The Syringa Tree, NT Cottesloe, London<br></br>Life After George, Duchess, London<br></br>The Feast of Snails, Lyric, Shaftesbury, London

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'Life After George': You'll laugh. You'll shout. You'll cry

UK citizens might suffer from voter apathy, but this week's London premieres pointed to a craze for political theatre, with new plays dovetailing national issues into domestic dramas.

Most impressive is The Syringa Tree, an Obie-winning, off-Broadway hit which recalls apartheid in South Africa. Lizzy, our narrator, starts out as a happy child in a white Jo'burg suburb around 1963.

Her parents are humane liberals who shelter their adored nanny Salamina's new-born baby – officially an illegal black resident – from their snooping Afrikaner neighbours and from dreaded police patrols. But then their household is shattered by retaliatory violence against whites. It's many years before Lizzy, having emigrated to the US, can face her homeland, love it anew and be reunited with her long-lost Salamina.

This is a solo show written and performed by Pamela Gien. Watching a grown woman pretending to be a skipping six-year-old can be tiresome. The pink-flecked light falling across Lizzy's garden swing also hints at a saccharine sunset. But there my cavils end. When Gien describes race riots and an attack on Lizzy's grandparents' farm, the contemporary relevance is distressingly clear. Overall, she tells this semi-auto-biographical saga with a light touch underpinned by passionate feelings. And she imitates everybody under the sun with a fine ear for accents and mercurial body language. In an instant she can twist from gambolling to Salamina's big-bellied stoop or encapsulate Lizzy's mother by just brushing a hand across her neck – suggesting softness, hauteur or lonely despair. Thus, single-handedly, Gien makes the stage teem with ghosts, flickering by like an old home movie.

The commercial West End also opened up two windows on the world this week.

Having won multiple awards in Australia, Hannie Rayson's Life After George aroused high expectations – especially with Stephen Dillane in the title role, playing a hotshot university lecturer. If you wanted to talk up this play – and you might, since a central theme is the urge to idealise – you'd declare it intimate and ambitiously sweeping.

We cut back from George's funeral to flashes of his life, spanning the late 20th century. In 1968, Dillane is a Geordie student witnessing protests in Paris, fired up by Marxism and arguing with his first (middle-class) wife, Cheryl Campbell's sturdy Beatrix. By the Seventies, he's an outrageously hip history tutor Down Under, advocating free love and reading to liberate body and mind. He struggles with feminism in the Eighties and his second marriage to a former student, Joanne Pearce's Lindsay, has become competitive. In his final years he battles against the slashing of the liberal arts by Lindsay, now a profit-led faculty boss. Maritally, he seems to have found happiness with post-feminist Poppy (Anna Wilson-Jones), but Ana his daughter (Susannah Wise) thinks he puts ideas before family.

For an expert on revolutions, George's character doesn't progress much. Moreover, you can hardly track major shifts in economics or sexual politics through bitty, non-chronological glimpses of George's relationships. Rayson can be amusing when depicting sniping women. Elsewhere, the dialogue is banal or dry, so Michael Blakemore's cast have to work their socks off, acting super-excited. Dillane is naturally magnetic and subtly satirical, kicking around in scruffy cords. But it's still a struggle engaging with speeches about systems of oppression, the great Conservative lie and fabricated political rationalisations. Meanwhile, the set deserves a booby prize for its dimwittedness. If you think dragging in a pier (complete with lamppost) for a fishing scene lasting moments is silly, just wait for the vase of flowers. This is winched down on a thwacking great rope, to titters of disbelief from the audience. That's what I call brawn over brains.

Ninety-odd minutes with David Warner's Karl feels like an excruciating lifetime, too, in The Feast of Snails. This should have been a welcome return to the British stage by Warner, who headed off to make movies 30 years ago. Moreover, the Icelandic writer Olaf Olafsson has been greeted as a brilliant, compelling novelist – for Absolution and The Journey Home. Unfortunately, drama is a very different kettle of fish – or escargots – and Olafsson has turned out a woefully stale thriller.

Philip Glenister's David, ringing on the doorbell of Karl's mansion, proves to be a sub-Pinteresque, pseudo-menacing intruder. Dark secrets from the past are, all too obviously, to be revealed as Warner and Glenister sit at a long, candle-lit dinner table pronging their way through six courses of the aforementioned molluscs. Warner certainly exudes seedy suavity as he attempts to seduce the maid (pert Siwan Morris). Nevertheless, as he turns into an increasingly bigoted monster, he's never genuinely alarming.

Xenophobia is laboriously symbolised by Karl devouring snails from different UN nations, and Ron Daniels's production moves at the proverbial gastropod's pace. By the time Karl had got round to echoing Ibsen's Ghosts and pontificating about superior genes and spineless degenerates, my head was slumping to my toes with boredom – not so much slipping into the slough as turning into the slug of despond.

In Simon Block's Hand in Hand, the issue of racial hatred resurfaces in what would otherwise be a sitcom. In middle-class Hampstead, Rebecca Egan's Cass is a Jewish thirty-something who's going out with a nice boy, Ben Miles's Ronnie. His best mate is her brother, Guy Lancaster's Dan. The lads josh fondly when Dan returns from the West Bank. Only now he's fanatically obsessed with Zionism and he wants to get resettled in Dan's spare room which he regards as his promised terrain.

Block's yoking of the micro- and macrocosmic would be interesting if Dan's machinations weren't so ludicrously blatant. When in sitcom mode, the characters' repartee is droll but irritatingly pat. Egan resorts to rattling off Cass's quips as if doing an open mic spot as she sits on her bench on the heath. This brand of semi-political theatre has a way to go before it wins my vote.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'The Syringa Tree': NT Cottesloe, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), to 3 April; 'Life After George': Duchess, London WC2 (0870 890 1103), to 15 June; 'The Feast of Snails': Lyric, Shaftesbury, London W1 (020 7494 5120), to 4 May; 'Hand In Hand': Hampstead, London NW3 (020 7722 9301), to 16 March