No Man's Land, Royal National Theatre, London<br></br>Monkey, Young Vic<br></br>Aladdin, Lyric, Hammersmith

Intelligent life forms found in Hampstead

No man's land, in Harold Pinter's disorientating four-hander of the same name, looks frightfully civilised. At first glance, you might think you've stumbled into a stiff, old-school drawing-room drama. For in the playwright's self-directed revival at the Lyttelton, Corin Redgrave's poker-backed Hirst is playing the host in a neoclassical mansion, pouring two malt whiskies and ensconcing himself in a leather armchair. His guest, John Wood's Spooner, implies that they are fellow members of Hampstead's literati. However, his bow tie is peculiarly bedraggled, almost like a tramp's, and we glean that this pair have only just met on the heath – not generally renowned for its pukka late-night encounters.

Our incongruous duo then appear to be sliding into a comic sketch – a form familiar to the young Pinter – as Spooner starts blathering in mock-philosophical mode about bucolic old England and attaining virtue through art. Meantime Hirst slugs back the snifters, gazing blankly. At points, Pinter is clearly satirising the clubbable, so-called intelligentsia with whom he'd started rubbing shoulders when he wrote No Man's Land (and saw it premiered by the NT) in the mid-Seventies.

Simultaneously though, the play is a nightmare scenario where threatening power games are played out with superficial smiles. Redgrave, when provoked, starts grunting like some caged beast and murderously clutching his glass. Moreover, he has two rough diamonds as live-in heavies – Danny Dyer's yobbish Foster and Andy de la Tour's hangdog Briggs with a faint trace of the Gothic butler about him. Spooner, though a predatory intruder, finds himself held prisoner without explanation.

In fact, we find ourselves in more and more radically strange terrain here. Though the scene remains essentially locked into realism, characters start fracturing, fantasies blur with facts, and conversations slew off madly. The meaning of such a piece can't be pinned down and the dramatist, in a programme note, claims it's a mystery even to him, So it's no man's script, definitively.

Such elusiveness is fascinating but also irritating. compelling you to wonder if Pinter's own power games involve awe-inspiring obscurantism. This work also feels baggier than his great early- and late-Seventies plays, Old Times and Betrayal. Some almost baroque, convoluted speeches bored me rigid. But, more often, No Man's Land combines extraordinary dream-like lurches with crafted latinate eloquence, building up a dark and explosively funny vision of treacherous friendships, verbal assaults, alcoholism, decadence, and domestic aridity. Meanwhile, the production is quietly polished. Wood is entertainingly shambling and unsettlingly cunning while Redgrave oscillates between frosty superciliousness and bleary-eyed flailing.

Spooner ultimately insists the memory-obsessed Hirst is trapped, "in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent." In contrast, roving adventures lead us progressively through life and optimistically beyond the bounds of the earth in Monkey – the Young Vic's typically classy Christmas show for children.

Adapted by Colin Teevan and performed by a multi-ethnic ensemble under director Mick Gordon, this vintage Chinese saga is a kind of alternative Wizard of Oz with added kung fu and a serious spiritual dimension.

Playing our hyperactive simian hero, Elliot Levey has scarcely hatched from his primordial stone egg, than he's thwacking the air with his magic stick and jauntily proclaiming, "It's time to play." He's a shameless bad boy, munching the peaches in Eastern Heaven's sacred orchard (obviously echoing Christian myths). But after that he embarks on an epic pilgrimage with his new-found master, the priest Tripitaka, and his fantastical porcine and semi-piscine chums, Pigsy and Sandy (whom you may remember from the appallingly dubbed, 1970s cult TV series). Their mission is to decimate demons and bring back, from the Western Heaven, Buddha's sacred scrolls containing all the laws to save mankind from the griefs of this life. In Freudian terms, Monkey is the unruly id with Tripitaka representing the instructive superego. Monkey gradually accepts responsibilities and even impending death. Moreover, he grasps that it's the story of their journey and enlightenment that should be written on the blank scrolls.

Thus we're taught a quietly sagacious lesson with magical and boisterous fun en route. There are, admittedly, slack patches and some disappointing acting. Pacifist adults might also raise an eyebrow at all the pitched battles. The small boys in front of me, who spent the interval enthusiastically throttling each other and exchanging Chinese burns, didn't seem to have fully absorbed Monkey's vow to cut down on the violence. But heck, the choreography – with whirling blades and backflips – is a hoot, accompanied by blended rock and folk music. Dick Bird's designs are often inspired as well. Cloud-chariots descend on pulleys and paper-lantern carp bob about in an underwater rescue scene. And throughout, Levey's irrepressible bounce – with preposterous sideburns and a hairy cape, like a primal rockabilly – provokes giggles.

Devised by the physical troupe Told By An Idiot, Aladdin is more like your local panto with some charmingly fresh clowning and gentle silliness. There are lame pop songs thrown in and excessive feeble jokes. But Paul Hunter is a winningly bustling Widow Twanky, jiggling with her whole laundrette on spin-cycle. Tiny, tomboyish Hayley Carmichael is an ineffably sweet Aladdin, bewildered by Iain Johnstone's wildly hirsute, broad Scots genie. But Javier Marzan, as the lanky sidekick, Wishee Washee, really steals the show with his delightful gags – delicately wiping his lips after being bludgeoned with a frying pan and crazily launching into the front crawl when prostrating himself before the Sultana.

Although these are sensitive times, this merry spoof of European and Middle Eastern manners – with interracial love at its heart – seems resolutely and touchingly innocent.

'No Man's Land': RNT, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), to 9 Mar; 'Monkey': Young Vic, London SE1 (020 7928 6363), to 19 Jan; 'Aladdin': Lyric, Hammersmith W6 (020 8741 2311), to 12 Jan