One Million Tiny Plays About Britain (Watermill Theatre)

Think of those snippets of conversation you overhear on the bus and imagine them taken further and fashioned into playlets with swiftly, deftly-drawn characters. The "snapshots of life in the UK" in Craig Taylor’s Guardian column – which shares the same name as this play – are director Laura Keefe's starting point. She’s chosen almost 37 little comedies, tragedies and personal histories that share insights into life in Britain today – Shakespeare would surely have approved. Her terrific achievement, shared with her cast of two and creative team, is fashioning them into a coherent whole and giving them a setting that works for these brief encounters set everywhere from a posh tea shop in Hungerford to a record shop in Belfast.

Working with designer Fly Davis to come up with a quintessentially British garden shed crowded with useful props and costumes is inspired enough. They crown it by evoking another British institution: a bingo board on the back wall lights up the relevant number, as a nicely-modulated female voice ‘calls’ the next scene "38 – Macdonalds in Swansea", and the characters "a mother and daughter".

Chameleon cast members Emma Barclay and Alec Nicholls quickly establish a clever convention of freezing to listen intently to hear what comes next, before embarking on another lightning change. Frenetically donning or tearing off layers of clothing and delving into bags and boxes for props and wigs, or nipping out the back for a ‘sex change’, they simultaneously transform the set and morph into new characters, instantly establishing new relationships.

Sound designer Nick Lodge provides delicious snatches of music. An ice-cream van chimes Greensleeves to evoke Henley on Thames, where our dynamic duo, spreading their hard-working table with a red cloth and whipping out appropriate hats from their handbags – turn into two genteel ladies each insisting it’s their turn to pay the bill. Lighting designer Andy Purves works his magic and has fun too – with fairy lights at "22 – a fairground in York."

The choice of playlets is wonderfully judicious. Two football fans provide laugh-out-loud lavatory humour in a post-match analysis in the men’s urinal, emptying plastic bottles of water for phalluses into buckets in front of them (one comes in handy later for a vomiting bride on her hen night). There’s genuinely gripping tension. An audience member gasped out loud as the audience eavesdropped on a divorcing couple and learnt with the wife about her husband’s unplanned parenthood elsewhere. And there’s shared pathos, a widow trying to date again confides in her daughter that she’s haunted by the voice of her first husband. An elderly lady’s dementia becomes apparent as she repeatedly apologises for not offering a social worker tea. Brief exchanges contrast with scenes earning several minutes, expertly varying the pace. It all makes for a life-affirming delight.

One Million Tiny Plays About Britain runs at The Watermill Theatre until 23 April.