THEATRE: Widows; Badfinger Oxford Playhouse; Donmar Warehouse

It all began with his hallucination of an old woman by a river, holding the hand of a body just washed up on the bank. The Chilean author Ariel Dorfman has explored that image in a poem, then in a novel, and now - after many rewrites, workshops, a collaboration with Tony Kushner and yet further revisions - it achieves its final dramatic form in Widows, powerfully staged by Ian Brown in the touring Traverse Theatre production.

The piece is set in a war-ravaged country where the tyrants have been thrown out and a new government, insecure because of its dependency on the army and tainted with elements of the old regime, is trying to persuade the people to forgive and forget former atrocities. But would it be right or even possible to do so, with the malefactors still at large?

This question, of painful pertinence in Eastern Europe, South Africa and Latin America, was addressed in Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, where a woman takes the law into her own hands over the doctor she believes was in charge of her torture and rape. Widows tackles the issue again from the point of view of the women in a village whose male population has "disappeared". The play shows how the wives, mothers and daughters of the missing come to defy the military, demanding nothing less than the return of all the menfolk, alive or dead, and the punishment of their persecutors.

With its chorus of blackly garbed and scarved women, the atmosphere of this work has strong traces of Lorca and Euripides and, by and large, Dorfman's attempt to draw together the mundane and the mythic, the ritualistic and the realistic is a striking success. At the centre of the story is Edith MacArthur's hauntingly intransigent Sofia, an elderly woman whose husband, father and two sons have been abducted. At first, her lonely symbolic stand - obdurately awaiting their return by the river where she becomes a landmark "stubborn, bitter, a tombstone" - is resented by the other females as a possible incitement to the military who include unreconstructed Fascists like Michael Nardone's Lieutenant. Then two decomposing, faceless, horribly injured bodies drift up the river.

From the Lieutenant's burning of one of the corpses to all the women provocatively claiming to be the widow of the other, the political reactions to these mysterious cadavers push the play to its tragic, yet not hopeless, ending. The one flat-out mistake is the narrator, a Dorfman substitute who agonises about the position of the exile and the moral propriety of writing about suffering from a distance, before getting swallowed up in the story. For all that he may reflect the author's own principled self- doubt, this figure comes across as an irritating distraction.

If Widows is reminiscent of Lorca, then Simon Harris's Badfinger - with its tawdry junk-shop setting, its all-male cast and its inventive profanities - can't help but put you in mind of American Buffalo. One of the jokes is that this is Mamet transferred to Wales, which is a bit like imagining Ivy Compton Burnett shifted to Chicago. Another is that all the would- be tough-guy stuff, involving psychotic religious maniacs and insinuating blackmailers, takes place round a man (excellent Robert Blythe) who is heavily into directing amateur dramatic musicals and into "protecting" under-age boys.

Michael Sheen's enjoyable, beautifully performed production has bags of flair, as does the witty script. But with the weather taking an apocalyptically thunderous turn, the proceedings become increasingly far-fetched. It's as a blackly silly and delightful acting vehicle rather than any kind of statement about human relationships that Badfinger impresses.

'Widows' is on tour; 'Badfinger' runs to Sat (0171-369 1732)