Free, NT Loft, London <br></br>A Carpet, a Pony and a Monkey, Bush Theatre, London <br></br>Where Do We Live, Royal Court Upstairs, London <br></br>The Lady's Not For Burning, Minerva, Chichester

Our capital city? It looks more like a fishpond to me

The National's Transformation season continues to buzz with the kinetic arrival of Simon Bowen's Free into the pokey Loft space.

This is just the kind of reckless injection of energy that was called for. Though hardly perfect – it's his first full-length play – Free is a fast and furious charge through the chaotic lives of seven young Londoners. Everyone's desperate to get out – of their job, of their relationship, of the country. Each of Bowen's 12 scenes shows a one-on-one confrontation with just such an escape at stake.

The opener, with ice-cold businesswoman Nicola Walker winding up Catherine McCormack's flustered temp, is hilarious, while Walker's showdown with her dad is breathtakingly vicious. These two give the best performances of the night – McCormack's nervous alloy of impulsive ditziness is one of the most natural-seeming I can remember in quite a while.

While Bowen can write a corking scene, he is a naïve plotter. In a 24-hour-long series of outlandish coincidences, he sends his poor characters repeatedly careering into each other's paths. This game of theatrical dodgems has the effect of reducing the capital to the size of a fishpond. Thea Sharrock's cast – with strong showings also from Andrew Lincoln and Stephen Beresford – are good enough and the play's velocity forceful enough, that you almost don't notice this at the time.

A Carpet, a Pony and a Monkey is one of the Bush's commissioned, issue-based pieces, and boy, does it show at times. Set during Euro 2000, its main target is ticket touts, but it also takes in racism, hooliganism and the tabloid life-style of the players. At its centre is the cautious, surrogate father-son relationship between Baz (Philip Jackson), a washed-out, debt-ridden tout, and young upstart Tosser (Nicholas Tennant, eyes beautifully expressive behind a patriotic cross of St George).

Writer Mike Packer also includes Al, a B-list striker, and Kate, his über-bimbo girlfriend, and then mixes them all up in a Mamet-style cat's cradle of gutter-level double-crosses. Under Mike Bradwell's direction, it's funny and thought-provoking almost by turns, with more wit and flair than anything Sven's men are likely to show over the coming weeks.

The truly three-dimensional writing, however, is coming yet again from across the Atlantic. Christopher Shinn's Where Do We Live is a rousing inquiry into neighbourliness, into what happens when you try to help those worse off than yourself. Stephen, a neurotic New York writer, pisses off his preppy boyfriend by tiring of drugs and clubs, and loaning cigarettes and cash to Timothy, the unemployed dad across the corridor.

These two apartments divide the stage, creating a focused, homely feeling that director Richard Wilson is hard-pushed to maintain when Shinn shifts the action outside, to clubs and galleries. But the dialogue stutters and flows like the real thing, and Daniel Evans inhabits the character of Stephen (as he did in Shinn's previous play, Other People) with sublime assurance. Intense, compassionate and prickly, to see him destroy the mood of his own house party with an argument about welfare reform is to see realism and political engagement coalesce to the point of embarrassment.

There is good support from Noel Clarke as Timothy's introverted, drug-dealing son Shed and Jemima Rooper as his English semi-girlfriend Lily. The only shame is that Shinn answers his big question – can't we all just get along? – not on his own terms, but with the obscene deus ex machina of 11 September. To see people pulling together after that is moving, but hardly a satisfying dramatic denouement.

There is always something comforting about the past – even in wilful antiquity. The fruity language of Christopher Fry's verse drama The Lady's Not For Burning, newly revived at the Minerva, would probably give most contemporary writers apoplexy. All those adjectives! All that meandering rhetoric! Written in 1949 and set in 1400, it features one of English drama's great pessimists. This is Thomas, a demobbed soldier who descends on an unsuspecting village demanding to be hanged. The locals, however, are more interested in burning alive a witch, the innocent, beguiling Jennet. Comic momentum comes from Thomas's desperate attempt to maintain his acidic nihilism as he gets caught progressively tighter in "the unholy mantrap of love".

The play positively groans under the weight of metaphor and philosophic wit, and needs to be spoken well if it's to fare better on the stage than it does on the page. Samuel West's production casts a healthy glow, without ever really catching fire. Alan Cox and Nancy Carroll as the precarious central couple could learn a bit from Alison Fiske as the world-weary mother of the house. She dispatches her lines as if she were in a frothy, Wildean drawing-room comedy – which is, of course, precisely what this is.

Kate Bassett is away

'Free': NT Loft, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), to Sat; 'A Carpet, a Pony, and a Monkey': Bush, London W12 (020 7610 4224), to 15 June; 'Where Do We Live': Royal Court Upstairs, London SW1 (020 7565 5100), to Sat; 'The Lady's Not For Burning': Minerva, Chichester (01243 781312), to 15 June