Ponies/Scotch and Water, Hen & Chickens, London

Betting and booze are the preferred ways of trying to relieve desperation in this sharp double bill of one-act dramas about those parts of New York that the American Dream has overlooked. The spirit of David Mamet seems to hover over Ponies, by Mike Batistick, a bracingly uncensored exploration of the tensions and treacheries in a beleaguered male subculture. By contrast, it's Eugene O'Neill and The Iceman Cometh that spring to mind as you watch the habitués of a dive bar downing their doubles in Brett C Leonard's less original Scotch and Water.

Both settings come across with a disconcerting immediacy in Simon de Deney's atmospheric, well-acted productions. You can almost smell the reek of frantic hope in the seedy Off-Track betting-shop in Ponies, where we see three recent immigrants backing horses, sweating on the results and trading insults.

You could not accuse Batistick of sentimentalising the trio. Wonderfully played by Simon Holmes with a hunted, manic drive that manages to seem both monstrous and pathetic, Drazen is a Croatian nobody who longs to be a big-shot wheeler-dealer. Having acquired a passport through a marriage of convenience (or, as one of the others puts it, from a cold-blooded ability "to fuck a chubby woman"), he's one up on Wallace (Jimmy Roussounis), the illegal Venezuelan immigrant who figures that he needs "a thick American girl" to secure his stay in the country, and Eddie Daniels's dignified Ken, an engineer turned cab driver who can't return to Nigeria for fear of political persecution.

Part of the pleasure of the piece comes from the outrageously un-PC way the characters taunt one another. "Your country performs female circumcision," is the kind of trump card blithely used by Drazen, who also thinks he can browbeat the cashier (Ann-Marguerite Devlina) with breezy references to her weight problem. The dramatic development of Ponies is less well handled, though. With Drazen gradually suspected of writing off Eddie's taxi, the play is bent on showing how viciously these men turn on one another when anything threatens their precious stay on American soil. But even with the post-September 11 paranoia that the piece invokes, I can't believe that Eddie would be so poleaxed by Drazen's retaliatory and baseless insinuations that he is involved in terrorism.

Scotch and Water is a more generic drama, though it has some likeable twists. When the hysterical, gun-toting Danny (Trevor Long) bursts into the bar, it's amusing that the regulars just carry on drinking and making wisecracks ("You wanna couple of bucks for your boyfriend's sex-change?" asks one, with a knowing nod to Dog Day Afternoon). But if the piece departs from the norm in showing the intruder neutralised by the group, it cleaves to cliché in many other respects, such as having the silent, hard-tippling oldster (compellingly played by Mike Sarne) suddenly turn on the young newcomer with a set-piece "Oh, so you think life's been a bitch to you?" rebuke. There is also a grossly unearned and unforgivable shock in the final moments that makes you question the integrity of the piece. It's Ponies to which I raise a double measure.

To 29 August (020-7704 2001)