These three short plays are presented as an accompaniment to the Orange Tree's current, excellent production of Susan Glaspell's little-known 1922 play Chains of Dew. They can't quite deliver the scope and perspicacity of the full-length play; but if they don't fully satisfy, they do make an appetising side dish.

The most toothsome of the trio is Trifles, delicately directed by Helen Leblique, in which local lawmen and two neighbourhood women arrive at a remote farm where a violent death has occurred. As the men comb the cheerless homestead for evidence to support their theory that its dislikeable owner was murdered by his wife, the women piece together a picture of the accused's life from the odds and ends in her gloomy kitchen. An empty birdcage, jars of carefully preserved fruit, some unfinished quilting: these, and the women's almost forensic reconstruction of a little-regarded existence, earn the laughing contempt of the men; but it is through the domestic details that the truth is revealed. It's a quietly heartbreaking little tale.

Rather less successful is The Outside, set in Glaspell's own Cape Cod locale. Mrs Patrick and her taciturn servant, Allie Mayo, have both lost their husbands, and pass their days in a kind of living death in an old house on the bleak windswept coast, buried among the sand dunes. When a drowned man is brought there by mariners, Allie sees at once that where the Captain's efforts to revive him will fail, she can resuscitate her moribund mistress. It's a neat idea, but Glaspell's use of symbolism and poetic language, in such marked contrast to the effervescent wit of Chains of Dew or the terse, biting economy of Trifles, seems overwrought. And it's not helped by a rather heavy-handed production by Svetlana Dimcovic.

There's nothing heavy, though, about Suppressed Desires, in which Henrietta Brewster, an ardent devotee of the modish theories of Freud and Jung, attempts to psychoanalyse her husband and sister, with disastrous and hilarious consequences. In Phoebe Barran's sparkling production, Ruth Everett is divinely funny as Henrietta, her pretensions intertwined with a genuine, bright-eyed thirst for knowledge born, you suspect, of the boredom of diurnal wifely duty. With David Annen, a sly but affectionate spouse, and Pia de Keyser, a fluttery and suggestible sister, the drama peaks with wonderfully witty silliness. It's as sweet and crisp as a meringue - delicious.

Box office: 020-8940 3633

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette