Performance

A drama which created its own drama, this is the first television production of Rodney Ackland's once scandalous black comedy and it starts a new season of studio dramas starring major artists. Ackland, now in his 80s, was a prolific playwright in the 30s. Absolute Hell, set in a Soho drinking club in bomb-blasted London in the weeks leading up to the 1945 election, was condemned as 'a libel on the British people' when it was first seen in 1951 under its original title The Pink Room. Recent productions have led critics to assess Ackland's portrait of seedy, Bohemian life as a significant picture of its age.

This new studio production of Chekhov's wistful masterpiece stars Warner as the retired professor whose return, with his beautiful young wife, to the country estate left by his deceased first wife sets in motion a typically Chekhovian comic tragedy of lost hopes, stifled passions and blighted ideals. It is a new adaptation by American playwright David Mamet (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross) is directed by Gregory Mosher, who was responsible for the Broadway and National Theatre productions of Mamet's Speed-the-Plow.

Les Dawson follows in the pantomime dame tradition by playing an outrageous old woman in the British premiere of a play by the leading Argentinian dramatist Roberto Cossa. Set in post-Falklands Buenos Aires - though the cast adopt Lancashire accents - it is a black farce about a family's desperate struggle to survive the effects of galloping inflation while trying to satisfy the voracious appetite of their selfish grandmother. The part has been traditionally associated with a leading male comic in productions around the world. This new adaptation is by Michael Hastings.

This is the first performance of Harold Pinter's screenplay version of his typically spare, elliptical and mysterious 1970 classic; the play that came between his gnomic one-acters Landscape and Silence and his National Theatre success No Man's Land. Twenty years after they lived together in London, Anna meets up with Kate, who is now married to Deeley. The visit stirs vivid memories in all three, sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary. But with the memories comes a growing awareness of the gulfs between them.

Widely regarded as one of the best new plays of the 80s, Caryl Churchill's award-winning Top Girls was first seen at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1982 directed by Max Stafford-Clark. This first TV production (in association with the Royal Court) is also directed by Stafford-Clark and features two of the original all-female cast. Seven actresses take 16 roles in this uncompromising assessment of high-profile and low-profile women, part fantasy, part hard-nosed reality. Marlene celebrates her new position as managing director of the Top Girls Appointment Agency by giving a dinner party for five oddly assorted women from centuries past. But Marlene's own past will throw a question mark over her Top Girls success. The author describes her play as "a celebration of the extraordinary achievements of women".

Twenty years ago the three editors of the underground magazine Oz were charged with "conspiracy to corrupt and debauch the morals of lieges of Her Majesty". The trial at the Old Bailey became a cause célèbre, pitting the alternative culture of the hippy underground against the legal might of the British establishment. This drama is based on the trial transcripts by Geoffrey Robertson, QC, then a solicitor working for the defence counsel, John Mortimer.