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It isn’t often I want to write both “charming” and “brave” in the same sentence about the same show but both are applicable here. Three talented, unflappable performers deliver a 40-minute opera to tiny children and their grown ups. Each performance is limited to 25 babies and at the one I attended the vast majority were under a year old. So there was a lot of intrigued crawling around Kirsty Harris’s simple, but beautiful, floor level set.

An apple tree dominates the space and it’s brightly coloured with garlands which are taken off and returned at various points in the action. We start in summer with leaves, move on to autumn fruit, winter cold and, eventually, spring regrowth. One crawler was handed a tiny seedling in a pot at this point because in a show like this actors have to adapt continually.

It isn’t a play, however, it’s definitely an opera. Sarah Forbes and Catherine Carter are very accomplished singers and Susie Shrubb does good work on piano and two different sized recorders. The music is mostly borrowed from elsewhere so we get delightful snatches of Schubert, Mozart, Delibes and more – all sung in the original languages. The language dimension is a lovely touch because, of course, the target audience is pre-verbal and will hear the words simply as a strand in the musical texture.

It’s a real treat to see such small children so engaged in live theatre. For the entire forty minutes they listened, responded, touched and made eye contact with the singers. The only crying occurred at the end when one little boy burst into tears of disappointment that it was over. You probably couldn’t hope for a better accolade.

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The (carefully managed) faded, peeling, distressed ambience of Wilton’s Music Hall is ideal for a dark play like Macbeth – in fact, given the grey brick surround it’s quite hard to tell where Katie Lias’s sombre set ends and Wiltons begins until we get to projections of blood trickling down the back wall eventually forming a sanguine forest. This ensemble take on Macbeth (in repertory with A Midsummer Night’s Dream) is very physical, pacey and succinct. There’s a lot in it to admire although sometimes it gets carried away. The rendering of The House of the Rising Sun, for example, adds nothing. Moreover Jamie Sattherthwaite (who plays Duncan) is a good actor but he shouldn’t have been asked to sing this given his iffy intonation.

We start with a very muscular account of the battle, before the ensemble turns into witches – understated in this version and none the worse for that. Other original ideas include the murder of Duncan on stage, setting the Inverness scenes in a hotel and intercutting the English scene with the murder of the Macduff family which brings fresh immediacy. The text is intelligently cut too – we lose Duncan’s interview with the Bloody Sargeant, quite a bit of witch incantation and most of the verbiage of the English scene and once we get into Act V the pace really hots up.

Emma Mcdonald is outstanding as Lady Macbeth. She looks wonderful – glitteringly attractive especially in the red outfit she wears once her status has risen. She articulates the verse beautifully and really shows us how her character is spiralling downwards from the assertive wife, later crazed with drink and horror. Her sleepwalking scene is one of the most moving I’ve seen. You couldn’t possibly feel anything but sympathy. This was, untimately, no “fiendlike queen” – just a lost woman

Billy Postlewaite is excellent in the title role too and I liked his rapport with Banquo (Robyn Sinclair – good) in the early scenes. He has a way of looking at the audience complicitly and he too speaks the lines with such clarity that the story tells itself.

The real drama on press night happened five minutes after the start when Lauryn Redding, ensemble and Lady Macduff, sustained an injury on stage which meant that the stage manager had to stop the show. This is the unlucky “Scottish play” after all. Emma Barclay, who has played this role before, happened to be in the audience and stepped into Redding’s shoes: a classic case of “The show must go on” although by then it was running almost an hour late. We were told by director Paul Hart that Barclay would play it “on script.” In fact she didn’t. Her unrehearsed contribution was actually pretty impressive and she certainly saved the day.

There’s a lot of music in this production which has a number of actor-musos in the cast. The use of drums and low level choral singing to create atmosphere works effectively but the solo sung numbers are irrelevant and distracting.

Members of the Watermill Ensemble. Photo: Pamela Raith

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It’s an interesting creative idea to hook three Beckett ‘shorts’ together to form a single theatrical experience because they don’t otherwise get many outings. Moreover they link together thematically because each of them is about an old man or men – at which Beckett excelled. And in the very capable directorial hands of Trevor Nunn the three plays make a compelling, poignant, sometimes shocking evening. The cast is top notch too.

We start with James Hayes in a role originally written for Patrick Magee as a curtain raiser for Endgame. Krapp, a writer, has diarised his life orally on tape. Here in a 45-minute monologue, as an, angry, rheumy-eyed, red nosed old man, he listens once more to an account of a sexual encounter he recorded thirty years ago. The self loathing is powerful and Hayes’s management of silence (he doesn’t speak for the first five minutes) glorious.

After a short scene-changing interval (unmade bed and a stage-left camera on tripod – designed by Louie Whitemore who has become a regular at Jermyn Street) we get Eh Jo. It’s another monologue – of sorts. Niall Buggy is alone, widowed and haunted by the voice of his powerful, mellifluous, sinister, controlling late wife, voiced by Lisa Dwan. It’s actually quite frightening because Joe’s silent distress and inner turmoil is distressingly strong. For twenty minutes Buggy sits silently listening and reacting to the manipulative voice grinding on on his head and we grasp the story of his marriage. He acts with his face – eyes glistening, mouth quivering, cheeks making tiny movements – but hardly moves his body. It’s some of the finest nuanced acting I’ve seen in ages and it’s all projected by the camera onto a screen behind the bed so we are, in effect, seeing it twice simultaneously and that’s quite disturbing. It’s a piece which really does hit you between the eyes.

And finally comes The Old Tune, a duologue in which two old gents (Buggy, whose character is in charge of a seaside barrel organ, and the ever-reliable David Threlfall, as Mr Cream) meet and catch up on a public bench after a long interval of not seeing each other. They reminisce, complain about the traffic – Max Pappenheim’s sound design provides frequent cars whizzing noisily past – and tell each other about their families. It’s beautifully observed inconsequential discourse as they lapse into occasional silences, each of them often forgetting what the other has just said. Threlfall’s Mr Cream, in particular – splendid long white hair, beard, three-piece brown suit and convincing Irish accent – clearly has early stage dementia. The actor has an effective way of using his long sinuous fingers to convey frustration whenever his character forgets what he wants to say. It’s warmly moving.

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Kevin Elyot’s frank 1982 play is hilarious in places (“A quick blast of The Magic Flute and you’d be up me like a rat up a drain”) although I think, 35 years on, it’s time to get beyond thinking that gay sex is funny simply because we have dared to mention or show it.

Two men share a flat. They have a nearby friend who is more camply outrageous than either of them. Then they employ a cleaner, who’s actually an out-of-work actor – cue for a titter or two on press night with a lot of theatre professionals in the audience. Elyot meant, presumably, to highlight the difficulties faced by these men only fifteen years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967.

For me the real poignancy lies in the knowledge that they are enjoying (sort of) one night stands as a way of life. “We’ve shared each other around half the gay scene in London” one of them observes. By early 1987 the government was so worried about the then incurable aids that it delivered a warning leaflet to every household in the country. Realistically most of these four characters would have been dead within the decade.

As drama it’s pretty taut. Cracks soon develop in the central relationship because, it transpires, fidelity does matter after all. It’s a strong cast working adeptly together under Adam Spreadbury-Maher’s direction. Lee Knight is exceptionally good as Tony: sardonic, crisp, devastated, anguished, reasonable, vulnerable and a lot more. It’s very finely nuanced acting which never looks or feels like pretence. Elliot Hadley is enjoying himself as the posturing William (and later briefly as the dour leather clad one night stand, Jurgen). Hadley makes sure we see the character’s brittle underlying sadness too, though, and the scene after he’s been beaten up is hard hitting.

Stanton Plummer-Cambridge finds warmth and rationality along with unpredictability in Greg and Jonah Rzeskiewicz, a recent RADA graduate, brings a lot of sensitivity to Robert.

The play benefits from being staged in a small space so that it becomes a quasi immersive experience. It’s very much of its time and it’s hard at times to decide whether it’s a period play or just plain dated – some of the set details (designer Amanda Mascarenhas) are evocative though: the wall phone with dial and the record player with vinyl, for example.

Elliot Hadley as Jürgen & Lee Knight as Tony in COMING CLEAN. Photo: Ali Wright

Working with a cast of twenty, many of whom are not dancers, choreographer, David Mallabone incorporates a range simple but effective movements to complement Sondheim’s naturalistic, conversational repeats in both music and lyrics – the result is pretty catchy and compelling as we are led to think about the age old conflict between art and money and the nature of friendship.

It starts, of course, with George Firth’s book on which the original play by George S Kaufman and Moss Hart was based. Franklin Shepard (Andrew Ruddick) is a highly successful musical theatre composer. His lyricist Charlie Kringas (Matthew Brown) is a lifelong friend. Now everything is beginning to stale. Franklin’s second marriage is on the rocks, He sees too little of his young son (Ted Taras) from his first marriage to Beth (Catriona Clark – lovely work). His embittered oldest friend Mary (Samantha Billing), who has always loved him, has now succumbed to alcoholism.

The plot winds all the way back to 1957 so that we see, in reverse order, how everyone got to this point. The dates are written into the text – reinforced in this production by slides projected onto a backdrop (which also provides ambience for an otherwise very basic set) with instantly recognisable photographs of, for instance, Obama being elected, the Beatles and an anti-Vietnam demo. We always know exactly where we are in the chronology in a piece which ends with hope and excitement and our bittersweet fore-knowledge that much of that will, over the decades, be thwarted,

Ruddick gives a finely nuanced performance as Franklin especially in his “Growing Up” number when he is composing at the piano and in the TV interview scene when he tells an entire story with his facial expressions alone. Brown is deeply convincing and often unexpectedly moving as Charlie especially in the TV interview when he says/sings what he really thinks at top speed and it develops into a bit of a showstopper. Emma Vieceili, a reliably terrific singer, is powerful as the predatory diva, Gussie.

Billing, arguably, has the most interesting part and she really runs with it. Her Mary is miserable, outrageous and almost repugnant in the opening scene because her drunken frankness compromises everyone else’s partying. She does it with total conviction before we scroll back to see how she used to be – eventually a fresh young student on an early morning roof in her nightclothes to watch Sputnik orbit past. Billing gives us a really truthful account of this complex woman whose own success (she writes a best seller) is not enough for her.

Sondheim’s work is always multi-layered and complex – deeply different from “traditional” (populist?) musicals such as The King and I or Jesus Christ Superstar – but productions like this pleasing one make it very rewarding.