Nick Payne's Latest Play Takes Him in a New Direction LONDON - Here's one immediately likable aspect of "The Same Deep Water As Me," the darkly comic Nick Payne play that takes this gifted young playwright in a new direction. Along with offering up an apt critique of an anxiety-laden milieu, the premiere at the Donmar Warehouse throws into the mix the funniest unfinished joke that I have come across on stage in some time. That moment arrives some way into the first act, and it comes courtesy of Anne, a take-no-prisoners cabbie performed by the actress Monica Dolan with superlative timing. The specifics of the joke will go unrevealed here, because the very point is that circumstances prevent Anne from getting to her own punch line. As a dramatic strategy, the passage speaks more generally to the abiding tactics of a shrewd, smart play that takes an uncompromising view of Britain's so-called compensation culture and raises laughs where a more hectoring view of events would find only a lament. Only near the end does an instance or two of thesis mongering sully the 29-year-old dramatist's otherwise blithe touch. "The Same Deep Water As Me" will surprise those who know Mr. Payne from "Constellations," his much-lauded two-hander last season about love and loss across parallel universes. The same writer was also represented Off Broadway last autumn by the overproduced "If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet," with Jake Gyllenhaal. Whereas "Constellations" played destabilizing tricks with time and space, this latest play is set very much in the here and now. You don't need first-hand acquaintanceship of the nondescript north London suburb of Luton to feel as if you know both the people and the place. In their gathering desperation, this community of lawyers and their comparably grasping claimants feels absolutely time-honored. A direct American equivalent exists in the rabid real estate salesmen of "Glengarry Glen Ross," the David Mamet masterwork that Mr. Payne has cited as an influence. As with "Glengarry," this play doesn't take us into anyone's actual home: This is a world in which bravado and fear get played out in public and where morals are put on trial well before the extended courtroom scene that starts the second act. Andrew (Daniel Mays) is heard speaking by telephone to an aging father just as his colleague Barry (Nigel Lindsay) voices concerns about his own debilitated daughter, but the two lawyers" immediate focus is on staying afloat in their country's much-vaunted "big society" - a Conservative Party catchphrase that on this evidence is fostering all manner of not-so-little scams. The pivotal figure amid a landscape of fraudulence is Kevin (Marc Wootton), a beefy sort who looks blankly at words like "metaphorically" but who can speak directly to "hanging off the edge" of the fiscal cliff. The character's exact phrase adds an expletive for emphasis. A onetime classmate of Andrew's, Kevin barrels into the tellingly named personal injury firm of Scorpion Claims fizzing with ideas about staging car crashes that will then result in profitable insurance pay-outs. What Kevin can't anticipate is the probity offered up by his wife, Jennifer (Niky Wardley), who - a coincidence too far, perhaps - also happens to have once been Andrew's girlfriend and whose conscience propels the play toward its cautiously hopeful conclusion. Under the director John Crowley's watchful eye, Mr. Payne is proffering his own dissection of the fretfulness that come with a sense of life's diminishing options. The differences between Andrew and Kevin are neatly encapsulated in their preferred supermarket chains. Among a collectively strong cast, attention is due not just to Ms. Dolan, returning after the intermission as a legal eagle as polished and gleaming as her joke-telling Anne is blunt, but to Isabella Laughland as a Starbucks-swilling van driver who redefines the word deadpan. Of the no less expert men, Mr. Wootton places himself amid the ongoing ranks of British actors whose gifts lie in making us believe that they absolutely are the people they are playing - in this case down to Kevin's fondness for bling and his over-ardent swagger. So real is his performance that when the company took their opening night bows, it came as mildly disconcerting to see Mr. Wootton among them. By that point I had long expected Kevin to have quit town, and that - trust me - is meant as a compliment. Two recent National Theatre openings deliver their own views of as many diverse communities. "Home," a piece created by its able director, Nadia Fall, shares with "The Same Deep Water As Me" an ability to take us into a corner of contemporary Britain rarely put on stage - in this case, an east London housing project that offers sanctuary and refuge. This is the nearest that many of its occupants have come to what we mean by home. Ms. Fall constructed her narrative out of more than 30 hours of interviews with the residents and staff of a specific hostel, so her play represents a process of selection and distillation that arguably could have been sharpened further: The material feels as if it is crying out to be presented a tad less earnestly as a sustained jolt toward audience awareness. A scorching 90-minute version of an evening that is now running an attenuated two-plus hours still awaits. That said, it's difficult to imagine bettering a nine-person cast who fold music and movement into a dramatic mosaic that recognizes the value inherent in every single life. "It's not much of a story," says the shining-faced Toby Wharton, playing the happier of two contrasting inhabitants of the place he can, however temporarily, call home. Oh, yes, it is. Playing across the foyer from the National's purpose-built Shed, Luigi Pirandello's little-known 1916 play, "Liolà," has entered the repertoire of the midsize Lyttelton as a dramatic curiosity that only intermittently connects and then mostly when the composer Orlando Gough's onstage musicians strike up the band. One can't complain with Tanya Ronder's new version of the text, which replaces the author's Sicilian locale with an equally circumscribed rural Ireland: Both communities effect variations on similar sexual and social codes. But surely a portrait of a town full of women sent into a tailspin by the priapically minded roustabout of the title needs a far greater erotic charge than is ever felt here, and too much of the acting seems exaggerated or self-conscious. At times, the cast seems to have been encouraged to be defiantly smarmy. Pirandello's own title references the name of its central character - played by an exceedingly strenuous Rory Keenan - as well as the Italian for "here or there." That in turn pretty much approximates what I felt about the play and Richard Eyre's production. I responded to it here and there. The Same Deep Water As Me. Directed by John Crowley. Donmar Warehouse. Through Sept 28. Directed by Nadia Fall. National Theatre/Shed. Liolà. Directed by Richard Eyre. National Theatre/Lyttelton. Through Nov. 6.