The quest for honesty led by Arnaud and Bertrande (Matthew Cammelle and Joanna Riding, both excellent) builds towards a final reprise of the stirring opening number "Live with Somebody You Love".This age-old message also underpins the fantastic stories that Shahrazad (a mesmerising Sophie Okenedo) concocts for the murderous king in Dominic Cooke's adaptation of Arabian Nights at the Young Vic. And although there are hindrances - underexplained plot developments, some trite or indistinguishable numbers - they pretty much do. It draws your attention to a quality of absence, an emotional void. John Napier's elegant, minimalist design, with its wooden-planked rake and jagged backdrop, boldly reflects that emptiness The actors, equally boldly, strive to fill it. It is this capacity which, the leaner, more urgently structured story argues, is crucial both to a sense of self and, as the local conflict between Protestants and Catholics becomes increasingly irrational, to anything approaching civilised society.The defiant, defining solo "I'm Martin Guerre" - which recurs in various guises, and is echoed by the imposter Arnaud, after he has taken up with his former comrade-in-arms's wife - is a gloriously perverse signature tune. Well, as near as dammit.This new, improved Guerre comes with added spleen.

Any fears that Morrison was simply going to import the earthiness he used in his riotous adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn are soon quashed. The young Martin is spat at by his superstitious neighbours and publicly flogged by the village priest for failing to consummate the marriage with Bertrande that has been arranged against his will, a humiliation that drives him out and crushes any capacity to love. It's hard to know where exactly to apportion praise, but (and some of you may need to sit down when you read this), the result is a triumph. Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg's labour of love has undergone some extensive surgery, with the up-and-coming Irish director Conall Morrison and his choreographer sidekick David Bolger brought in to lend a hand. Alan himself is treated to a performance of first-rate nonchalance from Pearce Quigley - when he asks his fiancee, Beatrice, to look on his affair as "something like getting tight", the inadvertent insincerity of his voice recalls Men Behaving Badly at its most unnervingly unreconstructed.Over at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, every effort has been made to reconstruct the multi-million-dollar musical they call Martin Guerre.

As Mrs Jeffcote, Sue Johnston mingles the character's sly hauteur ("We went to Norway in June, you know") with an air of continual alarm that hilariously suggests how much that pride is threatened by her son's dalliance. Ewan Hooper's self-made Mr Jeffcote, eyes sealed up like vaults, looks every inch the man with a "pair of scales" for a heart, incapable of enjoying the luxury he has earned. The set reinforces the sense that we continue to live in an age in which similar sexual conduct by men and women is painted differently, according to a black-and-white palette of bigotry.The greying oldies are played to stiff-jointed perfection, particularly the two leads. But the play is so well-crafted, carving intricate humour into the ugliest statements of self-interest, it doesn't seem dated.Les Brotherston's all-grey design (curtains, table-cloths, lamp-shades, the factories - cheekily represented by a line of smoke-billowing models) provides an expressionist frame for Houghton's ahead-of-its-time, feminist- inflected realism.