THEATRE / Faces in the crowd

Disappeared / Haymarket Shift / Old Red Lion

Take two New Yorkers. Sarah, 25, works in a travel agency but is in the embarrassing position of never having travelled. Elston, of indeterminate age, manages a charity thrift shop: it's a minimum wage job but it has the perk of enabling him to dr ess upin the clothes that have been donated there and briefly don the identities of the original owners.

On the evening this pair encounter one another in a bar in Hell's Kitchen, Elston alternately claims to be the big-shot entertainment attorney whose outsize tuxedo he is modelling and a serial killer who drowns his victims in the bath. The latter is either a supremely ill-timed fabrication or no more than the truth; Sarah is never seen again.

Awarded second prize in the 1992 Mobil International Playwriting Contest, Phyllis Nagy's caustically comic urban drama now receives its world premiere in the wake of such later works as her Butterfly Kiss (1994), a play that teased out the plethora of motives in a case of lesbian matricide. Disappeared is not out to solve the guilty-or-not-guilty conundrum of diminutive, balding Elston, a man who, in Kerry Shale's remarkable performance, attempts to mask terminal loneliness with the willed serenity of self-aggrandising make-believe. His vocal delivery has a foxing pernickety precision, as does his body language which, with its upraised forefinger and sweeping flourishes, employs the vocabulary of a cod magician. A trick up his sleeve? That would ratherdepend (or would it?) on whose sleeve he happens to be wearing.

Rather than demystify this enigma, the play uses its strange central situation as the vantage point for some sharp-eyed scrutiny of the atomised lives of the big-city dwellers, and of a culture whose capacity for moral thought and feeling has been addledby the mass media.

Derek Wax's strongly cast, skilfully inflected production confirms Nagy as the laconic laureate of this spiritual wasteland and demonstrates once again her wonderfully attuned ear for the daily crazinesses of New York speech.

"Escape?" rasps Ellen, Sarah's disappointment-soured mother, wonderfully played by Anna Keaveney. "My daughter would never escape. She never went nowhere. She wasn't the type." Maybe it's this suffocating maternal mentality that has finally induced Sarahto make a bolt for it.

There are some weak links in the play. The flashback scene in the travel agency (on the one occasion that Elston, differently disguised, had met Sarah before their fateful encounter in the bar) does not ring true. It's a crucial moment in the dramatic scheme because it's supposed to establish that this customer was the only person Sarah was ever likely to meet who could fully understand "the desire to simply... vanish".

When she recounts the incident unwittingly to its own protagonist in the bar later on, it clearly has an important effect on him. But it's hard to believe that Alexandra Gilbreath's excellent Sarah, all sceptical eye-brows and tough-broad act down the bar, would be such a different person behind her desk, sufficiently credulous to be taken in by Elston's patently trumped up crank routine in the travel agency. People have work-selves, sure; but this is schizophrenia.

It's a very funny play, as well as a bleak one, with a male suspect who is so isolated he keeps the detective guessing in order to cement a relationship, and with relations and friends of the missing girl who have no inhibitions about spreading their private grief over the airwaves.

Mick Mahoney's interesting, intermittently witty Shift at the Old Red Lion also fields a pair of losers who are drawn together. But here the couple (Victoria Harwood's spoilt, middle-class white girl and Trevor Laird's black Tube worker, who share a council flat while waiting to be rehoused) are neither as well-observed nor entertaining as the two characters who catalyse their reconciliation: a likeably ordinary girl on the game (Elaine Lordan) who itches to tidy up the bohemian mess and a Thatcherised bit of rough called Eddie (Perry Fenwick) who benightedly believes that the thought of having sex wearing only a Hermes scarf would make any girl horny. Both these dramatists are names to watch - especially Nagy, whose new play The Strip opens at the Royal Court in March.

n `Disappeared': Haymarket, Liecester, to 25 Feb, then touring. Details: 0116-235 9797

n `Shift': Old Red Lion, London EC1 to 25 Feb. Booking: 0171-837 7816