Three plays follow relationships and racism across the generational divide

In Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Marriage Material, directed by Iqbal Khan, romance is a secondary consideration if not a nuisance. Marriage is a pragmatic means of consolidating community bonds in a hostile land. Bhatti tilts the emotional core of Sathnam Sanghera’s 2013 novel towards the two daughters of Mr and Mrs Bains, Punjabi Sikh immigrants who run a corner shop in Wolverhampton.

In 1968, beneath the baleful shadow of local MP Enoch Powell, the sisters take divergent courses. The spiky yet dutiful Kamaljit (Kiran Landa) marries and stays; the brilliant, spirited Surinder (Anoushka Deshmukh) elopes with an unsuitable boy. Surinder can’t understand how people who were brave enough to trek from the Punjab won’t let her leave the West Midlands. “My daughter wants to be a somebody,” Mr Bains tells her. “We will find you a somebody to marry.”

When the story leaps forwards several decades in the slightly weaker second half, the actors’ new roles produce intergenerational echoes and rhymes. Kamaljit’s son Arjan (Jaz Singh Deol; Mr Bains in the first half) embodies the sisters’ dilemma, tearing himself in two even as he tries to heal the family’s rift. Themes of identity, racism, migration and aspiration are embedded in persuasive characters rather than declaimed. “We are who we are and that’s that,” says Mrs Bains, played with anxious complexity by Avita Jay. But who are they? And who might they be?

Marriage Material does many things well, from the agile performances to Good Teeth’s stitch-perfect period costumes. It’s funny but not light. Its jubilant, timeline-braiding resolution is hard-won.

Lindsay Posner’s revival of The Deep Blue Sea, transferring from Bath’s Theatre Royal, is an old-fashioned affair. But then Terence Rattigan’s 1952 masterpiece doesn’t require much embroidering. It opens with the thwarted suicide attempt of Hester Collyer (Tamsin Greig) and spends the next two hours searching for a reason why she shouldn’t try again. We never leave her sorrowful flat, a synecdoche for an exhausted postwar London where everything is rationed, including hope. In Peter McKintosh’s design, even the wallpaper looks dejected. Lena Horne’s Stormy Weather, the most inconsolable of 1940s torch songs, sets the tone: “Life is bare/ Gloom and misery everywhere.”

The front door, at least, is always in motion. People come and go with the regularity of a bedroom farce. The most persistent are Hester’s estranged husband (a sad, kindly Nicholas Farrell) and her feckless lover Freddie (Hadley Fraser), an apple-cheeked pilot gone to seed whose life peaked with the Battle of Britain. Each man can only skirt the shores of Hester’s oceanic unhappiness – her “shame at being alive”.

This is not, then, a famously funny play, but Greig brings sly, glinting humour to Hester (she can wring a big laugh out of the words “Lyme Regis”), tolerating each intruder with a brittle smile and crisp, probing wit. When she finally cracks, her howl splits the room. Until then, it’s fun watching her wrangle with Selina Cadell’s busybody landlady Mrs Elton and Finbar Lynch’s vulturine Miller, an enigmatic discredited doctor whose chilly anti-bedside manner is strangely hilarious before it transpires that he’s only the person in Hester’s life who knows how to live with pain and defeat.

There’s another love triangle in the Tony-nominated hit musical Shucked, but no pain and no shame. The disarming self-awareness of narrators Monique Ashe-Palmer and Steven Webb pre-empts any reservations about this all-out charm offensive: sure, it’s silly, ridiculous and, yes, corny, but aren’t we having fun?

This is Cob County, a tiny community closed off from America by the cornfields that also supply its economy and identity. When the wedding of Maizy (Sophie McShera) and Beau (Ben Joyce) is halted by news that the corn is dying, wide-eyed Maizy ventures out into the real world (or at least Tampa, Florida) to seek help. She returns with Gordy (Matthew Seadon-Young), a slick conman who accidentally wins her heart. Any similarity to The Music Man is purely intentional. As Webb says: “Nobody ever wrote a book about Moby Nice Guy.”

For book writer Robert Horn, a moment without a pun, innuendo or salty aphorism is a moment wasted. Beau’s folksy brother Peanut (Keith Ramsay) is effectively a machine for dispensing eccentric one-liners: “If I had a crystal ball… I’d probably walk real different.” There’s physical comedy too. Set designer Scott Pask’s giant, barn-shaped diorama of rural Americana sets up a wonderfully dextrous plank-and-barrel set piece, choreographed by Sarah O’Gleby. A delirious bit of quickfire slapstick involving two simultaneous phone calls dissolves into giggles.

Sincerity hides out in the songs, by Nashville progressives Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, which jump from show tunes to hoedowns to big, lung-busting country ballads such as Joyce’s sad-bro anthem Somebody Will and the hurricane-force charisma of Georgina Onuorah’s Independently Owned. Director Jack O’Brien keeps all the plates spinning.

On a perfect summer evening the audience is having such a roaring, hooting, hee-hawing good time that it might kill the buzz to ask what Shucked is actually saying. Although Maizy’s yearning ballad Walls rejects smalltown isolationism, the plot doesn’t back her up, while Beau’s reactionary tantrums go unresolved. To paraphrase a joke about weed-smoking cows, the stakes aren’t very high.

Maybe nothing matters but a good time. Like its beloved corn, Shucked is very tasty but it passes straight through you.

Marriage Material, Lyric Hammersmith, London W6; until 21 June

The Deep Blue Sea,Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1; until 21 June

Shucked, Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, London NW1; until 14 June

Photographs by Helen Murray, Manuel Harlan, Pamela Raith