The Family Plays — The Good Family & The Khomenko Family Chronicles - TNT

Everything in the garden is rosy in the first of this short double bill of well-acted, contrasting playlets which brings the Royal Court's International Season to an end. But if you've ever hankered after the perfect family — with no arguments, no problems, and absolute agreement about everything — you might just think again after spending time with Swedish playwright Joakim Pirinen's characters.The closest the teenage kids come to quarrelling is in deciding who's going to do the washing up — because they both really, really want to do it — and you couldn't wish for a more lovey-dovey mum and dad. But harmony can be sickeningly cloying and, although there's a final hint that this mini utopia might be about to change, a life devoid of any friction proves to be not much of a life at all.
But it's definitely preferable to the sort of existence portrayed in the even shorter second piece in which Ukrainian Natalia Vorozhbit paints a very different picture. Nine-year-old Lyosha has lost his hair and is fixed up to a drip, but when his parents come to visit - his mother heavily pregnant, his father boorishly swigging a beer — the bickering barely stops as they recall, with unexpected, poignancy, how their romance first flourished under the shadow of Chernobyl. Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, Sloane Square, SW1 (020-7565 5000). Until December 21