She counts the full moons on her fingers and two toes until they come again. Despite the pain of the material, the 50-year-old Mtshali's enactment of this part of her life is delightful, as she sheds more than four decades to become a round-eyed, impish child, sending the birds off to her mother with very important messages and scrunching up her face in anguish over the incomprehensible world of Jack and Jill. Mtshali at last joins her mother (her father has vanished), but she is still waiting for love, or even attention, as her mother is always working, exhausted, or asleep. Soon she is working too, and soon after she is surprised to be told she is going to have her own baby ("No one had explained these things to me. No one had time"), who in turn must wait while she looks after white children. Mtshali loves the little boys she cares for, but knows that, after a certain age, they will turn into her enemy.The show, written by Mtshali with the director Yael Farber, tells a moving story of life under apartheid, which Mtshali delivers with fluidity and force, deftly alternating prose with exuberant dances and songs, weaving the poignant moments with the comic.

But it might have benefited from a more playful and symbolic production, with more imaginative transformations of the set's two boxes and a washtub.Much more unsatisfactory are Mtshali's omissions (we never hear about the men in her life, and her children exist only as swaddled objective correlatives of sadness). Were they sacrificed to Farber's declared aim of creating a piece that would represent the suffering of all black South African women? If so, they should also have stopped before Mtshali auditioned for a local play. From this point, the beginning of her successful career as an actress and writer, the recollections sound as if they have been made many times before, and the show takes on the tone of the showbiz tribute-to-myself.To 30 June (020-7369 1761). Patrick Marber has missed a trick with the title of his new play, Howard Katz. If only he'd had the temerity to call it "Katz" he'd have given us all a good laugh and might have pinched some trade off a certain long-running musical. There aren't many other missed tricks, though, in this long-awaited follow-up to Dealer's Choice and the international hit Closer. Patrick Marber has missed a trick with the title of his new play, Howard Katz.

If only he'd had the temerity to call it "Katz" he'd have given us all a good laugh and might have pinched some trade off a certain long-running musical. There aren't many other missed tricks, though, in this long-awaited follow-up to Dealer's Choice and the international hit Closer. Premiered in the author's own spare, fluent and blackly funny production, the new piece focuses on a Jewish showbiz agent who is going through the mother and father of all mid-life crises. The drama is enacted in his head as he sits on a seat and contemplates suicide.Played with an engaging, driven energy and end-of-the-tether recklessness by the wonderful Ron Cook, Katz is an aggressive little hustler with a Rolodex-full of B-list celebrity wannabes "weather girls, chefs, gardeners .. and strange blonde ladies with one name". He lost his soul so long ago, someone remarks, that he can't even remember the price. As the play unfolds, we see him wilfully and almost systematically throw everything away ­ his home, his job and his family.The dark attraction of flirting with self-destruction has become a recurring theme in Marber's work.

It was there at the start in the addictive, relationship-substitute gambling in the restaurant/poker school in Dealer's Choice.It grew uglier and more disturbing in Closer, where the men had a compulsion to know every torturing, intimate detail of their partners' infidelities. In the determinedly downward spiral of Howard Katz, this preoccupation reaches an extreme, but our hero's vertiginous free-fall is also a search for faith.In the past, redemption in a Patrick Marber play would have seemed about as likely as Black Panther propaganda in a play by No?Coward. Here, though, after a rather embarrassingly Lear-like storm and shouting at the gods, the dark night of the soul ends with twittering birds and the playwright, who is himself about to become a father, grants his protagonist the grace of being able to remember the sense of universal connectedness and meaning he experienced the day that his son was born.It's good to report that Marber's new fervent pro-life stance hasn't robbed his writing of its bite. There are acutely conceived episodes, such as the one in which Katz asks his wife for how much money she would play Russian roulette, and her saddened reply ­ suggesting that they play a variant where the fatal choice involves him packing up and leaving ­ exposes just how little his family is an incentive to him now.Katz's final words are: "I want to live. Teach me how to live" ­ and they are tentative enough to allay any fear that the expectant Marber has become born-again.. Just 143 years after the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was first conceived, the highest court of British lexicography has finally delivered a verdict on "pants".