Written to last

Dealer's choice ****

Tron Glasgow
Noises Off ****
King's Theatre

There’s something special about plays that have been through the mill of London theatre and emerged to become long-running commercial hits. They may not be great works of art, they may not even survive the decade in which they are written. But they always have an air of tremendous, luxurious structural strength about them, as if they had been specially engineered to withstand the thousands of dramatic take-offs and landings involved in a long West End run.

Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice - first seen in London in 1995, and now given a long overdue Scottish premiere at the Tron - is no exception to this rule. The jury may still be out on whether Marber’s play is a creature of its time or a human drama with real staying-power. But this big, eloquent two-act tale of six men bound together by a shared self-destructive obsession with gambling has a structure that slots together with almost classical perfection. The action takes place over a few hours between closing-time and dawn, behind the scenes in a downtown restaurant owned by a quietly obsessive man called Stephen; and it shifts gradually from a diffuse, explanatory opening in which the six characters emerge and reveal themselves, into an increasingly tight focus on the scene around the basement poker table where Stephen, three of his employees, his son Carl and a mysterious stranger and rival father-figure called Ash, play out the drama of their weekly game.

And in the end, Zinnie Harris’s careful Tron production - featuring a top-line Scottish cast led by Tam Dean Burn as Stephen and Stewart Porter as Ash - makes it through to that memorably intense conclusion, accumulating a terrific dramatic force in its final half hour. But it takes a surprisingly long time to get there, meandering aimlessly around the foothills of the drama throughout what seems a very long first half. Part of the problem probably lies in the play itself, whose opening scenes now seem to belong to a conversation - about greed, power-games, men behaving badly - that was subversive and exciting a decade ago, but is now familiar to the point of tedium. And Harris’s production makes life difficult for itself, both by switching the action to Glasgow - an unnecessary move that takes the edge off Marber’s deep London sense of the city as a sinister, shifting metropolis - and, more importantly, by taking a strangely passive attitude to the text, a line reflected in Fiona Watt’s big, clunkingly literal set, which consumes acres of plywood while saying almost nothing about the play.

That the drama finally makes its way to the surface is a tribute both to the deep tragic momentum of the play and to the sheer force and thoughtfulness of the acting. Stewart Porter follows his recent success in The Fever at the Citizens’ with an immaculate performance as Ash, Tam Dean Burn is finally both sinister and poignant as Stephen, and Paul Blair and Steven Cartwright are flawless in the supporting roles of Sweeney the chef and Frankie the porter. But this is a play that should be shaped from the start by a sense of its own latent intensity, and the first act now needs a sharper focus, more pace, more drive and less clutter.

In Michael Frayn’s huge hit comedy Noises Off, by contrast, physical and emotional clutter is the name of the game. First seen in London 20 years ago, this breathtakingly clever farce famously combines the backstage shenanigans of an old-fashioned touring theatre company - the affairs, the rampant jealousies, the fear, loathing and drink problems - with three increasingly desperate performances of the play they are touring, an ill-starred farce called Nothing On.

It’s a simple idea to describe, a ferociously complex and hilarious one to execute; and the famous second act - in which we watch the increasingly frenzied backstage punch-ups and chaos that accompany an outwardly smooth matinee performance in Ashton-under-Lyne - is one of the great comic tours-de-force of British theatre, and one that invariably leaves audiences gasping with laughter.

Jeremy Sams’s hugely successful National Theatre revival - first seen in London three years ago - seems to me a little soft-edged and old-fashioned compared with earlier incarnations of the play. Once, it seemed quite clear that Frayn’s fraught company of 1980s actors were inhabiting a completely different world from the stereotyped characters in the farce they perform; this time round, the two worlds seem increasingly alike, both old-fashioned places populated by leering middle-aged men, lustful older women and dim-witted bimbos in scanty underwear.

But given the sheer quality of the cast Sams has assembled - led by Philip Franks as the luvvie director who leaves a trail of emotional destruction wherever he goes, Cheryl Campbell as the company’s increasingly frayed grande dame Dolly Otley and Sylvester McCoy as the drunken old stager Selsdon Mowbray - there’s no resisting the comic brilliance of Frayn’s creation.

I suppose this play may finally fade away into theatrical history, along with the very English kind of farce it celebrates. But that perfectly engineered structure is still holding up well and looks good for another few million air-miles, before it finally retires from service.

• Dealer’s Choice runs until 14 June; Noises Off at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, until 7 June, and at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 9-14 June.