THEATRE / Everyday Life After The Great Revolution II/ A Stop In The Desert - ICA, London SW1 / Watermans Centre, Brentford

The Polish company Akademia Ruchu produces work closer to visual art than theatre. Everyday Life After The Great Revolution II is a response to political and social change in Poland using five actors and four large glass screens. In one sequence the actors paper the screens with scraps of political posters; in another they jostle between them before smashing the glass that imprisons them. But for all its crispness of style, Akademia Ruchu's social tragedy is without a whiff of humanity.

Grupa Chwilowa's A Stop In The Desert is, by contrast, irresistibly intimate. It is performed in Russian by two Russian actors who first appear selling tat in the foyer, just as loathed Russian emigres do in Poland today. To confront such hatred is part of the company's political agenda to use theatre to build bridges between cultures. Later, the performers, an actor and his wife, invite audience members on stage to dance and drink vodka in celebration of the actor's birthday. It makes a mockery of British theatre-going reserve, and simply dramatises the process of making friends across a cultural divide.

Everyday Life: To 17 Sept (071-930 3647). Stop in the Desert: To 19 Sept. (081-568 1176).