Broken Voices

An election looms. So New Company has had the bright idea of commissioning eight short plays from around the world, from Argentina to the Ukraine, on the theme of the ballot box. And the result is to offer no more than a faint Forsterian two cheers for democracy.

The best plays are those that take a satirical line and none could be more hotly topical than a piece from Iraqi Jawad Al Assadi. It is like a mordantly comic Antigone in that it shows an Iraqi woman trying, on election day, to get her politician father's corpse past an American checkpoint: impossible she is told unless every orifice of the body is examined for potential explosives. At one and the same time the play is an attack on the "malignant tumour" of American occupation and the difficulties of Iraqi democracy in that the corpse ends up being elected to supreme power.

An excellent piece from Ukraine's Natalya Vorozhbit charts the excitements of the recent orange revolution while suggesting the people of Kiev are a "lazy, well-fed, ironic" lot happy to revert to their usual torpor. A Palestinian playlet by Adania Shibli effectively uses the Ionesco-like image of four people trapped in an ever-narrowing room as a metaphor for the refugees' plight. And Croatia's Tena Stivicic comes up with a sharp social comedy about a pair of ageing intellectual relics from the Communist era appalled by their daughter's consumerism.

Some of the plays stray rather far from the electoral theme: others, such as an Argentinian opener about escalating poverty, are informative but over-long. But it's an astonishingly bold idea from a young, unsubsidised company; and, under the joint direction of Simon de Deney and Anouke Brook, the show is buoyantly performed at the Actors' Centre by a five-strong cast in which Emma Buckley and Grant Gillespie shine. And, even if there is no single party line to emerge, there is enough here to disturb most politicians: in particular the widespread belief that the notion of free and fair elections is a consoling myth.

· Until April 23. Box office: 020-7240 6283.