the boiler room. Hunched in his brown overalls, he recalls his years of unrequited love for Iris (Debra Penny), a lonely shop girl obsessed with the elusive golden boy, Jimmy.

Winding gradually up to the roof, we drift past dimly glittering kitchen wares, climb battered concrete stairwells, and hover in musty boardrooms while Sidney and Iris grow more tragically twisted and prone to delusions. Apart from an unconvincingly happy coda, this is quietly fascinating, humorous and mournful. In touch with the history of the store and the pain of unrecorded everyday lives, this knocks the spots off a crowd of strangers stripping off for the cameras in Selfridges.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Absolutely! (perhaps)': Wyndhams, London WC2 (020 7369 1736), to 23 Aug; 'Flesh Wound': Royal Court Upstairs, London SW1 (020 7565 5000), to 7 June; 'News from the Seventh Floor': Clements, Watford (01923 235455), to Sat