Did she affect red dress and raven tresses in the trusty Scotland's-answer-to-Cruella- de-Ville manner? "I remember wearing my mother's shoes and falling off the heels in my first scene," laughs Doran when we meet during his lunch break from the technical rehearsal. Tossing the kind of luxuriant mane that is not so much follicly-challenged as follicly-challenging, he's warm, open, and highly articulate and doesn't seem to mind at all being dragged back to his boyhood. He played Lady M when he was a schoolboy at a Jesuit establishment in Preston and he's the long-term partner of the actor Antony Sher, who assumes the role of the hero in the forthcoming RSC production. The onlooker is left teetering between hysterical laughter and exquisite emotional pain.Western Front proves that there are highly talented comedy writers in the provinces - as well as four actors who can deliver a variety of comic styles and differentiated characters. Now Paines Plough has done the work, BBC executives may want to schedule a meeting with Richard Davidson and Toby Farrow soonest.Toby O'Connor MorseOctagon Theatre Bolton, (01204 520661) 11-13 Nov; Live Theatre Newcastle (0191-232 1232) 15-16 Nov.

Greg Doran has two unusual qualifications for directing Macbeth. So three-year-old Liam repeatedly demands of his girlfriend "But are you happy?", and doesn't want to hear about the boyfriends she had before him. Farrow either has a preternatural ability to write naturalistic dialogue, or a large collection of tape-recorders and a bad bugging habit. We all know that adults can often act like children, but Farrow's playlet Social Grooming is based on children talking about their nursery romances like adults. Taking the concept of European institutions rather literally, it depicts the psychiatric treatment meted out to a romantic novelist and a football hooligan in order to eradicate the last vestiges of Englishness in favour of EU homogeneity. The piece is more like a Eurosceptic's bad trip than a play, but the parade of lunatic snapshots offers a chance for an English audience to revel in their outstanding ability to laugh at themselves.The outstanding "find" of the evening, however, is Toby Farrow.

The plot is intangible, but the laughs aren't, and Davidson is a star, with a fertile imagination and top-of-the-range one-liners.Grey Matter shares its local setting with Adrian Sellar's Beaches and Cream, about two Bristolian lads desperately trying to act out the Ibiza holiday of a lifetime on the muddy, rainswept breaches of Weston-Super- Mare, a touching, finely crafted tale of male inadequacy.Kerry Hood's Paj and Pompetry, on the other hand, is far from downbeat, rampaging far past surrealism into total madness. Western Front showcases 15-minute comedies by 10 writers unearthed by Ticket to Write in the West. As with all gold-panning expeditions, there's some silt in the sieve, but there sure are also nuggets of genuine yellow stuff a-glistenin' there as well. Richard Davidson's Grey Matter is a surreal, post-Python farce. The only countdown here, though, is on a television monitor, clocking the minutes `til the end of the show. Sad to say, there were long stretches when I could barely keep my eyes off it.Dominic Cavendish`Kolonists' (0171-228 8828) to 27 November; `Evidence of Life After Death' (0171-637 8270) to Saturday.

BBC EXECUTIVES going down for the third time in a sea of criticism about poor sitcoms should follow the advice: "Go West, young man." With its national writing programme Ticket to Write, Paines Plough theatre company has struck a rich seam of talent. They set up various domestic installations (a kettle is boiled, for example). They inhabit a soundscape of heavy beats and portentous ballads. Little coheres.There are moments of maudlin beauty, particularly when a chorusline of old women shuffle in unison to a cabaret finale about refusing to give up the ghost In an ideal world, they'd be on Top of the Pops.

It could also be about pouring funding down a drain as a formal process.Two men and two women, one in a wheelchair, adopt clinically precise positions against a white backdrop seething with video-projected images (a foetus, fleshy innards, silhouetted torsos). There is no denying that Dykes (who himself plays the louche Vassily with hooligan assurance) has done his research or that the information traded is, for the most part, welded to his characters' anxious or boastful loquacity. But with NXT's fitfully sparky, largely underpowered production coming in at two-and- a-half hours, the drama remains little more thrilling than a round-table discussion. You could blame the fourth wall, but a play like this needs an author who's closer to his subject-matter. It looks as though, after two-and-a-half years of research, that performance artist Robert Pacitti has, on the other hand, got a tad too close to his chosen topic. Evidence of Life After Death could be "about death as a formal process". Showing a flagrant disregard for social niceties, their visitor clearly hasn't come to talk about the weather, but his intentions are held off by a deluge of dialogue about pretty much everything under the Estonian sun.For those who can't get enough discourse about Eastern Europe, this kind of chatter will not be altogether unwelcome.