Set in 1948, The Human Body is about four heroic women fighting to create the NHS despite opposition from right-wing extremists led by the ‘snob’ and ‘warmonger’ Winston Churchill. One of these heroic women is a Labour councillor, another is a physician on a bike, the third works at Westminster for a socialist MP and the fourth is a hard-working mother married to a violent drunk. What’s odd about Lucy Kirkwood’s new play is that these four women co-exist within a single figure: Dr Elcock (Keeley Hawes).

Bob Geldof was the Greta Thunberg of his day, a whingeing, sanctimonious diva

Dr Elcock is a housewife, GP, alderwoman and healthcare activist who spends her busy days cooking, cleaning, curing patients, helping her boss in parliament, handling council business and attending drinks parties with her sozzled spouse. Yet she also finds time to stalk a dashing film star, George (Jack Davenport), whom she adores for obscure reasons. George is a cowardly, charmless, brain-dead, morally vacuous narcissist who lusts after the 49-year-old Dr Elcock even though he’s fawned over by every starlet in London.

George tells the doc that he loves her, or at least the script says that he loves her, so we have to believe him. But it’s hard to tell with George because he doesn’t have a personality. Instead he just quotes poems and movie scripts. When expressing affection for Dr Elcock he can’t help insulting her. He calls her ‘sour’ and says that she’d be better off ‘barefoot and pregnant’.

Their story explicitly plagiarises Brief Encounter, including the trysts at railway stations, but this show lacks the anguished poignancy of the original. And the subplot about the formulation of the NHS is as dry as a ghost’s burp.

The production has several oddities. Every prop is painted blue, even blue lumps of coal in a blue coal-scuttle, as if to suggest that Dr Elcock’s world is steeped in the toxic hues of Conservatism. All the action is filmed on stage by videocams that project footage onto the back wall. The playing area is a twirling platform that revolves slowly throughout the play, like the Perspex plate in a microwave oven. These gimmicks are supposed to add visual interest, perhaps. And there’s the snag. If you need to add visual interest, you have a problem that can’t be fixed by merely adding visual interest.

Just For One Day: The Live Aid Musical tells the story of the charity gig arranged by Bob Geldof on 13 July 1985 to buy food for hungry Ethiopians. ‘A lot of old white men taking a day off snorting cocaine to help Africa,’ says a dismissive teen when she hears about the event. The setup is that Geldof has to explain Live Aid to a bunch of sceptical youngsters but the show, directed by Luke Sheppard, gets some of the basic details wrong. Geldof was clean-shaven in 1985 but here he wears a beard. And his chief promoter, the famously bearded Harvey Goldsmith, is clean-shaven. Are the producers blind?

The clothes and hairstyles of the 1980s don’t interest the designer, and the music is an afterthought: a lot of the tunes are sung by a skinny tenor with a goatee and a quiff who looks like a homeless Bee Gee. The writer, John O’Farrell, captures Geldof brilliantly in a complex and unsympathetic portrait of a prickly yob. Geldof was the Greta Thunberg of his day, a whingeing, sanctimonious diva, who felt the need to scold the entire world in order to cheer himself up.

His campaign to save Africa began when his girlfriend, Paula Yates, imposed a £5 levy on anyone who visited their kitchen. This was a large sum back then – enough to buy seven pints of beer in a pub – and it was obvious that their crusade was just a lark for rich kids. Geldof, a half-forgotten punk in those days, asked his friend Midge Ure to help him write a charity single and they came up with ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’. Geldof accused Ure of lifting the melody from Z-Cars (a TV cop show of the 1960s and 70s) but Ure confessed that he’d borrowed it from The Dam Busters. It sounds a bit like both.

The song became a Christmas hit in 1984, which brought Geldof into conflict with Mrs Thatcher over VAT payments. Just For One Day finds Mrs T fascinating. In act one, she gets a big song-and-dance number which she performs with self-mocking aplomb. Later she holds talks with Geldof at No. 10 where she offers him Guinness, which he declines. He asks for a tumbler of her favourite tipple, whisky, but ‘with a splash’. She hands it to him neat. Their battle of wills continues as they haggle over VAT and he leaves Downing Street with a million quid from the Treasury which he promptly gives to Ethiopia’s dictator. It’s riveting stuff. So is this fabulous show. If you were there, you’ll love it. If you weren’t, don’t bother.