Talent, Victoria Wood’s first play, premiered at the Sheffield Crucible in 1978 and was made into a television drama the following year for ITV. Roger Glossop asked Wood to revisit the work for a festival he runs at the Old Laundry Theatre in Bowness-on-Windermere and last night it transferred to the Menier Chocolate Factory in south London, another delightful small powerhouse that punches well above its weight in the arts world.

For someone who until very recently had an avowed dislike of Shakespeare, stand-up comic Lenny Henry makes a decent fist of Othello. It’s an astonishing role in which to make his stage acting debut - complex emotions are expressed in rhetorical gymnastics and he’s rarely off stage - but not for one moment does one believe Henry guilty of hubris. Rather, this is a man who has come to the Bard late (Henry is now 51) and clearly fallen in love with him.

The death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994 has provided a densely populated field of daydreams for conspiracy theorists, several of whom hotly insist that the troubled avatar of Grunge was murdered. Conversely, he may be playing in a ZZ Top covers band in Peru with Elvis and Jim Morrison. Whatever, playwright Roy Smiles has pursued a more original angle.

Picking up on a rumour that there had been somebody with Cobain on the night of his suicide, Smiles exploits Cobain's well-documented fascination with deceased Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, and wonders aloud what would have happened if the spirit of Sid had been "summoned from the desperate mind of Kurt Cobain to debate self-destruction and the pointlessness of suicide".

It's a fragile, fanciful construction, but Danny Dyer (Sid) and Shaun Evans (Kurt, obviously) manage to imbue the claustrophobic two-hander with a resonance and pathos which may be more than it deserves. The tiny Trafalgar 2 is transformed into the spare room over Cobain's garage where he was found dead from a shotgun wound. Cobain's mental chaos is reflected in the random assortment of stuff scattered around the floor -  pizza cartons, toy cars, ashtrays, wine boxes, LPs by The Clash and the Dead Kennedys, a collection of dismembered dolls - while Evans cossets and cuddles the fateful pump action shotgun like it's the only true friend he ever had.

The real-life Vicious was a wasted, felonious punk for whom remaining upright was a significant challenge, but Smiles amplifies and embroiders his spike-haired, swastika-daubed persona to convert him into a shrewd junkie-savant. Though cheerfully coarse and foul-mouthed, leaning forwards with mouth agape and swinging his leather-clad limbs like an ape with learning difficulties, Dyer's skilfully-conceived Vicious gradually reveals hidden layers. He goads the nihilistic Cobain with increasing savagery to take another look at his life and his apparently insurmountable problems, in the hope of planting a seedling of hope.

In contrast to Sid's London-geezer oikishness, Cobain seems tedious and solipsistic, lecturing Sid in a humourless monotone about his gruesome family who loved hunting animals and taunting homosexuals. He even had a couple of uncles who shot themselves. "I've been scared since I was three years old," he bleats. "There's evil out there, man."

"More self-pity," Sid retorts caustically. "Where's the violin?" Snatching up Cobain's laboriously penned note to posterity, Vicious treats it to a scathing critique. "The Lord of the Rings isn't as long as your suicide note, Frodo," he taunts.

As Vicious deploys a cunning selection of devices, ranging from a vein of camp humour that might have impressed Kenneth Williams to exhortations in Latin, Cobain is forced to mount a defence of his commitment to self-extinction. Gradually we can appreciate that he has humour, intelligence and self-awareness, but has reached what, for him, is the only acceptable decision. Not even Sid's furious tirade that a man with a wife and child has no right to top himself can pierce his oddly detached composure. Finally, all Vicious can offer is to keep him company to the end, since he knows full well the horror of dying alone. I kept thinking of a line from the Foo Fighters, the group formed by Cobain's former bandmates - "this is the blackout, don't let it go to waste."

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A beloved if flawed film becomes the latest celluloid icon to stumble on its way to the stage, The Shawshank Redemption on the West End flailing where theatre adaptations of The Graduate, When Harry Met Sally, and Rain Man, among various others, previously led. Devotees of the 1994 Oscar hopeful may bring enough prior affection for the material to see them through the (copious) chinks in the prison cell armour, leaving newcomers to this parable of liberation pondering how it is that a piece so devoted to inspirational uplift should seem so uninspired.

Is youth wasted on the young? Well, precious few grown-ups who watch Simon Stephens's new drama, Punk Rock, will develop a sudden urge to be a teenager again: his portrait of a group of middle-class youngsters is every parent's nightmare. They are either foul-mouthed and aggressive bullies, or deeply troubled neurotics - and the gradual escalation of their conflicts ends in the kind of mindless violence that stays on the front pages for days.

Adrian Lyne met controversy in the cinema with it head on, while Vladimir Nabokov's novel prompted one of the resounding Broadway flops of Edward Albee's stage career. (Trust me: I am among the few who caught its 1981 New York run.) So here is Lolita once more, this time filleted and distilled into a one-person show suspended somewhere between a stage reading and an actual play. Call it what you will, the result is mesmerising.