A new play, The Misandrist, looks at modern dating habits. Rachel is a smart, self-confident woman whose partner is a timid desperado named Nick. Both accept that Rachel must make all the important decisions in their lives and she orders Nick to submit to ‘pegging’. After some perfunctory resistance, Nick obeys. ‘Lube me up,’ he cries and she plunges a pink truncheon deep into his digestive tract. Afterwards he claims that the experience was so uplifting that even his ancestors enjoyed a taste of bliss from beyond the grave.

Lisa Carroll’s ironic and frivolous comedy is fun to watch. The characters are enjoyable and the lightweight, throwaway acting meets the script’s requirements. Act Two departs from the theme of sex and loses focus as Nick and Rachel both pursue stand-up careers. And the arrival of a drunken Irish relative sours the play and kills off the laughs.

The highlight of the script is a three-minute rant by Rachel about men’s unpleasantness towards females. ‘I hate men who…’ says Rachel repeatedly as she enumerates numerous misogynistic crimes. ‘I hate men who stone women to death’ is a view shared by everyone but Rachel implies that most men are capable of murdering a female. Her hate list includes the popular but mistaken belief that men all want teenage girlfriends. Rachel also loathes men ‘who don’t make the first move’. So what’s her real complaint? It’s acceptable to dislike pervy or violent men but ‘hating’ courteous, gentlemanly characters who decline to pester women for sex seems confused and barmy.

The only reliable component of Rachel’s diatribe is the opening phrase, ‘I hate…’. And the real object of her revulsion is not male behaviour but the fabric of life itself which has convinced her that every unwelcome experience is a personal injury contrived by the other half of the human race. A sad, blinkered and incoherent speech. Doubtless it will be praised to the skies.

Biscuits for Breakfast also looks at modern dating habits. Joanne is a brash, cocksure beauty who seduces a weedy, timid chef called Paul. The story takes ages to get started because Paul keeps listening to old tape recordings of his long-dead father giving him pretentious cookery lessons. Paul and Joanne are amazingly stupid and colossally snobbish. They live in a seaside resort where Paul rents a cheap flat and works for an employer who fails to remunerate him. Joanne has a different boss who also fails to pay her wages. Yet both of them continue going to work while starving to death.

They begin to steal. Joanne snaffles garlic bread while Paul lives on ketchup, rice and biscuits. But he finds this diet humiliating because he regards himself as a gourmand who deserves top-quality foodstuffs. Puzzlingly, he also owns a large fishing vessel which the couple might live on or rent out to tourists but they lack common sense or entrepreneurial drive.

Eventually, fainting with hunger, Joanne collects a box of cheap tins from a food bank but Paul refuses to touch them because he cleaves to his bizarre ideas about haute cuisine. Joanne suffers a meltdown as she describes the food bank in terms that might have been invented by a Labour spin doctor. The hungering queue was full of public-sector workers including nurses in uniform (‘all hanging their heads, all wiping their eyes’) and teachers who wore badges identifying their profession with the caption ‘teacher’.

Socialist propaganda apart, the play is weakened by its air of snarling brutality. The characters spend about 40 minutes of stage time screaming unimaginative obscenities at each other. It’s like being stuck in a lunatic asylum after the drugs have run out.

Glory Ride is a new musical that tells the little-known story of Gino Bartali, a bicycling Oskar Schindler, who used his athletic prowess as a Tour de France winner to smuggle secret documents around Italy during the war. His courageous missions through the Italian Alps enabled numerous Jewish fugitives to avoid transportation to Nazi death camps.

The script opens too early, in 1938, and explains how Bartali became a champion cyclist. Then the action proper begins and he embarks on his furtive trips, which he has to conceal from his childhood friend, Mario, who has embraced the blackshirts and their ideology.

The dialogue is written in English but the cast use grating Italian accents that seem to belong to an antique and unfunny comedy sketch. And the story is cluttered with too many characters: pious clergymen, dreamy artists, fanatical right-wingers, earnest musicians, adorable village elders and cute little Jewish kids. A leaner and more disciplined script could have helped this extraordinary tale to soar. It never really achieves lift-off.