A melodrama with comic relief (in the shape of a grotesque elocution teacher, squawkingly portrayed by Alison Fiske), the piece unfolds at a leaden pace that enables you to predict the consequences of every implausible development.Mary, the culprit, is presented as wickedness incarnate, with no clue to its source or to her power over the other girls. Her grandmother (who brings the accusations against the school) takes what she says on trust, in spite of knowing the brat from birth. And as Mary delivers her lies in a whisper, the audience cannot tell what it is that convinces the old woman of their truth. After which, in a domestic trial scene, the teachers, Karen and Martha, cook their own goose by putting fatal information into the mouth of an innocent witness.

Meanwhile, the production tightens the screws with ominous violin scratchings and Ashley Martin- Davis's grandiose penthouse is shaken by a non-textual thunderstorm. Emily Watson and Gillian Barge are excellently cast as the two accusers, but the roles leave them with little to do beyond telegraphing sly malevolence and moral turmoil.Coming fresh to the play, I was unprepared for its third act in which Hellman smashes the melodramatic mould. At the point where the story ends, with the victims' legal defeat and the closing of their school, the real play begins. Everything has changed for the two partners, Martha and Karen; and as Clare Higgins and Harriet Walter play their inconsequential preliminaries, remarks on the weather or having a bath vibrate like sub-textual harp-strings.Karen has a speech listing commonplace words, like 'love', and saying that every one of them now has a new meaning - as she proves when her engagement breaks up, and Martha acknowledges desire for her. Hellman's point is that lies take on a life of their own from which the innocent have no escape When the truth comes out, it is too late The two heroines have turned into damaged people. And nothing in the play is uglier than Karen's response to the guilt-crushed apologies of her former accuser.

Harriet Walter luxuriates in a sadistic pause before replying. 'Get out of here,' she spits at the broken old woman, 'and be noble on the street.'In Mary Morris's Two Weeks with the Queen (adapted from Morris Gleitzman's children's novel), young Colin is shipped off from Australia to relatives in London when his kid brother develops irreversible cancer. Consisting mainly of Colin's increasingly fantastic schemes for miracle cures, and his entirely practical help to an Aids victim, this is a four-square moral fable on the need for adults and children alike to face the prospect of death. It is also honestly and illuminatingly funny; thanks partly to the unsentimental treatment of the hyperactive siblings (even Tamblyn Lord's bubblingly athletic Colin can be a pain in the neck); and partly to the hilariously stylised portrait of the buttoned-up British family whose idea of a treat is a day out in the local hardware centre. In Alan Ayckbourn's production, the message sings out as from a Bach trumpet, with virtuoso pantomime entr'actes on international airways and the London Underground.The message would produce a collective yawn from the teenagers in Michael Henry Brown's The Day the Bronx Died. As the middle-aged narrator lugubriously puts it: 'Death had established an unwanted intimacy' with his younger self.