The modern-day comedian Stewart Lee, himself part of a double act with Richard Herring, believes that the bowler-hatted duo should not be found guilty by association with their pre-War comedy peers. Cockrill is not so much stylistically promiscuous as dialectical: once he has followed one course, he always counteracts with a kind of opposition, although one that grows out of an unexpected aspect of his previous work, all of which informs, at some level, the synthesis which constantly beckons. Out of Entrances came the series Wheat, which gradually lost its symbolic literalness in a series called Generation. In these, an amorphous shape, within which nestle organic growths and landscape vistas, floats against a bright, almost garish monochrome ground.It was here that a new kind of mark introduced itself. Detached from the rest of the composition, lasso or anchor-like forms provide some kind of commentary on the rest of the scene As marks they are elegant, lyrical and spontaneous.

The women get their turn in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa and the season climaxes with a grand-scale Oedipus Rex at the Bloomsbury Theatre. Let out on a pass, Eugene falls in love with Daisy - a nicely innocent and gently understated Claire Parsons - but it's really an all-boys show. He may bear an uncanny resemblance to Radar from M*A*S*H but he has a relaxed presence and a quiet confidence which act as a still centre at the emotional high points. Jack Pierce cuts an enormously impressive figure as the swaggering disciplinarian sergeant, his powerful voice commanding attention from the audience, let alone his raw recruits. Everyone seizes their opportunities, but the real stand-out is Matt Hickey as the nerdy Epstein. He may not quite come across as echt Jewish (which may be a decision by the director, Ed Wilson) but the accent is vintage Woody Allen and he even has a gleaming, perfect-teeth, all-American smile. Thrown into Simon's carefully assembled bunch of types - the redneck (Sam Spruell), the "Polack" (Josh Cole) etc - Eugene tells us of their often comic exploits as they struggle to come to terms with enforced cohabitation, war, and strict obedience.

Simon did his training in Denver, Colorado in 1945 but in Biloxi Blues he switched location to Mississippi. Not only out of his beloved Manhattan, we are also in new dramatic territory as, ironically, he almost abandons the machine-gun rattle of his two-liner formula: the automatic ricochet of set-up and punch line. But we're still in his trademark chocolate box, where even the hardest things have a sweet, soft centre. His heart-on-sleeve alter ego, Eugene, is a nice Jewish boy who dreams of becoming a writer He's a gefillte fish out of water. Well- scrubbed David Nicolle has a naive, engaging warmth as he tells the story of 10 back-breaking Army weeks.

With a cast almost entirely made up of young men undergoing basic military training, the second in his "Look Back Without Anger" trilogy is thus an entirely apt choice. After streams of smart, urban comedies he turned the clock back 40 years to write three autobiographical plays about his early years: Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound. Endless young writers have been inspired to "write about what you know about". churning out versions of what Joyce called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. However, few playwrights have taken the lead quite as literally as Neil Simon.