What can you tell about a country by the plays it produces? An American critic drops in to the London stage, and reports that British playwrights seem to have a dismal perception of today’s UK. “The organised, shimmering intelligence of contemporary British theatre contrasts, shockingly, with its vision of a hopelessly incompetent wanker nation. Is the Great Brittle of these 12 plays, a country where no one has any faith in anything, true to the life people are living outside the theatre? Or is the truer portrait of Britain in late 2003 that piece of street theatre enacted by thousands of well-behaved, jolly protesters in Trafalgar Square last month, toppling the papier-mché statue of George Bush?