Continental Divide, Birmingham Rep, Birmingham<br></br> Singer, Tricycle, London<br></br> Macbeth, RST, Stratford

Vote with your feet... Run away!

Don't believe the hype. Imported from North America and transferring to the Barbican's BITE season, Continental Divide has been talked up as a not-to-be-missed major event. How ironic given writer David Edgar's apparent worries about the PR industry's manipulative powers in the political sphere. Certainly, in the 1990s, this British dramatist brought us an international perspective, penning three plays about Eastern Europe's troubled history. Now he has produced another epic of a sort, contemplating 40 years of US politics. But an element of grandiose spin creeps in as he dubs this his new "cycle". I guess, at a push, you could call it a bi-cycle since Continental Divide is a pair of plays.

The author of this Oregon Shakespeare Festival/Berkeley Rep co-production also claims that Mothers Against and Daughters of the Revolution can be seen either way round. But whichever order you see the plays, it's hard to make sense of them. Mothers Against ought to be intriguing per se, for it shows the inner workings of a contemporary election campaign. It's something like David Hare's The Absence of War, only across the pond and in the right-wing Republican camp. Sheldon Vine (slim, silver-haired Bill Geisslinger) is the candidate who wants to govern the West Coast state where his grandfather accrued a fortune in the timber trade. A working weekend is underway at the dynastic mansion. Policy consultants and pollsters stand ready in smart suits, seemingly oblivious to the more primal, monolithic trees which surround them (a dull set trying to be ominous).

Numerous tensions surface as everyone prepares to test Sheldon's gubernatorial mettle by rehearsing a TV debate in which he has to face his Democratic opponent. The first ruction is caused by Sheldon's daughter, Deborah, aka Snowbird to her eco-warrior friends. Dirty tricks are feared too, with rumours about old photos of Sheldon's advisor at a revolutionary demo. Other dark secrets lurk in various woodsheds and the team stand divided while presenting a united front.

In Daughters of the Revolution, we switch to the Democrats and learn that Michael Bern (slim, silver-haired Terry Layman), an academic, has been appointed to head a state committee but is mixed up in the aforementioned photographs. He runs into Deborah's commune as he frantically tracks down an FBI snitch. Bern is also faced with his challengingly committed younger self.

One must appreciate Edgar's ambition. These plays touch on countless topical issues as well as offering a historical sweep, surveying the 1960s and today, youth and age, idealists and pragmatists. Daughters of the Revolution has its moments, too, as a thriller. However, the material is garbled, without clarity or focus and Tony Taccone's cast don't help, hollering or racing through their lines. One strains to see the wood for the trees, and in Mothers Against the subplots thicken like a pea-souper. Why so much conspiratorial mystification merely leading to a few sticky questions in the mock debate? Who knows, and in the end, who cares? For a more riveting political play about schisms within rival camps and within individuals, vote with your feet and go see Michael Frayn's Democracy at the National.

Dealing with the past is again a central theme in Singer. Premiered by the RSC in 1989 and now revived by Dominic Dromgoole's Oxford Stage Company, Peter Flannery's tragicomedy is loosely based on London's notorious 1960's landlord, Peter Rachman. We first see Ron Cook's Singer struggling to survive in a German concentration camp. Though denied British citizenship after the war, he moves up the property ladder as a hard-nosed entrepreneur, buying slum dwellings. But he cannot sleep and is haunted by his old friend, Stefan, who insists on quietly painting his memories of the Holocaust.

Singer was a controversial success in 1989, criticised by some for equating Nazism with Thatcherism. In 2004, what seems more polemical is Flannery's portrait of a Jew superficially forgetting his people's former suffering and grabbing everything he can, even if it means ousting others from where they've settled. Cook puts in a fine performance, full of vim, and John Light's softly-spoken, sombre Stefan provides a good foil. Nonetheless, Sean Holmes's production makes Dromgoole's high praise of this play (in his book The Full Room) look questionable. The supposedly formidable narrative energy comes over as a rush of sketches, strewn with lame caricatures.

Meanwhile, the RSC has embarked on a bold new ensemble season concentrating on Shakespeare's tragedies. The project gets rolling with a remarkably fast-moving Macbeth, staged by Dominic Cooke. The set is impressively simple: one grey fortress wall. With muddy greatcoats and fur hats on the battlefield, King Duncan's medieval Scotland has a touch of Tsarist Russia. Though no proto-Communist revolutionary, Greg Hicks's hawkish Macbeth is a thrusting man of action. Fiercely ambitious as well as wracked with nerves, he fidgets in courtly ceremonies and powers through his soliloquies. He weighs up the pros and cons of regicide with clipped precision. It's a compelling performance but lacks great tragic depth.

Sian Thomas appears to demonstrate rather than feel Lady Macbeth's raw desires and vulnerability. Still, her look, like a hungry crow dressed up like a fairy-tale princess, is sad and macabre. The witches are scavenging peasants who use royal chalices for their unholy communions. They are unusually convincing, except when weirdly acquiring a home cinema for video-recorded visions of Banquo's heirs. Banquo himself is embodied by an electrifying Louis Hilyer and the Macduff children are, rather poignantly, glimpsed as house guests at Glamis. All in all, forceful and lucid though not harrowing.

'Continental Divide': Barbican, London EC2 (0845 120 7515), to 4 April; 'Singer': Tricycle, London NW6 (020 7328 1000), to 10 April; 'Macbeth': RST, Stratford (0870 609 1110), to 2 Oct

k.bassett@independent.co.uk