She is incited to murder her husband by the poison-dispensing Matriona, Nikita's ruthless mother who, in Colette O'Neil's excellent, calmly implacable performance, masterminds evil in the soothing commonsensical tones of a wise old granny who knows what's best This incongruity is particularly chilling in the fourth act. In its portrayal of a marriage unravelling in the shadow of a crime, and in its depiction of the waking nightmare of a guilty conscience, this dark, intense work invites comparison with Macbeth and Zola's Therese Raquin. Anisya (Katrina Levon), the wilful second wife of a well-to-do, ailing peasant, has started an affair with his husband's handsome young labourer, Nikita (Dermot Kerrigan). It's a story of how adultery leads to avarice, murder, further adultery and infanticide before redemption is found in confession and repentance. In Power of Darkness, his best play, now engrossingly revived by Sean Holmes at the Orange Tree, Tolstoy's theoretical veneration of peasant life is almost wholly set aside as he trains an unsparing gaze on the ugly, superstition-ridden reality. Both of us are free; that makes us equal." Some of us more equal than others, however, for having unburdened himself of this piety, Tolstoy, with majestic obliviousness, proceeded to leave his full pot in the servant's capable hands. In James Goldman's recent biodrama, the aristocratic genius, in full peasant regalia, was seen wrangling with a perplexed servant over which of them should have the honour of emptying his chamber pot "You empty yours; I'll empty mine. After his religious conversion, he may have urged intellectuals to copy the simple, wise way of life of the peasantry but this airy idealisation kept getting tripped up by brute fact.

Where Tolstoy was concerned, precept didn't always match up with practice. As part of Bristol Old Vic's on-going commitment to black theatre, the production is not only an excellent opportunity to see this rarely staged play, but also a chance to see some fine performers demonstrating that there is a great deal more to black British acting than bit-parts in The Bill.To 3 May (0117 987 7877). It's time you let me be a man" - leaves the audience in a breathless hush where one can sense a thousand hands teetering on the edge of an ovation.There is an Arthur Miller feel to the way in which the play depicts the quiet and desperate inevitability of Margaret's entropic shift from order to chaos; but at the same time the story is firmly grounded in the blend of fervent religion and soul-destroying poverty unique to the ghetto. In his first professional role, he displays both excellent comic timing and a fine feel for Hamletian soul-searching, and his departing speech to his mother - "I want to be a man. However, the play marches towards its inevitable conclusion to a syncopated beat, with gospel music and humour applied lavishly - all the better to counterpoint the tragedy, climaxing with Luke's death downstage to the accompaniment of a lively devotional jive in the hall above. The outstanding performance comes from Michael Price as Margaret's son David.

Her congregation ferments rebellion, her son abandons his strict Christian upbringing in favour of the life of a strolling jazzman, and the carefully applied coating is chipped away to leave her weeping over the gaping holes in her life which religion has merely papered over. But when Luke, her louche jazz musician husband, returns after a 10-year separation just in time to collapse across the kitchen table with terminal TB, the rigidly heaven-bound structure of her life begins to collapse. Sister Margaret leads her small flock along the path of righteousness with unbending puritan piety. James Baldwin's tragedy of a woman who applies the varnish of the Lord to cover the wounds of her past, only to have it stripped away layer by painful layer, crackles to life in a frenzy of pure-cut holy roller religion. But religion looms large over the lives of Sister Margaret's congregation, and in Paulette Randall's production, the shabby mission hall squats over the sketchily outlined living quarters, filling with an ebb and flow of worshippers whose eruptions into rapturous song lend a background soundtrack to the action.