The death by drowning of teenage characters is the one common feature in this double bill of otherwise exceptionally diverse plays designed to showcase the talents nurtured through the Young Vic's excellent Young Directors scheme. One looks around for the puppy.This parade of mushiness and caricature is ended with Barbara's return to New York, declaring that Guantanamo made her realise, "I'd never thought about the kind of person I wanted to be." She decides to renounce her job (ruining Lawrence in the process) because, though she never broke any rules, she knew illegal trading was going on and winked at it. What is the message here? That the honourable path is one of self- immolating purity?The Private Room has a fine title, symbolic of power, secrecy and conscience, but the vagueness and naivety of its writing don't live up to it To 26 June (020-7794 0022). Janet Kidder, though, is too insistently innocent as Barbara, the young trader from a lower-middle-class Irish background who pits her stern morality against Lawrence's success and ruthlessness.An army reservist, Barbara spends a year in Cuba, and manipulates Salman, a meek Pakistani, into giving her the names of his kinsmen.

Her scenes alternate with monologues by Lawrence, who complains about his fading marriage and pulling power ("Used to be stockbrokers got laid Now it's firemen."). Presumably Lawrence represents the heartless capitalist machine driving Barbara's harsh tactics. But the girlish Kidder is less scary than many an infant-school teacher, and Lawrence is given a speech in which he reflects sadly that building a fence ("something real") gave him more satisfaction than making millions. There is also an excellent cameo from Bernice Stegers as a restaurateur whose deference to Lawrence shades into chilly reserve, then threat, as his unpaid bills mount. Michael Hayden gives an impressive performance as Lawrence, a trader whose handsome face remains benign while his mouth spews hatred and contempt. George Souglides' set - a blown-up photo of barbed wire backing a stage divided between a chic, minimalist restaurant and a clinical interrogation cell - is elegantly ironic.

Eschewing argument for analogy and impressionism, it becomes, finally, sentimental. For about half its length, though, The Private Room seems a much better play, thanks to Debra Hauer's classy production. But, despite some deft writing and the horror that recent revelations have added to the prison scenes, the play is no more engaging emotionally than it is intellectually. With substantial roles for only two characters, Mark Lee's drama sets itself a task that would be difficult with a cast of hundreds: "trying to understand the fear and pride that have pushed my country down a very dark path." With substantial roles for only two characters, Mark Lee's drama sets itself a task that would be difficult with a cast of hundreds: "trying to understand the fear and pride that have pushed my country down a very dark path." Lee, a foreign correspondent as well as a playwright, has set half his play in Wall Street, half in Guantanamo Bay, where suspected terrorists are interrogated. The object is to expose the assumptions that mould what we accept as a neutral view of reality.For example, in Hostage: the Bachar Tapes, the intense focus on the Western hostages during the civil war and the media neglect of the thousands of Arab detainees are implicitly questioned by the video "testimony" of a Lebanese airport official who, it now appears, spent three months of a 10-year imprisonment in the same cell as five Americans.

In her 2002 film Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, she made a journey down the whole length of the Green Line that separated Muslim West Beirut from the Christian East. In each district, she stopped people and asked: "Do you know anyone who was kidnapped from this area?"The result was a set of conflicting responses, ranging from tight-lipped paranoia to open grief, and a clash of attitudes to the idea of being questioned that included (I paraphrase): "The government won't talk, so how can you expect us to?" and: "In dredging this up, you give families false hope. There are con men who will charge them $15,000 for false sightings of their sons." The film presents a bewildering situation that is almost impossible to clarify, let alone resolve. It makes you appreciate why Beirut's artists are so mistrustful of overviews of their city that purport to be objective, and of a too-confident separation of fact and fiction.These considerations - the need to gather documentation, and the corresponding need to remain wary of accepting documented evidence at face value - are what drive Walid Raad's Atlas Group, an outfit that is both a repository of archives and what has been described as a "sort of fictional investigation bureau". The group is known for creating pieces that mischievously smuggle imaginary figures into the non-fictional record and for fielding invented evidence as fact. This charged object is a potent example of what the two artists call "latency" - a term from psychoanalysis referring to the lapse of time between stimulus and response and a pregnant way of symbolising the suspension and paralysis caused by the war To develop the film - or not - was a vertiginous decision. One of these was his uncle, who was kidnapped and is still missing Among his effects, they found an undeveloped 8mm film.