He is also aquiver because he's got the hots for the cook, Anastasia. In this role, Naomi Frederick rabbits away in a pricelessly funny, pea-brained singsong. Meanwhile, Deborah Findlay's Madame Guliachkina and her offspring are business folk ludicrously affecting to be intellectuals and getting into a pickle, still trying to marry into the aristocracy.Erdman's plot twists are occasionally silly and strained. Madame Guliachkina's son, Pavel, lives in fear of the authorities knocking at the door, and their lodger, Ivan, threatens to turn informer.Yet this is not a suspenseful thriller Erdman's chosen genre is farce. Under Stalin's new regime, the Guliachkins are frantically trying to refashion themselves, but they remain bourgeois and closet Christians and are entangled in a plot to reinstate the Romanovs. The most remarkable thing about this lesser-known Russian play by Nikolai Erdman - championed by Meyerhold in 1925 and now admirably revived by Declan Donnellan - is its conjunction of humour and terror The scenario is frightening. Becket's murder is also feeble, with a clumsy segue into the whipping with much slow-mo sword-waving.

Sometimes you wonder who is suffering most: Britton, Scott or the audience.Acts of treachery also threaten everyone in The Mandate. Anouilh induces increasing ennui and Caird's production is not always finely judged, with several poor cameos and slow pacing. The fey King of France (Michael Fitzgerald) is an excruciating caricatured bore, milking every line. He conveys, without overplaying, the King's jovial laddishness, arrogant brutality and insecure neediness. Scott's contrasting portrait of Becket is assured and well-sustained in its ambiguity: exuding humane gentleness and an elusive cool which might conceal ambitions or festering vengeance.That said, this play grows heavy-handed, as the action veers towards the didactic and resorts to crass comic relief. Britton is an extremely deft actor with a deceptively rumpled aura.

In Frederic and Stephen Raphael's pointed new translation, Britton's Henry also finishes with a declaration that one of his blood-stained barons will head an "independent inquiry" into Becket's death.Stephen Brimson Lewis's black-arched set is plain and simple, but the show's strength lies in its central performances. In Jean Anouilh's Becket, Dougray Scott plays the brooding, eponymous Archbishop of Canterbury who is slaughtered in the cathedral for resisting the demands of his erstwhile friend, Henry II. Then Jasper Britton's King Henry is seen stripped naked, in penance, waiting to be flagellated. To be upbeat for a moment, John Caird's revival of this costume drama shows how the anxieties which the French playwright felt in the 1950s - concerning racial hatred and cycles of genocide - remain pertinent.Here envisaged as a Saxon with Arab blood in his veins, Becket works with his Norman rulers but finds institutionalised bigotry in the royal family, Church and armed forces. There is more than a whiff of martyrdom about this week's big West End show. As fascism and communism spread across Europe, the general's wife suspects that he might be spying for one side or the other. It's a tantalising premise, but the script is verbose, the staging is inert, and the actors seem to be reading their lines off cue cards.

At bottom, it's just trying.Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent (U) introduces us to an exiled White Russian general who's been reduced to a clerical post in 1930s Paris - or so it seems. Someone must have realised that there's not much to the story, because the film works desperately hard to keep our interest. For the first hour or so it tries and tries to be ingratiating, and when that doesn't work it tries to be scathing and moralistic. "It's been medically proven!") Too soon, though, Saved! falls into the teen movie rut of bitchy girls and rebellious outcasts, and it stays there all the way to the climactic senior prom.In the excruciating Little Black Book (12A), Brittany Murphy finds the names and numbers of her boyfriend's exes on his electronic organiser, and uses her job as a talk-show researcher as a pretext to contact them.