Pericles, The Warehouse, London<br></br>Party Time/ One For The Road, BAC, London<br></br>High Society, Open Air Theatre, London

All washed up (on a shore of wet jumpers)

I'm being told to stand behind the white line. They want to know where I was born. And why have I come here? I am here to see Shakespeare's late romance, Pericles, which is strange because I seem to have wandered into some industrial no-man's land, just off a spaghetti junction in South London. The white line where I'm being registered for entry - as though an asylum seeker - is in a vast warehouse, all corrugated steel and dirty concrete. The place looks suspiciously like a cattle market for herds of human beings and, once inside, you are marshalled from one hangar to another. In one huge chamber, you sit at shabby desks and are told to fill in a seemingly endless Home Office form, which made me want to cry almost instantly. In another, child-size camp beds stretch out to the crack of doom in the half-dark. Mountains of second-hand clothes are piled in corners and inside a bunch of canvas tents, television monitors flicker, showing real-life immigrants telling their stories.

Well, you may think, this isn't very RSC. It's more like a raw performance art installation. But it is the Royal Shakespeare Company - going out on a limb and collaborating with Cardboard Citizens, the theatre company that works on site-specific productions with homeless people and refugees. This is a refreshing, adventurous project, and the main point is that Cardboard Citizens' director, Adrian Jackson, makes the Bard's meandering folk tale about the twice-shipwrecked, bereaved and beggared Prince of Tyre connect with the struggles of contemporary refugees.

His production certainly has its ups and downs, though it's not as rough a ride as Pericles himself endures on the wheel of fortune. With a cast of mixed abilities (some professionally trained), the acting is at points clumsily exaggerated or emotionally flat. The echoing acoustics are often lousy, and the video footage is very badly shot and nearly inaudible too (which seems odd if RSC technical resources were available). Crucially, Jackson never quite captures the transcendent poignancy of those scenes where broken lives seem suddenly, mercifully blessed - when Pericles' wife Thaisa and his daughter Marina, both presumed dead, are miraculously reunited with him. The final scene where, acting on a dream, he seeks out Thaisa at the ancient temple of Diana, is ruined by a crass directorial conceit: Jackson's temple is a kitsch shrine to Princess Di complete with a huge publicity shot and statuette of her as the Madonna. Di may have been a much mourned and charitable royal, but she wasn't the goddess of chastity.

Nonetheless, the evening is scattered with many inspired and unforgettably moving moments. Even if Christopher Simpson's Pericles does not take on board much emotional freight, his joy is beautifully tender as he dances with his long-lost child. Jasmine Hyde's Marina also manages to be pure, impassioned and sturdy all at once.

The shipwrecks are terrifically imaginative too. The kindly fishermen on the shore of Pentapolis are transformed into laundrette attendants, possibly working for Shelter. So as Simpson's Pericles washes up, he tumbles from a fellow actor's shoulders on to a beach of tangled jumpers as foaming water floods from an incomplete rinse cycle like a gently breaking wave.

Most heartrending, however, are the interwoven verbatim accounts of modern refugee experiences. You hear of families scattered to the four corners of the earth, trying to find each other again. A mother recalls fleeing her country and being aboard a packed sinking boat with three women going into labour. A corpse, she says, floated past her with its baby umbilically attached; then, eventually, she was rescued and made the captain sail back until they found her son - still alive. This makes you realise that the endless wandering and suffering, and indeed the extraordinary human resilience and hope in Pericles, are far from fantastical.

If being on the road in Pericles makes for hardship, in Pinter's ironically entitled chamber play, One For The Road, what chills the blood is imprisonment without trial. Written in the mid-Eighties, this is one of the most quietly terrifying plays from Sir Harold's markedly political phase. And BAC's studio staging by Bijan Sheibani - winner of this year's James Menzies-Kitchen Award for Young Directors - is bleak and gripping. A middle-aged man in a smart suit (Collin McCormack) sits facing another (Jason Barnett) who appears to have left his jacket and tie in another room. We could just be in some drab office building that's got run-down. The room is a square of grey carpet, Barnett sits on a plastic chair, and McCormack ambles over to pour himself whiskies from a cut-glass decanter. But this isn't a civilised conversation. Barnett's shirt is torn and McCormack is doing almost all the talking. We are, in fact, in some nameless, brutal dictatorship that keeps up bureaucratic appearances, and Barnett is a political prisoner being verbally tortured with insinuations about his wife and child who, we glean, are being held on other floors.

Balding and thickset, McCormack gives a riveting, controlled performance as a mad sadist with a sickening mask of benevolence. Barnett, meanwhile, is startlingly dignified and pitiful, answering occasionally in a croaking whisper that conveys a world of atrocities beyond the door. There is little hope of a family reunion here.

One For The Road is cleverly paired with Party Time, in which McCormack plays the host at a lavish bash where the rich and powerful sip champagne whilst drawing a menacing veil over what has happened to an associate called Jimmy. The final monologue by Barnett's Jimmy is elusive and haunting, but this piece is more stiffly directed and less subtle in its political satire.

Cole Porter has a much more larky and tuneful take on America's upper crust in High Society. Ian Talbot's al fresco production of this classic musical, with a chorus line of dapper maids and butlers, is an enjoyable breeze. Tracy Lord's wedding plans descend into a champagne-fuelled farce but her ex, Dexter, gets his gal back in the end. Annette McLaughlin's towering blonde Tracy, singing with a nasal timbre, never quite wins your heart, and Claire Redcliffe tends to holler tiresomely as her brattish kid sister. But the numbers get better and better, with choice extras thrown in including the lonely, semi-seduced "It's All Right With Me" and the buoyantly naughty "Let's Misbehave" (Latin style). Dale Rapley's Dexter is lovably witty, and husky Tracie Bennett is a hoot as the snooping gossip mag photographer, Liz, scuttling round desperately trying to escape the clutches of Brian Green's doddery (and aptly named) Uncle Willie. Not dazzling but undeniably enjoyable.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Pericles': The Warehouse, London SE1 (0845 120 7543), to Sat; 'Party Time'/ 'One For The Road': BAC, London SW11 (020 7223 2223, fee), to 17 Aug; 'High Society': Open Air Theatre, London NW1 (020 7486 2431), to 13 Sept