THE tradition of summertime short plays at the Stephen Joseph Theatre continues, but gone are the days of bite-sized lunchtime theatre in the restaurant that first announced the writing talent of Tim Firth and Torben Betts.

Instead, two 40-minute plays by established playwrights will be divided between lunch and early evening solo performances and later-evening double bills, all of them staged in the McCarthy at the lung-busting top of the stairs.

In truth this flexibility is welcome, not least because of the Arts Council spending review that has led the SJT to forego its summer tours of such micro-plays to the likes of Filey and Pickering.

Should you be beside the sea one afternoon, catch one play, but your reviewer could not recommend one over the other and so would advise a night out seeing both Brian Friel’s The Yalta Game and Arthur Miller’s Elegy For A Lady, where you can better appreciate the performances of John Elkington and Jennifer Rhodes in each two-hander.

Directed by artistic director Chris Monks with the subtle touch of the forgotten tennis art of the volley at the net, the plays are linked by a common theme of truth and fiction, reality and illusion, each founded on the shifting sands of a relationship.

In Friel’s deliciously naughty work, two holidays makers divided by age and experience meet in the lounging, people-spotting hours by the sea in Yalta, where a veteran seducer, the married but unaccompanied Dmitry (Elkington) has his eye on newly-wed Anna (Rhodes), who has her dog rather than husband by her side.

Adapted from Chekhov’s short story The Lady With The Lapdog (I almost wrote laptop), this a delightful piece of tall tale-spinning, where Dmitry may be the narrator but both protagonists make up outrageous stories involving fellow tourists and passers-by.

This is the Yalta game, played to make life more interesting, but when a holiday romance ensues, suddenly the dividing line between reality and fantasy blurs as they disappear into a vortex of self-deception. We are spared the dark shadow of the inevitable denouement, no rain allowed to ruin the sunny parade, Friel’s wit intact to the last.

Elkington and Rhodes bond wonderfully in the game’s thrust and counter-thrust, conducted at tables and chairs, and they are better still in Miller’s sleight of hand, Elegy For A Lady, set in a New York boutique.

A lone Man, again older, enters the shop in search of a gift for his terminally ill, much younger mistress. Surrounded by pretty boxes and glass shapes that throw large, ghostly shadows on the wall behind in Michael Roberts’s design, the Proprietress gradually assumes the character of the elusive mistress.

This culminates in a clasp, a kiss, and then another, and so they come to mull over loneliness, ageing, the vicissitudes of love and marriage. Is she really his Mistress? Well, that is the Miller game, where illusion or reality has you hooked, along with the playwright’s ever-wondrous powers of imagery.

The Yalta Game and Elegy For A Lady, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until July 9, then August 5 to September 10 in repertory. Box office: 01723 370541.