THEATRE: Making a drama without a crisis

IT'S Saturday afternoon and one by one the players arrive, making a bit of an entrance, wringing their hands from the cold and heading for the fireplace. This is The Changing Room of a northern rugby league club. They take off clothes, talk pure Yorkshire, twang their jockstraps, get advice from the trainer, put on their team strip, get patronised by the club chairman, and limber up. That's all Act One is, really, a bunch of individuals turning up, changing, and psyching themselves up as a team. As it progresses, the sound of 15 pairs of rugby boots pummelling the floor provides a soundtrack of mounting urgency. The scene is busy, purposeful and exhilarating. You'd never imagine realism could be this theatrical.

It's not hard to work out that Act Two will take place during half time and Act Three after the game. David Storey's groundbreaking play, premiered 25 years ago, observes the unities. The dark, narrow suits, sideburns and Cold War references to the Russkies date the play in one way, while the major activity - undress, dress, undress, wander round naked, then dress again - must have been more of a talking point in 1971 than in 1996. But what's special remains.

Storey wrote The Changing Room in two days, which may explain its seamless, organic quality. There's a purity of intent here that defies expectation. You wait for one character to emerge as the protagonist, or someone to introduce a theme or issue. You wait for a crisis or personal confession. You wait, basically, for any of the gambits by which a dramatist might direct our interest. There isn't one. This is it. Storey is uncompromising in the way he presents his world. Next week these guys will be back for another game. You could argue - wrongly, in my view - that this is not dramatic. Yet in a terrific moment in Act Two, the actors pour in off the playing field - sweaty, muddy, blood-splattered, knees red from the cold, and gasping with pain. It galvanises us.

The Changing Room takes you into its world in a way few plays achieve. Yes, you watch the steam from the showers drift across the stage, you smell the smoke of a pre-match cigar, you hear the dripping of the taps, the roar of the crowd, and the melancholy music on the Tannoy. No wonder Lindsay Anderson was this play's first director. It evokes rugby league the way If... evoked public schools. But it's in this intensely credible atmosphere - with its multiple, overlapping activities - that Storey pulls his Macavity stunt. He disappears. There's no literary sensibility in evidence. This gives the play its transparency. It's about exactly what it is: Storey offers us, with an unforced tenderness, the shifting moods of everyday experience. There's a democratic spirit, too, which means you meet 22 lives without sensing that one character is more important than another. When one of the forwards lies on the bench with a broken nose, one of the reserves whoops with delight that he is about to get his own sort of break. James Macdonald directs this enthralling ensemble piece so that it looks natural and clear without looking over-choreographed. Very impressive.

Stephen Poliakoff's latest play, Sweet Panic (which the author directs), is a nervy, highly unsettling piece that is far stronger in the quality of its observations - always funny and pertinent - than in its rather lumbering dramatic structure. See it now. Sweet Panic is a dark, intelligently topical play. It's unlikely to improve with age.

Saskia Reeves plays a middle-class housewife who becomes obsessed with her child's psychologist, played by Harriet Walter. One of the play's ironies is that this difficult, bird-like woman has as good an idea about what is really going on as the cool, caring psychologist whom she stalks. With unkempt hair, a heavy overcoat and darting glances, Reeves unleashes woundingly sour truths. "One would have to be extremely unlucky," she says, "to get some sort of nutty avenging angel, coming at you all over town." That's just Walter's luck.

Reeves strips away Walter's mask of professional competence, until in the final scene in a car park, deep down below Marble Arch, Walter has to admit "I do not know ... I do not know." Both actresses are excellent. Reeves drives the plot, and Walter has the reaction shots: bafflement, shock and embarrassment. Poliakoff incisively examines the great middle- class concerns - personal space, professionalism, parental responsibility, what's going on in their children's minds, whether the past was better than the present. Strikingly, no children appear. Instead, Walter tells us about her clients, hilariously taking on their voices and introducing us to the wilder corners of the pre-pubescent mind. This is a play that's full of nuggets (the schoolmaster who is furious at the sort of person who gets on to Desert Island Discs; the iconic status of the Cadbury's flake; how to shoplift in Harrods) and catches the strangeness of cities and the odd lives we lead within them.

The last time I saw Athol Fugard acting, he was General Smuts, reluctantly releasing Ben Kingsley from prison in Gandhi. In Valley Song, Fugard plays no less an authoritative figure. Himself. Fugard's new play - 90 minutes, with no interval - is a muscular, poetic tale for two actors. Fugard strolls on as "the Author" when the house lights are still up, and proceeds to tell us about the Karoo valley, where he was born. "Imagine a spring day ..." he says, and soon slips into the character of Buks, an old African with a woollen cap and precise military gestures, whose great duty is to look after his granddaughter.

Buks is a strict, God-fearing man who grows enough vegetables to live on. Veronica (played by Esmeralda Bihl with great candour and honesty) is 17, with an open nature and a desire to go to the city and become a singer. She may not be the next Whitney Houston - her untrained voice happily moves in and out of tune - but she clearly has to go to the city. Like her country, she is on the verge of something new.

At times Valley Song seems so personal and intimate that it could be An Audience with Athol Fugard. It has that directness. Sometimes he is Buks, sometimes the relaxed, ironic Author, buying the land on which Buks grows his vegetables. The play is so portable - it takes place against a backdrop of stiff, sandy curtains - that Fugard could do it in the Royal Court foyer. Fugard, here, is as much a storyteller as a playwright. It means that, quite naturally, he can play both a white man and a black man, and with this warmth and depth the production itself is a kind of metaphor for what's most hopeful about post-apartheid South Africa.

Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall makes a short and unexpected appearance in the West End, thanks to Bill Kenwright having a venue available at the time that Counterpoint, a new theatre group, were putting on Hall's play in Brixton. The company more than justify the transfer, and Willis Hall's absorbing study of British soldiers stuck in the Malayan jungle stands up better than other, more celebrated, plays from the Fifties.

'The Changing Room': Duke of York's, WC2 (0171 836 5122, to 30 Mar. 'Sweet Panic': Hampstead, NW3 (0171 722 930), to 9 Mar. 'Valley Song': Royal Court, SW1 (0171 730 1745), to 9 Mar. 'The Long and the Short': Albery, WC2 (0171 369 1730), to 2 Mar.