All this is sweetness and light compared to Simon Stephens's one-act Morning, which has transferred to the Lyric Hammersmith after an enthusiastic reception at the Traverse in Edinburgh. If Ian McEwan's Cement Garden met the Lord of the Flies the result might well be the two sociopathic mavens who dominate the action in Stephens's short, uncomfortable drama. Stephanie (Scarlet Bilham) is a pretty 17-year-old, devoid of empathy and casually amoral as she awaits the death of her mother from cancer.  Her real love interest is her leonine friend Cat (Joana Nastari), about to leave their one-horse town to go to university, though not if clingy Stephanie can help it. 

Soon a plan to keep her best friend near at hand has morphed, rather incredibly, into the savage murder of Stephanie's guileless boyfriend. This joyless enterprise is partly redeemed by two strengths: Stephens's winning way with the vernacular of disaffected, densensitised teens and his deft handling of inverted morality.

Sean Holmes's production features an eerie soundscape produced on stage by a performer at an electronic keyboard. Mostly, we forget that he is there, until he comments on a character's development. It's a moment of fresh, canny stagecraft which shows us why Stephens (one of the most frequently performed living British playwrights in Germany) is attracting a youthful following. Performances from the Lyric's Young Company are assured, but the dramatic material here feels scanty. 

Speaking of women who don't turn out quite as their parents hoped, Hedda Gabler (around 28 in Ibsen's imagination) is reincarnated at the Old Vic, the opening offer of an ambitious 2012-13 season. Director Anna Mackmin has taken a risk with Sheridan Smith (Flare Path, Legally Blonde and Gavin and Stacey) as the most lethally bored housewife in Nordic history. Her Hedda has the boundless malign spirit of a playground bully — in Brian Friel's racy version, she derides poor Thea (a finely agitated Fenella Woolgar) as a "bitch" and revels smugly in her torments. Friel brings a new, arch playfulness to the translation, while Hedda's salon sneer barely masks her desperation and multiple death wishes. She exudes sensuality turned sour, but she lacks the terrifying eddies of aggression and self-destruction that make this the most compelling and chilling of Ibsen's plays.  

Her Gavin and Stacey fellow-graduate Adrian Scarborough is so brilliantly irksome as Jorg Tesman, the fussy academic, that we empathise with Hedda's horror at the prospect of a life frittered between his cloying domesticity and the sexual extortions of the "cock of the yard", Judge Brack, (a silkily manipulative Darrell d'Silva). The set (by Lez Brotherstone), with scraped white walls, chilly glass reflections and outsized doors, conveys the grandeur of Hedda's barren married life, but also its intolerable artifice. What we miss is the terror of a moral world turned upside down in a provincial drawing room. Without that, Hedda has a hole in it.