They keep you on your toes at the Young Vic. This double bill, part of their Bertolt Brecht festival, highlights the unpredictability of that great dramatist's work: one play as depressing as the other is exhilaratingly funny.

A Respectable Wedding is the comedy, translated by that scourge of Westminster, Rory Bremner. Those who have found his recent TV output worthier than it is amusing will be pleased. He seems to have relished a move from politics, and provides here a fresh, breezy farce with a generous dollop of cynical social satire.

His script benefits from a tremendous cast, including not one but two History Boys: Russell Tovey (the thick one) and James Corden (the spatially thick one). Tovey's Groom is the central character, at whose tiny wedding reception a cast of grotesques gather. He exudes a familiar likeable front as he shows off the furniture he has glued together for his bride. Of course it falls apart.

As it does, this party from hell veers between brawling and boredom. Doon MacKichan is a riot as the Wife, taking a quasi-sexual delight in the chance to bitch. Lloyd Hutchinson's Father has a wealth of perfectly timed, insufferably tedious anecdotes. Corden is great in the more subtle role of "friend with an agenda", squeezing laughs from the most throwaway lines. The jokes can get repetitive - but come thick and fast enough that you won't want to notice.

The Jewish Wife

The Jewish Wife offers what it says on the tin. Originally written as a propaganda exercise against Nazi Germany, it portrays the last hours of a Jewish woman in Germany, as she prepares to emigrate and give her Aryan husband a break.

In a cold-looking room, bedecked with Art Deco furnishings, Anastasia Hille's Wife phones in her goodbyes with bourgeois niceness, offering discreetly worded forgiveness to friends and bridge partners who have chosen to avoid her. She saves her anger for her husband, unleashing a torrent of emotion that convincingly mixes political outrage with a shallower frustration at her loss of status. "You can't be bourgeois unless you're blonde," she cries.

Sean Jackson's Husband speaks confidently but gestures weakly, interested only in absolving himself from blame. Director Katie Mitchell goes easy on the stylistics - a strange hum that's almost but not quite building noise oppresses the action, and a short but telling moment of slow motion at the close accuses the Husband of deeper, more horrific complicity.

• Until 14 April (020 7922 2922).