Tartuffe, National Theatre: Lyttelton, London; <br></br>Hinterland, National Theatre: Cottesloe, London; <br></br>Kiss My Echo, BAC, London; <br></br>The Glee Club, Bush Theatre, London

'A hideous troll with a belly like a trembling blancmange'

Why does it say Tartuffe in neon? As you take a Lyttelton pew for Molière's 17th-century comedy about hypocritical puritanism, his antihero's name fluoresces on high like the latest ad in Piccadilly Circus. Lindsay Posner's production is essentially a costume drama, designed by Ashley Martin-Davis and starring a becassocked Martin Clunes as the pseudo-saint who infiltrates the home of wealthy, gullible Orgon. Clare Holman, playing Orgon's wantonly pursued wife, is exquisitely dressed in period lace and silk. Baroque painters have decorated the walls and ceiling.

Yet scattered around, mimicking Bruce Nauman's conceptual installations, are additional luminous signs announcing maxims: "The Self Is Hateful", "The Truth Does Less Good Than Its Appearance Does Harm". The point of the neon is, presumably, that this classic has contemporary relevance. Glowing slogans highlight that Tartuffe is a cult leader with commercial interests.

The Molière/Nauman link also implies the French playwright was an early modernist, questioning moral propaganda.

Beyond that, however, this revival has little bite. You'd never guess Molière's satire was so excoriating in the 1660s that Paris's archbishop banned it nor that sect-based wars were devastating France. In Posner's revival, Tartuffe's corrupt wiles seem harmlessly entertaining and you're barely nudged to draw comparisons with current religious tensions.

Gorgeous frivolities are this show's forte, for it offers comic performances which avoid crude stock types and slapstick. David Threlfall is an irresistibly funny, flailing patriarch, blinking nervously and growing irascibly frenzied, while Tom Goodman-Hill is a splendid combo of righteous militant and fop as his son. Clunes's Tartuffe, having a hint of Rasputin, could certainly push further and behave seriously badly. What he does introduce is a flash of surprising innocence, squirming before Elmire like an overgrown choirboy. And he's a hilariously hideous troll, parading in his loincloth, his belly like a vast, trembling blancmange.

Indeed, the whole ensemble manifestly enjoy themselves once they get rolling. Bolt's octosyllabic rhyming couplets initially sound like chugging doggerel, but soon they're cantering along, spattered with cheeky expletives.

By comparison, Sebastian Barry's new would-be poetic and political drama is dying on its feet in the Cottesloe. This writer can't get those two Ps working together and Hinterland disappoints after The Steward Of Christendom and Barry's other absorbingly lyrical plays.

Holed up in his mansion outside Dublin, Johnny Silvester is an ex-prime minister who stands accused of chicanery – a fictional character with controversial similarities to Ireland's disgraced former Taoiseach Charles Haughey. Meanwhile, his bitter wife won't let his adultery lie and his son threatens suicide.

Johnny is terminally ill as well and – with obvious echoes of The Steward – is haunted by a ghost. His late electioneering partner pops out of a cupboard and nags like a guilty conscience. So, our protagonist is transported to the "hinterland" of his memories or mad fantasies and, in case you needed another analogy, we're told a urologist has inspected his nether regions.

Though assassination is a possibility, no suspense is generated and designer Es Devlin can't create a cliff-hanger just by making Johnny's study jut over the audience. In this slice-of-life, complete with cluttered bookshelves, Barry's impressionistic dialogue sounds false (being less honed than Pinter's comparable No Man's Land) and Johnny's garbled quotations from King Lear – not to mention Hamlet, Yeats or Brendan Behan – are a literary embarrassment, not a buttress. Max Stafford-Clark's production (for Out of Joint, the NT and the Abbey) looks elegant, and Patrick Malahide, as a morose Johnny, copes with Barry's vagaries. Other cast members are stiff and the slow pace is agony.

Kiss My Echo by the Clod Ensemble takes mental derangement for its theme and produces some pretentious nonsense as well. On the up side, Clod are a youngish troupe exploring how to overlap musicians, choreography and drama.

Visually, Suzy Willson's production is crankily stylish, featuring a hallucinatory hospital ward with walls made of X-ray transparencies. A quintet lolling in a corner like ashen corpses is joined by physical theatre actors who, in nutty vignettes, play doctors, nurses, loons and abused human guinea pigs. Unfortunately, this immature work offers unedited wackiness without emotional depth.

There are witty semi-dances, but overall, John Binias's text execrably mixes jargon and gobbledygook and you leave feeling like the victim of a particularly painful experiment.

By contrast, being stuck in a tiny room with Mike Bradwell's great cast for The Glee Club is a joy. Richard Cameron's new play, set in a Yorkshire mining community in 1962, is a mournful male bonding 'n' parting play and a quirky musical. David Bamber's Phil leads a barber shop-style band. His joshing work mates sing in close harmony and confer about women.

Nonetheless, popular music is moving on, lay-offs loom and the revelation that Phil is homosexual will cause ruinous quarrels. Cameron's characters remain static too long with Bamber's repressed Phil looking anxious ad infinitum.

On the other hand, the dialogue is humorously earthy, explosions of bigotry come from startling directions, and Shaun Prendergast's Scobie and his pals are having a blast, playing games with the borderline between naturalism and vaudeville. Catch this.

kate.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Tartuffe' and 'Hinterland': National, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), to 20 April and 18 April respectively; 'Kiss My Echo': BAC, London SW11 (020 7223 2223), to 17 March; 'The Glee Club': Bush, London W12 (020 7610 4224), to 23 March