Andorra, Young Vic<br></br>Midden, Hampstead<br></br>Sympathetic Magic, Finborough, London

At the edge of global anxiety

"Early one morning they'll come with a thousand black tanks, and they'll roll in all directions over our fields, and they'll drop from the sky with parachutes like grey locusts." Such are the fears of invasion voiced by Barblin, the village schoolmaster's daughter, as she whitewashes her father's house in Max Frisch's politically loaded drama, Andorra, which features in the Young Vic's Direct Action season for young directors.

In the grim aftermath of 11 September, some British theatres have had their fingers quite unnervingly on the pulse of international anxieties. Take the scrutiny of religious fundamentalism and consequent wars in John Osborne's Luther at the National or David Rudkin's semi-apocalyptic Afore Night Come – Direct Action's first show – where the audience winced as characters fled from sinister crop-spraying planes.

Andorra is another pertinent revival from the early Sixties in which the Swiss playwright focuses on Barblin's foster-brother, Andri. He's known locally as the Jewish boy rescued from the anti-Semitic, so-called Blacks across the border. These troops eventually march in and execute Andri but, prior to that, we see him shabbily persecuted by his own neighbours: the carpenter declines to give him a decent job; the doctor is a foolishly smug nationalist and insidious racist; and the native soldier is a harassing yob.

Frisch's vision – like The Visit by his 1950s compatriot Dürrenmatt – clearly reverberates with memories of the Holocaust. At the same time, it critically reflects today's strife-torn world from Bradford to Bosnia, from Ulster to America and Afghanistan. Director Gregory Thompson underlines this with a multi-ethnic cast. The drawback is that such a team is contrary to the playwright's idea of a community of Fascistic purists, reducing any sense of immediate alarm.

This piece is weak in other respects. The evening starts engagingly as the residents open their shutters, Advent calendar-style, and amicably peruse the stone-flagged village square and audience. However, from the whitewashing onwards, Frisch's symbolism is heavy-handed and Michael Bullock's English translation is stiff. Jack Shepherd shines as the schoolmaster, a comically shambling drunk with sinews of courage. Alec Newman's Andri is an innocent with flashes of bitterness, but Thompson's unwieldy ensemble often slow to a crawl.

In Midden at Hampstead Theatre, mothers and daughters are engaged in more exclusively domestic battles, although (as with Andri) emigration combines with ill-treatment to create a personal identity crisis. This is Morna Regan's playwrighting debut, staged by Lynne Parker for Ireland's Rough Magic theatre company and transferring from this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival with some cast changes. Ruth (Michelle Fairley) is a Derry-born career woman returning to her ma's house after years in Philadelphia. With a working kitchen on stage, you can smell the Sunday roast hotting up. Only the motherland offers a desultory welcome as Ma (Ruth Hegarty) is cold and grudging and skeletons lurk in the cupboard, cryptically alluded to by Ruth's senile gran (Barbara Adair).

Regan grapples with Irish migration and rootlessness and with women's changing status down the generations. Unfortunately, a whiff of melodrama hovers over the family's dark past and Parker's leading actors seem drab.

The supporting characters are far sparkier. Ruth's kid sister – played by young Emma Colohan, a name to watch – is witty and quietly angry while Maggie Haye as Ruth's old pal, Mab, is a buoyant party animal with surprisingly sensitive antennae.

At the Finborough, more women are rejecting traditional maternal roles in Sympathetic Magic by America's Obie-winning Lanford Wilson (famed for Burn This). Dr Elizabeth Barnard is a Californian anthropologist who insists men still hold the spears and women hold the babies (although she virtually abandoned her own daughter). Barbara, who's grown into a talented sculptress, is devoted to her work and has an abortion. Her partner Andy, an astrophysicist, should be a rational guy but he goes ape and beats up Barbara on the very evening he's been congratulated on a professional break-through.

Opening The Steam Industry's Faith and Science season, Sympathetic Magic should be intellectually stimulating. In practice, director William Galinsky presents a ropy production of an execrable soap scantily dressed up as a play of ideas. Wilson's supposedly brilliant characters merely spout potted lectures on big topics like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the Theory of Everything. Nothing is explored or interconnected at all.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Andorra': Young Vic, London SE1 (020 7928 6363), to 10 November; 'Midden': London NW3 (020 7722 9301), to 10 November; 'Sympathetic Magic': Finborough, London SW10 (020 7373 3842), to 17 November