If the work has an intellectual flaw, it is that it keeps telling us how afraid liberals are to speak out, whereas many more problems lie in a tendency to kid ourselves that extremism will go away if we are nice to the perpetrators: what one character calls a "pious paralysis". But this is one of the most original and galvanising dramas the National has staged in a while. Good on them for taking it on. See it there soon, or when it tours to Salford in the spring.

Seeing as we are in full verbatim, intertextual mode this month, Going Dark is at the Young Vic, the latest work by Sound and Fury, another premier-cru small company, who brought us the brilliant Kursk. That re-created the mood and physical constriction in a submarine on a doomed mission to save Russian submariners abandoned by the arrogant stupidity of Vladimir Putin's Kremlin. Going Dark brings us back to dry land, watching the heavens in the company of Max, a single dad and planetarium narrator played by John Mackay, who discovers that a rare eye condition is eating away at his sight.

Immersiveness is a bit of a faff for the audience. We shuffled into a space slightly smaller than my ideal clothes closet, stripped of bags and coats and bumping into each other in the dark. The first hour passed enjoyably, watching Max being sappily reasonable with his six-year-old (rendered by a voice on tape-recorder, saving the trouble of an actual child actor). It palls because Mackay, while an energetic and responsive presence, never makes us feel truly moved by his pitiful plight, as personal darkness descends. Going Dark wants to tell us a lot about the randomness of the universe and the wonderful accident of human life. Alas, it's not much you haven't heard before and the nifty planetarium projection on the ceiling did not leave this spectator star-struck. Hattie Naylor's script has moments of luminosity, but no amount of immersion can atone for the simplistic material.