The History Boys, NT Lyttelton, London; <br></br> Cruel and Tender, Young Vic, London; <br></br> Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's Globe, London

The words "school play" don't normally inspire a surge of media excitement. However, The History Boys by Alan Bennett is, of course, hot news especially since Nick Hytner (who took The Madness of George III to the big screen) is directing this new tragicomedy set in a northern grammar school. Bennett focuses on a clutch of sixth-form lads and two male teachers who are "grooming" them as Oxbridge candidates but whose professional approaches clash. Both also find their star pupils dangerously attractive. Though officially set in the 1980s, this piece often feels like a personal memory play with several characters looking like refracted aspects of the Leeds-born playwright who, of course, read History at Oxford, taught a bit, and continues to look like some eternal bespectacled scholarship boy.

That said, Bennett (now 70) is recognising the march of time and mortality here. En route, he produces plenty of comic scenes. The narrow-minded headmaster (Clive Merrison) works himself up into ludicrous philistine rages when faced with uncontrollably cultured members of staff. The general studies class - taught by the veteran maverick, Hector (Richard Griffiths) - also turns into a trouser-dropping French farce as his boys practise the subjunctive by role-playing in a make-believe brothel.

The sexual chemistry becomes more serious later when the headmaster discovers Hector's "grooming" extends to fleeting gropes. Meanwhile, the new history teacher, Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), finds himself irresistibly drawn to one precocious pupil. Irwin also upsets Hector with his journalistic attitudes to essay-writing, turning the old truths on their head just to be different. Bennett, the satirist, has Irwin moving into television and politics. Beyond that, this play ends at a memorial service in a philosophical and melancholy mood, contemplating subjunctive history (what might have been), the accidents that change the courses of our lives, whither education leads us, and what we will pass on to subsequent generations.

One can't help wondering if Bennett is thinking of signing off with The History Boys for there's a symmetry here. Forty Years On - his first hit as a dramatist, 36 years ago - was a school play with many parallels. Regrettably though, Bennett is not on absolutely top form. The kids' dialogue doesn't always ring true and the Eighties setting feels like an ahistorical mishmash, with interspersed songs that surely belong to some vintage school revue and talk of league tables that is more 1990s. There are some terrifically witty lines, handled with brilliant timing by Frances de la Tour as the dry school mistress Mrs Lintott, but generally the piece feels bitty. There's fine work from Hytner's young actors - especially Dominic Cooper, James Corden and Samuel Barnett - yet Bob Crowley's grey set is dreary and the projected film sequences just evoke memories of Grange Hill. Still, it's a box office sell-out already.

Moving swiftly on from teachers to terrorists, Cruel and Tender is Martin Crimp's new adaptation of Trachiniae, Sophocles' tragedy about the macho hero Heracles and his domestically isolated wife. Starring Kerry Fox as the unhappy spouse and directed by Germany's renowned Luc Bondy, this internationally touring production is a highly topical rewrite of the legend. One gleans that Heracles (Joe Dixon), whom Crimp just calls the General, has been away from Fox's Amelia for months, decimating supposed terrorist training camps with little regard for conventional rules of combat. Sophocles' messengers, bringing news of his return, are transmuted into a spindoctor who is shamelessly economical with the truth and a journalist who exposes the brutal facts. Virtually the only survivor of the General's campaign is a beautiful young woman called Laela - actually his new mistress - who arrives at Amelia's home looking like a shy, bewildered refugee.

Many of the updates are intelligent but Crimp will keep hammering home the political relevance. He also makes Amelia's plot to win the marital war perversely unbelievable. Retrieving a glass phial containing a chemical weapon from her perfume drawer, she hides it in a thumping great pillow and sends instructions that her beloved should press his face into it until he hears something snap. Wouldn't, say, a bottle of aftershave have been a wee bit less suspicious? Bondy doesn't always help matters. His own symbolism can be heavy-handed and Dixon's mad rants are a bore. However, the spartan military accommodation has a brooding, grim atmosphere. Fox's mounting hysteria glints sharply through her cynicism, and Ackerman's silent smiles are powerfully unsettling.

Finally, the balmy weather makes any evening at Shakespeare's Globe a pleasure, and that helps the season's opening show, Romeo and Juliet, rival the RSC's current production.

Kananu Kirimi's elegant and spirited Juliet, at her best, has the freshness of a new blade of grass. Her balcony scene with Tom Burke's Romeo is charmingly funny as well as ardent. James Garnon's Mercutio, in his fatal fight scene, is also memorably furious, constantly struggling to stand like a wounded bull.

Nevertheless, no one's performance is as finely worked as their lavish Elizabethan costumes. Kirimi's verse-speaking is over-punctuated and Burke can look physically self-conscious. Bette Bourne makes a droll cross-dressed Nurse, yet Melanie Jessop's dire Lady Capulet doesn't even seem to understand her lines. Given that the director or "master of play" is supported by masters of dance, combat, movement, voice and words, you sometimes wonder what half of them have been doing. Still, enjoyable all in all.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'The History Boys': NT Lyttelton, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), to 26 June; 'Cruel And Tender': Young Vic, London SE1 (020 7928 6363), returns 17 June to 10 July; 'Romeo And Juliet': Shakespeare's Globe, London (020 7401 9919), to 26 September