If this is the best international rendition that the RSC could find

If this is the best international rendition that the RSC could find for its grand, year-long Complete Works Festival then the worldwide state of play must be poor – which is, I suppose, an eye-opener in its own way. To be fair, this modern-dress staging has a certain sturdy simplicity. She’s like one of Moli?’s comic rustics, at once wanton and innocent, only with deeper psychological disorders brewing. At the preview that I caught, Hale was still negotiating one or two of her character’s mood swings but, with Sylvester downplaying her mum’s bruising clumsiness, Laney’s climactic raging grief is really frightening To 3 June, 020 7610 4224. In particular, Chazen manages to be ludicrously weird yet extraordinarily lovable, with a sexually frisky nature bubbling up through her rote about sin and the Devil. Just full-submersion baptism, prophecy, healing and speaking in tongues,” she concludes without batting an eyelid.What’s lovely about Mike Bradwell’s production is its studio intimacy – with just white clapboard walls as a backdrop – combined with some very fine acting.

Her dad, she adds, is a preacher at the local Church of the Redeemer, “but we don’t pick up snakes or drink poison, or any of that crazy stuff. At school, the only other kid who will speak to her is Debbie Chazen’s Maribel (inset, with Amanda Hale). She is very fat, like a vast chatty marshmallow, educationally remedial due to incompetent home tutoring, and ostracised too.
Maribel proves to be hilariously evangelical, blithely plunging straight in with the conversational opener, “Have you ever asked Jesus into your heart?”, and explaining that she’s only asking in case, say, her new acquaintance were to get shot by a stray bullet that afternoon without having been saved. We gather her academic dad has, distressingly, become psychotic and been institutionalised, and Laney – at the same time as being an amusingly precocious wannabe writer – has developed dystonia, with seized-up muscles that make her look hunchbacked.

Amanda Hale’s gawky, stroppy Laney has just moved to the South with her mum, Suzan Sylvester’s Elise. But Jessica Turner and Tilly Tremayne – as Garry’s ex-wife and Monica, the unshockable PA – are terrifically crisp and fondly long-suffering Touring to 3 June, 01225 448844. Religious nutters are, of course, no joke in today’s world when they are hijacking planes, planting bombs or, indeed, when they’re flagging up axes of evil as if they’re apocalyptically battling with Satan. Yet there’s a delicious satirical naughtiness as well as warmth about Crooked. Written by a promising young US playwright, Catherine Trieschmann, this is a seriocomic, neatly structured chamber play about two oddball adolescent girls who become buddies in Mississippi. They both seem to share a burgeoning fervour as Jesus freaks but one of them, Laney, actually hopes it will lead to Sapphic rites of passage, furiously struggling to keep her desires under wraps as her insensitively frank, liberal and atheistic mother keeps exposing all her little fibs and fantasies.

Lysette Anthony merely strikes tiresome poses as the clique-wrecking sexual predator, Joanna. Moreover, having our most famously florid actor taking this role – with photographs of Callow’s own past performances lining the walls – is a delightfully knowing joke, especially when Garry’s theatre chums claim they’ve tempered his overacting and he huffs, “Now you have gone too far!”
Perhaps Rudman could sharpen up one or two scenes, reining in Robin Pearce’s cartoon acting as the insane stalker, Roland Maule, or letting us glimpse a little more dark anxiety and decadence under the surface of this 1939 light entertainment. Nonetheless, Present Laughter and Hay Fever are a strikingly witty twin set and Garry – exclaiming that his own relentless theatricality may drive him mad – feels teasingly close to a self-portrait by Coward (even if homosexuality is left in the closet). He isn’t as consummately hilarious as Dench and can’t resist milking good gags. He swans around his chic monochrome apartment in Michael Rudman’s production, sporting silk dressing-gowns and getting increasingly frazzled as his suave life turns into a bedroom farce, pouting about his thinning hair and bouncing on a pouf, knees clenched, like a small boy having a tantrum. That might wipe the smile off a lesser luvvie’s face, but Callow is having enormous and often infectious fun playing Garry Essendine, the compulsively womanising celebrity who’s dogged by mad admirers.