Hedda Gabler, Barbican, London<br />The Vortex, Apollo Shaftesbury Avenue, London<br />Artefacts, Bush, London

Three hysterical women and tragic fate &ndash; but it's not all doom and gloom

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. But that won't stop a dangerously bored wife firing bullets across the lounge of her sheet-glass designer home in director Thomas Ostermeier's update of Hedda Gabler. This is BITE:08's often electrifying import from the Schaubühne in Berlin.

Though a dark portrait of brooding frustration, Gothic malignity and Schadenfreude, Ostermeier's take on Ibsen can be startlingly funny. Katharina Schuttler's Hedda idly aims her gun and destroys a vase of flowers – stalks flopping to the ground amid a spectacular explosion of porcelain.

Schuttler has, moreover, been a surprise on her first entrance. Slouching in from the bedroom, in low-slung tracksuit bottoms, this Hedda is very young: quite possibly one of her academic husband Jorgen's undergrads, more fille than femme fatale. A skinny little thing with a touch of feral cat about her – not fully domesticated – she looks skeletally fragile but sexually assured and surly. Only just back from their honeymoon, she is already infuriated by his nerdy obsession with work.

This modernised text, scripted by Marius von Mayenburg with English subtitles, is occasionally strained, even though it doesn't stick closely to the original. It is particularly hard to believe that Jorgen's suave rival, Eilert, has spent two years writing a dazzling book on his laptop but never made a hard copy. In the original, Hedda burns his manuscript. Here, you just think he must have burned it on to a CD.

No matter, Schuttler is a horribly recognisable, 21st-century enfant terrible: materially indulged yet dissatisfied, already jaded and alarmingly amoral. It might seem odd that she has bothered to marry, but this superb ensemble's physical work is sharply delineated and, in one moment when her strapping husband hugs her on his lap, you glimpse a damaged child suddenly comforted. There are also hints of a shared sadomasochistic past between Schuttler and Kay Bartholomäus Sch-ulze's sardonic, seething Eilert. They have clearly rebounded from it, but maybe not recovered.

With his use of projections and rock songs between scenes, Ostermeier risks seeming to try to be hip. But here he uses them with elegiac sophistication, and his slow-spinning set – with one dividing concrete wall and mirrors high above – brilliantly captures a household of lurking dishonesty, entrapment and estrangement. If only this show could have had a longer run.

The veteran director Peter Hall keeps Noël Coward's The Vortex, starring Felicity Kendal, in period costume. Nothing wrong with that, though this staging doesn't transport you back to the 1920s with breathtaking vibrancy. Centring on Florence and Nicky – a wealthy beauty and her messed-up son – Coward's early tragi-comedy caused a sensation at the time.

Unfortunately, Hall's supporting cast gets off to a turgid start. The barbed repartee in Florence's flat needs more zing. However, you can still discern the brilliance with which Coward captured the catty wit of a clique, and Kendal does make Florence warmly real. Her youth-addicted vanity seems not over-affected but an almost natural ingrained trait – which may make it all the more incurable.

Her belief that she can avoid ageing is certainly topical. Phoebe Nicholls gathers momentum as her mercilessly frank friend Helen, who even wordlessly comes out of the closet in an ardent embrace. Kendal and Dan Stevens, as Nicky, also rise to a fraught mutual confession about their lifestyles which is palpably shot through with the sting of autobiographical grief.

The fledgling playwright Mike Bartlett was somewhat overhyped for his recent custody-battle drama, My Child, at the Royal Court. His new play, Artefacts, is about a shallow teenager called Kelly who is in a fractious relationship with her Iraqi dad, Ibrahim. Although Peter Polycarpou has touching gravitas as Ibrahim, I often wished Lizzy Watts' Kelly would simply shut up. Bartlett keeps interrupting plot developments with interior monologues, so the drama stagnates. That said, he does have an ear for dialogue and his experiments should lead somewhere more interesting soon.

'The Vortex' (0870 040 0046) to 7 June; 'Artefacts' (020-7610 4224) to 22 March