Double Feature is a new play by John Logan, whose credits include Skyfall. The subject is movie-making, and the action is set in 1964 in a Hollywood cottage where Alfred Hitchcock is preparing Tippi Hedren for a nude scene in Marnie. The great director, who made a star of the unknown Hedren by casting her in The Birds, has all the power here. He positively quivers to get her into bed and yet he hesitates because he’s three times her age and nine times her girth.

Nobody, not even a director of Kent’s powers, can make a gourmet feast out of two half-eaten pizzas

Their interactions have a gruesome master-slave vibe and it’s hard to know whose side to take. The control-freak director who appears physically revolting despite his natty suit? Or the simpering blonde who looks as frail as a cobweb? Eventually Hedren gives Hitchcock a richly deserved tongue-lashing and at the same time a double-bed is shoved on stage. It’s empty but the sheets are tousled. Did she sleep with him? Has he raped her? It is unclear. And it’s unclear why it’s unclear. A biographical play like this should embrace the truth and not blush coyly and try to sweep it out of view.

That’s, however, not the least satisfying aspect of Double Feature which is this: a second play is in progress during the Hitchcock/Hedren drama. Yes, that’s right. Two scripts are staged alongside each other in a single space. The second play, wholly unrelated to the first, is about an argument that took place during the making of Witchfinder General. The setting is Suffolk, not Hollywood, and the year is 1967 not 1964. The chief characters are the young director Michael Reeves and his star, Vincent Price, who threatens to quit the movie in a fit of rage. But even that premise is unconvincing because, as the programme notes confirm, the film was released with Price in the lead role, so there’s no real suspense in the story.

Watching these two dramas side by side is like witnessing a colossal error unfolding over 90 minutes of stage time. Lazy Logan has simply jammed two unfinished plays together in the hope that no one will notice. But we’re bound to notice. It’s like a surgeon trying to turn conjoined twins into a single person. The play’s director, Jonathan Kent, attempts to unify his unwieldy material by switching the focus from one story to the other every so often. Hitchcock and Hedren converse for a bit and then Price and Reeves get their turn. Nobody, not even a director of Kent’s powers, can make a gourmet feast out of two half-eaten pizzas. Jonathan Hyde gives a mesmerising performance as the camp old drama-queen Price, but it’s not worth leaving the house for.

The location is supposed to be a luxury home, but the set resembles a recently bulldozed signal box

Nachtland is a 2022 satire written by Marius von Mayenburg and directed by Patrick Marber. A family of wealthy Germans discover an oil painting by Hitler among their dead father’s heirlooms. It’s a great idea for a play. An art connoisseur arrives to authenticate the canvas and at this point, things go awry. The expert, played by Jane Horrocks, is a freakish lesbian who describes 19th-century Vienna as ‘crawling with Jews’. This old-fashioned bigotry divides the family into two camps: neo-fascist and liberal. The liberals are represented by the sister-in-law, Judith, who happens to be a Jew. So it’s a pitched battle between a Jewish outsider and a gang of neo-Nazis. Not very imaginative. And the playwright shapes his characters according to modern gender orthodoxy. All the men are prattling, half-witted ninnies and all the women are confident, articulate hard-nuts. No character is remotely likeable. Visually the production causes pain to the eyeballs. The location is supposed to be a luxury home, but the set resembles a recently bulldozed signal box. The actors wear shapeless, unwashed togs that make them look like a team of volunteer street cleaners. The only exception is a wealthy sexual deviant, played by Angus Wright, who camps it up in an off-white overcoat trimmed with otter fur at collar and cuff. He arrives at the house intending to buy the painting but he turns out to be a predatory lothario who tries to bed the womenfolk in return for cash.

By this point, the plot has collapsed entirely because the writer has no faith in his own conception. Bored with Hitler’s painting, he sets up a series of irrelevant surprises and explosions. One character dies of blood poisoning. Another gets locked in a bathroom. Someone else finds a few Nazi jewels. Two siblings strip off and start to have sex while Tristan und Isolde plays on the soundtrack. This sort of lazy, unanchored writing is nearly as bad as an episode of Doctor Who. A few references to Voltaire and Chaucer are thrown in to persuade any overeducated ticket-holders that the show has intellectual merit. When the production was announced, the company included Romola Garai, but she seems to have withdrawn for undisclosed reasons. Smart move.