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One or two American directors may have smirked when in 1993 Wonderful Tennessee closed on Broadway after nine performances. A year later, Molly Sweeney won more awards in New York – a pleasing affirmation for Friel, whose directorial debut this was. But then he directed Give Me Your Answer, Do! with an apparently deadening hand. This is where you would think the similarity ends, but the Irish reviews which greeted its Dublin premiere a year ago begged to differ.

Since Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) carried all before it in both London and New York, Friel has yo-yoed up and down the playwrights’ squash ladder. While Lughnasa was winning Tony Awards, he got into trouble for saying that a good stage manager is preferable to a director who disobeys the script. With umpteen impeccably highbrow works behind him, however, Connolly’s literary powers are now on the wane. When one’s stopped name-dropping, the walk round these images feels as though it is done in the company of an individual with a secure touch of his own.Albemarle Gallery, 49 Albemarle Street, London W1X 3FE 0171 499 1616, until 28 March.. Brian Friel’s new play, Give Me Your Answer, Do!, tells of Tom Connolly, a writer pushing on in years who lives in the rural isolation of Donegal In these details he is not a million miles from his creator.

He tells his students to study how to draw before attempting artistic revolutions and himself left art school because he wasn’t being taught the basic skills He now works surrounded by books of his favourite painters. But it’s hard not to compare the man with Thomas Eakins, America’s awkward, brilliant, anguished portraitist: here’s the same discussion of the potency of women and the same mixture of pride and resentment with which women regard men regarding them. And then here, too, is a great dollop of Walter Sickert, with his snapshots liveried out in oil and his claustrophobic suburban scenes and his back bedrooms glimpsed with a mixture of horror and fascination.It’s not necessary to pity Malcolm L Liepke for being so rich in influences He seems delighted not to be straining after the empty new. There is a gleam of joy in this stuff.
According to an interview and profile by the artist Kathleen Anderson, in American Artist, Liepke is a successful illustrator in New York, and he often exhibits there. The paintings in London have mostly sold, and it’s not surprising. Liepke is showing us a complicated world, but does it with charm. And it may be that being an illustrator encourages in him a certain modesty: he is happy to declare several influences and we are happy to hunt down those and more.

There’s the Degas love of strong light and shade and whacky angles and cropping. There’s an element of John Singer Sargent’s swagger portrait flirty-dirty in the women. There’s Whistler’s fuzzy, visionary illumination.There are also qualities which the artist didn’t mention to American Artist and which may be coincidental. But the canvases and prints (on show until Saturday 28 March) are also frankly sexy: these pale, underclothed young women look hungry, and a tad insatiable They look cross, and you’d not want to cross them But sobered up, they’d probably be quite larky. He seems to lay paint on vigorously, in what look like almost declamatory strokes.

Room 29 at Trafalgar Square shows you that the great Spaniard does indeed hover in the eye, mind and hand of this modern American, whose work at the Albemarle is his first British outing. The show is dragging in lunchtime businessmen, tempted by the bosom and frank stares the painter’s models throw out

Born in Minneapolis in 1953, Liepke’s work is sombre. A trip to the National Gallery bears out Malcolm T Liepke’s placing of Velazquez amongst his influences. Few writers have so much to say, the skills to make reading what they say an irresistible pleasure – and the clout to be able to say it, when and how they like, to an audience of millions.. He uses this independence to think for himself – the faculty his readers have surrendered in exchange for their status as middle-class Americans.No off-the-peg liberal, Grisham’s ultimate destination is unguessable Whatever he writes next, don’t underestimate this man. I half-suspect that Grisham is not a particularly humorous man himself, but a skilled writer who has mastered comic techniques through diligent study. He seems to be getting angrier about the betrayal of America, and increasingly favours the neat gag over the dazzling cliff-hanger.Ironically, it is just because he is the world’s best-selling author that he is able to work almost under cover, invisible to mainstream critics.