THEATRE / The Fringe: All dressed up, no place to go: Sarah Hemming reviews Worlds Apart, Self Catering and The Northern Trawl

HEATHROW airport. Not the most romantic of settings for a new play. And Paul Sirett's Worlds Apart (Theatre Royal, Stratford East) is not only set at the unlovely air terminal, but tackles the intricacies of immigration policy and political asylum - important and very topical subjects, but scarcely the most promising dramatic fare. It's a relief then to report that he does so with such verve that the play manages to make its points and to be entertaining without trivialising.

Sirett uses the stage and the particular properties of theatre to match form to content. His play juxtaposes the stories of five people detained at the airport with the view from the immigration office, and he places his characters in physically separate worlds. Sue Mayes' set is on three tiers: in the middle is no-man's land, the waiting room in which the detainees languish; below is the immigration officer; above is a ledge where Tibetan dancers appear to punctuate the action below.

The play is introduced by Tsering (Richard Rees), an outspoken Tibetan who has fled from his job as a narrator with a touring Tibetan opera troupe to try and find asylum in Britain. He takes it upon himself to use his skills for our benefit, stepping in and out of the action to give us inside information, and to narrate snippets of a traditional Tibetan opera which mirrors the power-struggle going on in the immigration office. This clever device both lifts the play, preventing it from sinking into naturalistic stodge, and reminds us that for Tsering, the drama played out at Heathrow will send him back to a Tibet where his own culture is being eroded and his future as a critic of the Chinese looks black.

Within this framework we have a play about power and prejudice, which ricochets back and forth between the experience of the detainees and the motives and disagreements of the officers detaining them. Sirett is best on the victims . He derives endless enjoyable gags from the antagonism between Mr Ramalingham (Madhav Sharma), a self-important Asian businessman who is more English than toasted teacakes and has been detained for forgetting his passport, and Dion Stanley, an American airforceman, who is bursting with attitude (a cracking performance from David Harewood). 'The United States of America,' says Ramalingham, pronouncing the words with great distaste when Stanley makes an uncharitable remark about cricket, 'the country that made national institutions out of rounders and netball.' The text is peppered with one-liners and full of energy, working up to a great bit of slapstick in the middle.

Not so good are the scenes in the office which are written with less spark and dragged down by stereotypes. The central battle between Sullivan (David Barrass), the hard-bitten chief, and the idealistic new recruit (Hannah Jacobs), would be far more effective if the characters had more shading and depth. Sirett also tends to underwrite female parts which means that Mangbetu, the pregnant Zairean woman, whose plea to be allowed to join her husband is at the centre of the row, is thinly drawn. He weaves facts in well, and his play is timely and disturbing - but one more draft might have made it all the stronger.

Andrew Cullen's Self Catering is also about people travelling hopefully but ending up nowhere, it too assembles a group of disparate people marooned together, and opens with the screaming roar of jet taking off. But there the similarity ends. Cullen's fantastical and funny comedy is set on a desert island and explores the vexed interaction of five passengers who survive a plane crash.

As the play is subtitled 'A Short History of the World', it comes as little surprise that the group starts off badly and gets worse, ending with open hostility and battles over territory. The play's path is predictable, and the topic has obviously been well covered in Lord of the Flies, but that doesn't prevent Cullen's play from being highly enjoyable. His characters are dismaying specimens of humanity, but he writes their dialogue with relish.

The play opens with a bang, as the entire cast falls on to stage at once all yelling at each other in a great babel. It then proceeds into ever more eccentric territory - you soon accept the fact that since one character is obsessed with the movies, the group find themselves adopting the names and mannerisms of their favourite film star.

Kate Rowland's snappy production for Altered States theatre company (co-produced with Liverpool Playhouse) revels in Cullen's outlandish plotting and contains some fine acting, in particular Matilda Ziegler as the funny but pathetic bimbo Marilyn. 'We're not hunter-gatherers, we're shoppers,' she protests, when asked to look for food - one of many throwaway reflections on the human condition.

Travel, hardship, power struggles and enforced co-operation surface again in Remould theatre company's The Northern Trawl. This time, however, we are dealing with boats not planes, and the group of ill-fitting people has to some extent chosen its lot. Remould's play (on tour and seen at the Bridge Lane Theatre, Battersea) portrays the lives of deep-sea fisherman from the company's native Hull - this show opens to the sound of howling wind and rain rather than a screaming plane.

Like Paul Sirett's play, The Northern Trawl is based on fact, but the two styles are worlds apart. This a well-made, sturdy and sensitive docu-drama, which interleaves songs and anecdotes from the fishermen with dramatistations of stories gathered by the company. It's an even- handed show, expressing regret at the passing of this once great trade, but giving chilling accounts of the hardship and hierarchy endured by the crews, who often suffered under skippers desperate to prove themselves. It has the limitations of any such show - it is not a play as such - but is sympathetic and excellently performed, and you emerge, as you do after Worlds Apart, both entertained and informed.

'Worlds Apart' continues to 20 Feb, Theatre Royal, London E15 (081-534 0310) - 'Self Catering' continues to 6 Feb, Cockpit, London NW8 (071-402 5081)

'The Northern Trawl' is on tour (details: 0482-226157)

(Photograph omitted)