Up For Grabs, Wyndhams, London; <br></br>The PowerBook, NT Lyttelton, London; <br></br>Bacchai, NT Olivier, London; <br></br>Homebody/Kabul, Young Vic, London

In bedlam with Madonna

Has everyone gone mad? The rush to see Madonna making her West End acting debut has been a crazy scrum. Some fans have allegedly paid £500 for a black market ticket to David Williamson's satire-going-on-sob story, Up For Grabs. On press night, our pop idol was hysterically whooped, merely for walking on from the wings. But what is this show really worth? The veteran Australian playwright must be asking himself that question with some irony, for an insanely overpriced painting is central to Up For Grabs.

Madonna plays Loren, an art dealer determined to make a mint by privately auctioning a Jackson Pollock. She lures investors, including coke-snorting dotcom entrepreneurs and an older philistine executive, Manny, who spends to conceal suppressed sexual problems. The stakes get higher as money gets tied up with sex and emotions, and Loren is pressurised to commodify herself. This leads to two largely comical "kinky" sex scenes, one with a giant wobbly dildo.

Famed for her raunchy gigs, Madonna ought to be in her element here. But she's terribly wooden and self-conscious, with a surprisingly feeble voice.

She does warm up given time, but struts as if she's on a catwalk and frets around the stage unconvincingly – none of which is going to earn her any theatrical cred. In the West End's current battle of the superstars, she's no match for Gwyneth Paltrow.

Director Laurence Boswell fails to fine-tune Up For Grabs to rival his excellent Garrick Theatre staging of This Is Our Youth. Jeremy Herbert's would-be designer set – using mirrors and washed-out projections – looks drab. Good supporting performances are offered by Michael Lerner as the gross, bullish Manny and by Tom Irwin as Loren's fuming husband. But other characters – translated from Sidney to Manhattan – are brashly caricatured.

And though Williamson touches on big issues, not least market forces corrupting personal morals, this is no trenchant masterpiece. Plot developments feel bald and the humour is frequently lame. The modern art world is also old terrain after Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things and Yasmina Reza's Art (previously long-running at Wyndhams).

Sorry to bang on about sex aids but over at the National we're asked to believe a tumescent tulip strapped to a cross-dressing Turkish lass has a 16th-century Italian princess in sustained ecstasies. Written in the passé style of magic realism, this is a particularly tiresome episode in Jeanette Winterson's pretentious novel, The PowerBook, now experimentally co-adapted by the author, director Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw. The National's risk-taking is admirable and the Lyttelton's conversion into a more intimate space for its Transformation season is attractive – with the stalls raked up to meet the circle.

As for this production, Winterson is concerned with how "transgressive" flings and fantasies overlap with more "ordinary" lives. Our narrator is a nameless female novelist who has globetrotting, passionate one-night stands with a woman who doesn't want to abandon her marriage. In between, owing much to Virginia Woolf's Orlando, our protagonists' identities blur with various historic amours as the novelist sends fictions as billets-doux via e-mail.

Winterson's dialogue can resemble a Mills & Boon story, loaded with banal philosophising ("Love is an assault course"/ "Some wounds never heal" etc). In computer lingo, one might want to select "Empty Trash" at this point.

Thankfully, Shaw plays the novelist with dry humour while Saffron Burrows, as the rich belle, progresses from swanky arrogance to fraught ardour. Tom Pye's video designs can be dreamy, too, as the set becomes a huge computer screen across which words – projected on layered gauzes – flow like a glimmering river. Nonetheless, the period costumes look naff and Shaw's bouts of disco dancing, to cover rough joins, are embarrassing.

Tensions between wild urges and repressive forces crop up again, far more fascinatingly, in Bacchai. Peter Hall is essentially back on form for this production of Euripides' Greek tragedy – played in masks on a huge sloping arena. Greg Hicks is mesmerising as the god Dionysus who, disguised as a wanton cult leader from Asia, maddens Thebes' King Pentheus – a control freak who secretly craves to mingle with the women who have escaped his citadel to worship in the woods. Interrogated by William Houston's sweating Pentheus, Hicks's Dionysus – with long blond dreadlocks – lists very slowly from side to side, suggesting, with brilliant ambivalence, both teasing effeminacy and an awesome bully spoiling for a fight.

The mud-smeared Bacchic chorus, sporting primitive hides, look regrettably like Sindy dolls mated with Caliban and they are surely too tame – chanting awkwardly to Harrison Birtwistle's jerky percussive score. But Colin Teevan's translation is eloquent and alludes to contemporary troubles, pointedly emphasising clashes and hidden parallels between cultures of East and West.

This strikingly links up with Homebody/Kabul, Tony Kushner's eagerly awaited American play about an English family embroiled with the Taliban regime in 1998. Written before 11 September, this contains the staggeringly prescient line – screamed by a raving woman, furious at Western interference – "You love the Taliban so much, bring them to New York! Well don't worry, they are coming to New York." Beyond this, Kushner's writing is often startlingly idiosyncratic. Part One is a monologue by a sweetly eccentric London housewife – the titular homebody, played by a shyly smiling Kika Markham. She's obsessed with old Afghan guidebooks and chatters with a ludicrously bookish vocabulary. Part Two suddenly hurls the homebody's staid husband, Milton, and their angry daughter, Priscilla, into a kind of murder-mystery drama that deals with mourning, insanity, and the befriending of the enemy. The duo find themselves out in Kabul, hearing unconfirmed reports that the homebody has – like the ill-fated Pentheus – been torn to pieces by anti-Western extremists.

Declan Donnellan's production, marking the revival of his Cheek By Jowl company, is staged with great simplicity – designer Nick Ormerod conjuring up sun-baked Kabul with just plywood boards. And there's fierce as well as warmly funny acting, particularly from Souad Faress as the screaming Mahala and from William Chubb's Milton, going to the dogs with an ex-pat opium addict. On the downside, Kushner is a verbal show-off and often rambles abstrusely. You want more cuts yet also hanker for a Part Three that would bring you up-to-date. Alternately fascinating and frustrating.

'Up For Grabs': Wyndhams, London WC2 (020 7369 1796), to 13 July; 'The PowerBook': NT Lyttelton , London SE1 (020 7452 3000), to 4 June; 'Bacchai': NT Olivier, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), to 8 June; 'Homebody/Kabul': Young Vic, London SE1 (020 7928 6363), to 22 June

k.bassett@independent.co.uk