Have I None + The Under Room

Taking place in a sterile room, empty except for a table and two chairs, Have I None feels particularly post-apocalyptic in Sean Holmes's production.

A picture emerges of a society with "no windows,""no carnivals" and certainly no human love.

"They did away with all that," says Sara (Naomi Frederick) when a strange man (Timothy O'Hara) from "the other end" turns up and claims to be her brother. His evidence, the family photo he produces, is indifferently torn up by her husband Jams (Aidan Kelly), an officer in "the service."

When the stranger then attempts to sit in one of their chairs, a darkly comic argument ensues with more than a passing resemblance to Eugene Ionesco's absurdism. The chair morphs from a symbol of rigid obedience and status quo to one of malevolence and torture.

The Under Room, directed by Bond himself, is the more protracted and impenetrable of the two plays.

When a woman finds an intruder in her cellar - the "under room" - his story quickly turns her fear into sympathy.

Joan (Tanya Moodie) offers protection from "the soldiers" that pursue him and even employs a trafficker (Nicholas Gleaves) to help him escape the oppressive authorities.

There is an important message here about immigration and exploiting other people's suffering vicariously but it's subsumed by some of the piece's less subtle flourishes, such as the immigrant being played as a seated, stuffed dummy.

Yet there are interesting moments, as when we hear that shoplifting has, presciently, been renamed "shoplooting."

Both plays are traditional dystopias - they attempt to say more about us now than in a predicted future -and express a general fear of social collapse and a coercive, faceless state. But they feel more dated and jaded than they should, given that both were written in the noughties.

These stagings play out an obsession with violence, which in its cold dispassion is a million miles from that of Hollywood spectaculars.

But more importantly, the Lyric's artistic director Holmes wants draw attention to the hope that Bond's plays are often accused of lacking. This is revealed in Have I None, where the incessant knocking at the door reminds the characters of the not-quite-dead humanity that haunts them.

Chair caps the eponymous trilogy when it follows later this month.

It would be surprising if that production radically breaks away from the ideas that Holmes and Bond explore here at exhaustive length.

Runs until May 5. Box office: 0871 221-1729.