London Theater Journal: Seeing Patterns in a Nuclear Cloud After more than a week of wall-to-wall theatergoing here, strange patterns are taking shape in my crowded, sleep-starved mind, the sort of coincidences that a cultural cabalist might make much of. In addition to the expected garden-variety trends (like children condemning their parents for destroying their lives), there are more exotic motifs to ponder. Take, for example, the violent and sustained use of a foam bat or rubber truncheon to beat people and/or furniture (an activity that showed up in four plays). Two very different works (or is it three?) have cited John Donne's "Meditation 17," the one that says "no man is an island," and three have featured the protracted onstage strangulation of a woman. I am sorry to report that thus far I have noted only one instance of a mad hunchbacked industrialist who plans to take over the world, but it's early days yet. In the meantime, perhaps those with the Knowledge can read from these portents the fate of the euro, the future fashion choices of the Duchess of Cornwall or the winners of the 2012 Olympics. Anyway, none of these have been what you'd call "get happy" productions, a breed that dominated the West End last season. And I spent Saturday with two plays, set in the early 1960s, that took place under the shadow of a mushroom-shaped cloud. In the first of these, a matinee of David Hare's "South Downs" at the Harold Pinter Theater, a character mused about how science-fiction movies set in the future tend to be all-white, without the satisfactions of rich colors. And lo and behold, that night at the Donmar Warehouse I attended a production of Friedrich Durrenmatt's apocalyptic "Physicists" set in a blindingly white insane asylum. Spend enough time doing nothing but going to plays, and you start to imagine they're talking to one another. Written in 1961, "The Physicists" clearly hails from the era of "Dr. Strangelove" and "Fail-Safe," where H-bomb fears were at their height. It also traffics in the "who's-running-the-asylum" whimsy that would pervade countercultural films later in the decade. This is the sort of work in which inmates of a sanitarium believe they're Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. And, yes, the Newton figure (Justin Salinger) is obsessed with apples, while the would-be Einstein (Paul Bhattacharjee) smokes a pipe and saws away at the violin. Our hero, a brilliant nuclear physicist named Mobius (John Heffernan), communes with the spirit of King Solomon. Or says he does, anyway. Staged by Josie O'Rourke, the Donmar's new artistic director, from a new version by Jack Thorne, "The Physicists" now feels both too thick and too thin with its coiled but predictable plot line and reiterated message. The cartoon police-procedural set-up, featuring a fatuous inspector (John Ramm) and buxom nurses, would later be put to more spirited used by Joe Orton. And its central premise, that physicists are murderers, simply becomes more and more baldly stated. While nuclear anxieties have certainly achieved a new hold on world consciousness these days, "The Physicists" lacks much sense of contemporary urgency. Despite a funny, grotesque comic turn by Sophie Thompson, as the asylum head (she brings to mind Cloris Leachman in "Young Frankenstein") and a fetchingly sensitive performance by the on-the-rise Mr. Heffernan, this production feels inescapably time warped. In Mr. Hare's "South Downs," a new one-act paired with Terence Rattigan's "Browning Version,"a 14-year-old misfit in a Catholic board school in 1962 broods on the possibility of a nuclear holocaust and loses his faith. Now this would seem to be a ripe opportunity for polemical fulminating from Mr. Hare, the author of fierce state-of-the-world works like "Stuff Happens" and "Plenty." But "South Downs" was commissioned by the Chichester Festival Theater specifically to be a companion piece to Rattigan's popular "Browning Version" (a portrait of a desiccated school master on the eve of his retirement), and Mr. Hare has graciously and gracefully matched Rattigan's tone of voice. I had remembered "The Browning Version," directed here by Angus Jackson, as being bleaker than it is. While the play includes classic Rattigan elements like middle-class repression and marital infidelity, it is ultimately far more hopeful than, say, his "Deep Blue Sea." And though it touches on the bullying and cruelty associated with portraits of English boys" schools, the play is most notable for an instinctive act of compassion that had much of the theater in tears at my matinee. A similar redemptive gesture is at the center of "South Downs," directed by Jeremy Herrin. The casts of both one-acts are led with aplomb by Nicholas Farrell and Anna Chancellor. This may well be the most forgiving play Mr. Hare has ever written. By its end, he has generously lightened the moral burden of his anguished, politically judgmental young hero (an engagingly severe Alex Lawther). Surprisingly, Mr. Hare's play suggests that sometimes the best way to circumvent society's rules is to pretend to accept them. This sort of makes sense when you remember that its famously anti-establishment author accepted a knighthood in 1998. In any case, I had hardly expected Mr. Hare to figure in what turned out to be a comforting oasis of sentimentality in a week of hope-starved plays.