WHO says Yorkshire and Lancashire, Leeds and Manchester, can’t work together?

The West Yorkshire Playhouse’s burgeoning creative partnership with the Royal Exchange Theatre is in full bloom in the White and Red Rose liaison for two plays: the WYP and RET co-production of Jo Clifford’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the Exchange premiere of a remarkable work by Chris Urch.

Both directed by Ellen McDougall, they juxtapose two stories that explore the powerful nature of love and lovers at odds with their society, each using a design by Joanna Scotcher, best known in York for The Railway Children’s traverse set on railway tracks.

She is not showing a lack of imagination for Anna Karenina in coming up with another set with a traverse design and a railway track on which the set travels on waggons, with the audience placed either side to emphasise the friction in the story.

The coming of the railway, cutting through the Russian fields, is a symbol of the role of agriculture being diminished to the chagrin of the eternally disappointed central character Levin (the splendidly doleful John Cummins), who echoes the demeanour of David Ganly’s Vanya in the Playhouse’s Uncle Vanya earlier this season. On this thin strip too is the soil that is making way for the industrial age.

Love is a burden, a bind as much as a bond and destined for troubles in both the devastatingly depressing Anna Karenina and damnably shameful bigotry of The Rolling Stone. Scotcher’s design is an even more minimalist blue carpeting with a dais in the middle and no props, except for copies of the Rolling Stone news-sheet (not the American music mag) that names, shames and photo-frames gay men in Uganda.

Homosexuality is still illegal in 70 countries across the world, not least on the African continent. In Urch’s play, the love of Dembe (Fiston Barek) and Sam (Robert Gilbert), an Irish-Ugandan doctor who has come to his mother’s homeland, cannot speak its name when the consequences are violent intolerance. Especially when Dembe’s brother is a pastor who knows he can bump up church numbers by condemning gay men.

The Rolling Stone will make you angry; Anna Karenina will depress you almost as much as it does Anna herself.

Anna Karenina, Courtyard Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until June 13; The Rolling Stone, also West Yorkshire Playhouse, today at 2.30pm and 7.45pm. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk