The Jewish Wife/A Respectable Wedding, Young Vic, London

A theatrical night out with Brecht usually means yet another date with Mother Courage, Galileo or Arturo Ui. So demonstrating that there is more variety to the old boy than can be deduced from watching those established masterworks is the aim of the Young Vic's enterprising "Big Brecht Fest" - a showcase of four of his shorter plays presented in the theatre's two studio spaces. The season kicked off with the first pairing: The Jewish Wife (translated by Martin Crimp) and A Respectable Wedding (in an exuberantly funny new version by Rory Bremner). The result is highly stimulating and enjoyable. The latter shows such unfamiliar facets that I don't think that I'd even have been able to identify Brecht as the author, had I come to the production blind.

The Jewish Wife is one of 24 brief scenes that comprise Fear and Misery of the Third Reich from the mid-1930s. The focus is on a middle-class doctor's wife who, having decided that she is a liability to her Gentile husband and in grave personal danger, has decided to leave Berlin alone.

We witness her agitated packing, and the burning of her incriminating address book. We overhear phone-calls to friends and relatives that, depending on the degree of her intimacy with them, keep up or deny the fiction that she is taking a two-break in Amsterdam. She rehearses a much more honest and indignant confrontation with her husband but, when he eventually appears, they lapse into the consoling clichés ("You could do with a change of air") that both of them know are monstrous lies. Katie Mitchell's quietly intense and unsettling production in the Clare studio taps deep into the pain of the situation, with Anastasia Hille in fine, febrile and angry form.

The mood swings to raucous high spirits in Joe Hill-Gibbins's witty staging of A Respectable Wedding. Brecht punctures petit bourgeois pretensions in a broad farce about a wedding party from hell. The bride is pregnant. Her father (Lloyd Hutchinson) can't be restrained from telling long-winded, unerringly mirth-free and tactless anecdotes and the bickering, obstreperous guests (who include the hilarious James Corden and Doon Mackichan) are cramped into a domestic interior that has all the calming roominess of a lift. The shift of period creates some puzzles, but the production expertly escalates into the kind of mayhem we have associated more with Ray Cooney than Brecht.

To 14 April (www.youngvic.org; 020-7922 2922)