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Lyttleton, London; Minerva, Chichester; Young Vic, London

The most crucial prop in After the Dance is a jumbo-sized drinks tray. Benedict Cumberbatch's cirrhotic host is never far from it. Free-loading Adrian Scarborough is first seen beached alongside it, replete with G-and-Ts. You begin to expect the cast-list to be a cocktail menu. One visitor demands a "tiggy wiggy little drinkie-poo". The idea of a gas-mask party is abandoned because the guests wouldn't be able to get a martini down.

After The Dance is driven by intoxication, but it's a sober affair. It centres on a self-deceiving marriage: a sozzled couple love each other but it would be "boring" to make this plain, and they are driven apart by an earnest ingenue. It has disappointment as its starting-point and despair as its end. It doesn't so much develop as slowly (the pace is of an almost forgotten leisureliness) darken. This is prime Terence Rattigan territory. Yet though the dramatist's reputation has long recovered from its pummelling by John Osborne, this play hasn't been seen in London for 70 years. First staged in 1939, three years after his first frothy hit, French without Tears, it opened to enthusiastic notices, but audiences dwindled when war threatened. The playwright excluded it from his Collected Plays.

Thea Sharrock's production is a fascinating revival. This isn't a first-rate play: the palette for each character is too restricted and the range of sympathies too narrow. Still, it's hard to imagine it more fully realised than in Sharrock's sumptuous, meticulous production. Faye Castelowe is a lethal combination of dainty and driven. Cumberbatch slides seamlessly from languor to gloomy stupor. Nancy Carroll provides a pole-axing moment when, after gales of garrulous dazzle, she succumbs to grief and simply sits for minutes, silent and unflinching. As the sensitive parasite, Scarborough is an extraordinary litmus test. Contained but responsive, he seems to change colour. Not least when he hears the words "a cold tub".

Who'd have thought that out of the gooey horror of death as spectator sport of Love Story would come something so bright and astringent? Howard Goodall and Stephen Clark's new musical doesn't change the rotten plot: clever poor girl meets over-privileged jock, gives up her career for him, and dies. But it transforms every other aspect of the vapid 1970 movie.

The essential ingredient is Goodall's music. Performed by a small onstage band: it's tight and wiry, with lots of pizzicato and very little swooning from the strings. It has a strong ballad for the female lead, which supplies her with a kind of inner life. It has a show-stopping number which speeds the action on: a cooking song in which the lovers mingle fusilli and Donizetti. The Love Story theme is cleverly quoted, played by our heroine as her prize piano piece.

Rachel Kavanaugh's production is elegant and economic. Gone are those oh-we-are-young romps in the snow and the interminable scene when Ryan O'Neal belts around slamming doors. In Peter McKintosh's design, different households are conjured up by different tables: stiff white linen laden with flowers; a small red and white chequered tablecloth; a gleaming New York breakfast bar. From the beginning, violet-hued lighting tinges the action with twilight: no wonder that Chichester is selling packets of Love Story tissues.

Emma Williams is teasing and sharp, and doesn't have to keep putting on her specs, Ali McGraw-style, to show she's got a brain. Michael Xavier's strong voice and easy presence remakes the sap of a hero, whom Erich Segal's fellow student Al Gore claimed had him as a model. Peter Polycarpou is poignant as the doting Italian dad. Yet another Chichester-grown show has a transfer in its sights. No reason to say they're sorry.

August Wilson is the great dramatic voice of 20th-century America. He is able to conjure up unchained melodies for his characters with the fluent force of Tennessee Williams; he has the moral fervour of Arthur Miller. His plays are visions and social documents. Wilson's project was (he died five years ago) huge: to map the experience of African Americans over a hundred years by writing one play for each decade.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone is the second in this saga: set in 1911, in a Pittsburgh boarding-house where the sons and daughters of freed slaves are looking for work and a new sense of themselves. Its pungently varied cast includes a man who sets himself to reuniting people's lives, helped by doing bloodcurdling things to pigeons, a mysterious wanderer ("He ain't no gambler. Gamblers wear nice shoes") who falls into strange fits, and a sassy woman who swings in to pick up a man or six.

Rolling from the personal to the historical, the vatic to the domestic, this is not an easy play to bring off. David Lan's production has a few indistinct talkers and muddily plotted moments: it's quite often hard to know what's actually happening. But it registers the power of Wilson's work, which frquently seems about to break into music. Here, the blues are never far away and snatches of slide guitar â€" a pulling-point for one youth â€" are woven into the action.

The whirling high point of the evening is a dance sequence with clapping, stamping, challenging into which all the characters are drawn in one by one. Apart, that is, from the man who brutally stops it.

Shakespeare's histories have been staged in their entirety recently. Surely it's time that all of Wilson's cycle was produced on an equally grand scale? Step up the National? The theatre needs this chronicle of American life.

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