The Magna Carta Plays, Salisbury Playhouse, review: A genuinely thought-provoking evening

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You have to hand it to Salisbury Playhouse. 2015 marks the 800th anniversary of the iconic charter arrived at between King John and his barons who wanted to consolidate their feudal rights. In Salisbury Cathedral, you can view the least damaged surviving copy of this document. So all the more credit to Gareth Machin, the theatre's artistic director, for the boldness and creativity with which he has devised this compendium event. The dramatists, invited to respond to the anniversary in the evening of four playlets, have not been briefed to big up the local connection or to spoon feed the audience with historical information. In fact, the two more successful pieces are those that range widest, geographically and imaginatively, in their attempt to test contemporary and future-shock injustices against the precepts enshrined in the medieval charter.

Always stimulating, even when annoying, the evening begins in disappointingly sophomoric-skit mode with Kingmakers, the one play set in period. Anders Lustgarten, the Owen Jones of dramaturgy, whose last play, Lampedusa, about the tragic traffic in drowned migrants, was one of most compelling works of the year, is not on form here. The year is 1225, ten years on, and in this lumpenly larky piece, Henry III, John's son, is brought back to prop up the barons – majesty and, above all, a royal wedding always dead handy for mollifying those pesky, discontented peasants. Unfortunately, the grating amalgamation of cod blank verse and street punk and the unfocused multiplicity of modern references (Isis, anyone?) make the proceedings feel ahistorical rather than transhistorical. Well below par, too, is the piece from Howard Brenton. You feel, in part, that you are watching a mercifully non-greenlighted TV pilot with Ransomed – a modern-Trollope-meets-The Killing mini-drama in which a Russian oligarch steals the precious copy of Magna Carta housed in “Melchester” Cathedral and demands a British passport from a rattled government as the price for returning it.

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The two other plays are terrifically good in very different ways. In the highly unusual and uncategorisably hilarious Pink Gin by Sally Woodcock, we are whisked to a neo-Mugabe East African dictatorship where the President (a brilliant comic performance from Trevor Michael Georges) is selling off ancient tribal lands to foreign powers intent in creating a real-life Disney infotainment paradise. But this graduate of Oxford, Cambridge, and Aberystwyth keeps having juddering seizures, involuntarily vomiting streams of medieval Latin. What he is gibbering turns out to be Clause 47 of Magna Carta which states, with all due respect for period-differences of phrasing, that all privatised land must be given back. Lastly, in Timberlake Wertenbaker's haunting, rather Caryl Churchill-esque We Sell Right, we're in a near-future dystopia, where absolutey everything has been sold off to the highest bidder including words and concepts. Even the phone apps have had key, cornerstone ideas such as “justice” indetectibly censored.

An evening that's genuinely thought-provoking and, though uneven in quality, well worth the trip.