The Accrington Pals; Di and Viv and Rose; One Monkey Don't Stop No Show – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/jan/27/accrington-pals-di-viv-rose

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With what varied meanings the word "pals" winds through Peter Whelan's 1982 play. This is a drama full of warmth between both women and men, yet full, too, of asperity and political scepticism.

In the early months of the first world war Kitchener promoted the idea of "pals" battalions, realising that men were more likely to enlist if they could serve alongside workmates and neighbours. Accrington in Lancashire became the smallest town in Britain to raise its own battalion. Comradeship killed them. In the battle of the Somme more than half the Accrington Pals were dead within the first half hour. Of 720 men, 584 were killed, wounded or missing. There they go, cries one of the women who run the town in their absence: "bawling good fellowship in full retreat from what life's all about".

The Accrington Pals is a revelation. It chronicles in the round a vital piece of 20th-century history, showing the battlefield but concentrating on civilian life. It goes beyond documentary, drawing on a visionary stage vocabulary and creating individual stories that are both desolating and stirring. It has found an ideal director in James Dacre. His production is meticulous and unflinching.

The stage of the Royal Exchange becomes a dark and sodden arena in Jonathan Fensom's first-rate design. The puddles and cobbles of Accrington's market place remain throughout the action. Domestic scenes, lit by the golden glow of an oil lamp, perch on them with precarious cosiness; soldiers at the Front splash over them, illuminated by the hard white light of foreign stars. As women wait for news – and boys hurl themselves to the ground believing they can hear the noise of guns along the railway lines – the air is full of half-heard voices, metallic clangs and drums.

Even the faces look more in period than usual: more pinched, more merry, less confected. A pairing of two powerful actresses gives the production a vibrant centre: Emma Lowndes is the wary, ambitious stallholder who cannot bring herself to sleep with the man she loves; Sarah Ridgeway is the luscious countrywoman who loves to give herself. As a damaged youth, the recently graduated, expressive Séan Aydon demonstrates another kind of love. This is a perfect play for the Royal Exchange, where the audience relishes each local dig: "Such habits – they can be very vile in Salford." It's a wonderful play for anywhere.

Coinciding subjects; coinciding titles; the same theatre. Nearly 40 years ago Pam Gems's Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi – in which four women in a flat try to sort out their lives – opened at Hampstead. Now Amelia Bullmore's Di and Viv and Rose – three women in a student house surprising themselves by liking and caustically, joyfully, arranging their personalities around one another – is the first play to move from the theatre's try-out downstairs space on to the main stage. It's an apt choice for an upward move. Women's friendships (I've seen both Gems's much revived play and Bullmore's sparky new one with the same female friend) have more often appeared as a side issue, an emotional colouring, than as the central subject of plays.

Anna Mackmin's lickety-split production – brightly coloured set, 1980s music, snappy shifts of scene – zips the action along through some 20 years. A trio of terrific actresses give heft and delicacy to characterisation that is more perky than profound.

Gina McKee looks too mature for an 18-year-old but has a fine mournful poise as the self-barricaded girl who digs herself out of her background by writing cleverly about corsets while dressing – satchel and flat shoes – as if she "were in the war". Tamzin Outhwaite – tracksuit, candid, business studies, truthful, has never heard of coriander, lesbian – is strong and true. Anna Maxwell Martin – pedal-pushers, scrunched-up hair, sex-obsessed, calls her vagina "va", can't live without dried apricots – is a marvel. She scampers and gurgles, is at once maddening and adorable.

As in the excellently written Coronation Street (in which Bullmore acted for some 18 months), the pulling power is in the snap of individual lines, in the register of daily life, the gradual piling up of memories that eventually accumulate to make a shared history. As in Corrie, large-scale dramatic twists – of which there are three-and-a-half – derail the detail; there is a stretch in the overlong first half when the play feels artificially extended. In this case, the more ordinary the events, the more daring the drama.

It's not often you see a woman fanning her fanny on stage. You could have seen that twice in the past seven days. Anna Maxwell Martin's lubricious character wafts away at hers. In One Monkey Don't Stop No Show, a snob who is trying ("Do you want to use the laboratory?") to malaprop her way up the Philadelphia social ladder does the same. Her prudishness has in an instant been vanquished by a peek at The Joy of Sex.

This 1982 play by Don Evans, the African American playwright, director, actor and teacher closely identified with the Black Arts movement of the 1970s, is a light satire with a few sharp edges. Performed by a cast of black actors, set in an apartment that is wonderfully characterised as "almost gaudy", it's the latest move in Indhu Rubasingham's impressive remodelling of the Tricycle. Who would have thought that the overtly political theatre would pack in audiences with a love-across-the-tracks comedy?

Dawn Walton's production ingeniously pre-empts TV comparisons by presenting the play as a live television recording, with red light, canned laughter and signature jingle. As a result, its feminist thrust looks stronger. The fellow who "always wanted to make me a woman" is utterly defeated by the independence of the woman he tries to remake. Eat your vowels out, Professor Higgins.