A hard Puck story

Richard Jones reminds us how dark A Midsummer Night's Dream is, while Peter Hall's thespfest drains Wilde of wit

A Midsummer Night's Dream RSC, Stratford
Lady Windermere's Fan Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1
Life After George Duchess, London WC2
The Feast of Snails Lyric, London W1

The fairies twitch and twitter, rubbing their faces as if to free themselves from a glue-sniffing trance. Kohl-eyed Titania vamps about in slit-to-the-thigh glitter. And when Oberon - heavy-lidded and fleering - tells Puck where he can find the magic love-potion, he insinuates that he's whispering the whereabouts of a dangerous drug. Which, of course, he is.

And that's the point about Richard Jones's spiky, anti-tinsel, non-cajoling production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It's often perverse, over-designed and underacted. But it taps into something important. In giving us the Bard as Goth, and putting the 'witch' back into bewitching, it reminds us how dark and disturbing this play - Shakespeare's most beguiling - can be.

This is not a sweet plot. Lovers are brought together only by being doped. The play's most famous joke - 'Titania waked and straight way loved an ass' - is funny only if you see it from a fairy's point of view. The Court's titterings at tender-hearted underlings are repugnant. The catch-all jovial ending - 'and Robin shall restore amends' - is pretty insecure when you remember that Robin is the congenitally changeable, troublesome Puck.

Giles Cadle's design reminds you of this. Set in a black box, streaked with confusing cones of white (which look sometimes like beams of light, sometimes like lavatory rolls), it's always uncomfortable. And it's sometimes irrelevant. It's enjoyable to watch the mechanicals (all in grey) swaying together on a train (with telegraph poles whizzing by on an inset screen) but it doesn't get you much further than Richard Branson would.

It's disconcerting to watch this box contract and expand, retreating from and looming towards the audience, but it's not always clear what prompts these convulsions.

This is an approximate production but it's an exciting shot across Shakespearean bows: every speech about disorder and pollution (there are many) leaps out freshly. Its vision is partial, but its theatrical language - bell-like music, a system of movement, which involves a serpentine sidle of shoulder-blade and cheekbone - is inclusive, fluent and brave.

The West End is regularly declared mortally wounded by the gargantuan musical. Last week, it received a different blow: three attempts to administer serious drama.

The Peter Hall remedy for revivification is straightforward: take a well-established theatre, put on a series of old, though not necessarily familiar plays, and stuff them to the gills with famous names. He did it with The Royal Family - a creaky thespfest with Judi Dench and a dazzle of other talents which had everyone dancing on their cameo spot, and no sense of dynamic. Now he's given Oscar Wilde the same treatment, with the same result. Lady Windermere's Fan, which has as its motor the plot-revealing combination of Vanessa Redgrave and her daughter, Joely Richardson, is stiff with stars.

Hall has declared his interest in expressing the humanity of Wilde's plays. He does so at the expense of wit. There's no spring, no acerbity, no drive: Wilde's dangerous lines sound like chuckling crowd-pleasers.

John Gunter's design is a pretty flounce, draping the action in a big lace hankie. Vanessa Redgrave can send her voice through a tumble of different sorts of distress or discovery, but she's hopeless at the things needed: staying steady, calm, beady and fixed and allowing the plot to unpick her apparent serenity.

Redgrave isn't Redgrave if she doesn't ripple, but her mirthless laugh and glazed wide smile take on horror-movie proportions here. And her incantatory swoops slow down the delivery of lines that should nip you before you've noticed.

Joely Richardson is winsome but lacking in strength. She clutches her hands and looks pleadingly out towards the audience to make her major announcements - parodying melodrama, but not quite knowingly enough. When she's particularly astounded, she allows her mouth to hang open for long seconds. These are anxious silences in a production - made merrier by the gurgling reproofs of Googie Withers - in which not everyone has a secure grip on their lines.

Hannie Rayson's Life After George attempts to raise the aspirations of the West End towards the play of ideas. Michael Blakemore directs a strong cast, with Stephen Dillane playing a charismatic campus idealist with his usual feather-lightness of touch. As one of his adoring women, Joanne Pearce switches from adolescence to middle aged at the drop of a thesis. Cheryl Campbell suggests smoky depths in the dully written character of the first wife.

But why is this a play rather than a postcard? It takes hours to come to an obvious, and dated, conclusion: that the various generations of women who've doted on George - the programmatic feminist, the postmodernist, the damaged daughter - would feel better if they didn't depend on a man to find their reason for living.

The banality and datedness of the conclusion wouldn't matter so much if the arguments were enacted rather than simply stated, but all the decent points of Rayson's play are dumped in front of the audience as explanatory monologues, drained by Peter J. Davison's dreary design of cinder-coloured bookshelves.

Sometimes you think you're going mad in the West End. Who can possibly have thought it a good idea that David Warner - gaunt and graceful after 30 years away from the stage - should come back in an inert play from Iceland? Olaf Olafsson's unappetisingly titled The Feast of Snails serves up a routine family melodrama as if it were a psychological thriller - with Warner as a gourmet bully who sits down to a banquet of escargots and is made to realise by a mysterious stranger that, despite his hard shell, he is vulnerable underneath.

It's hard to pick the worst moment. Here are some contenders. A visitor, pinioned by a harpoon at his throat, gasps: 'I didn't plan it like this.' Warner, sinking to his knees to sob over his dead wife's photograph, is accompanied by dappled lights and lilting piano notes. The fine actor Sorcha Cusack is reduced to a background pinny and smile. The play creeps by at a snail's pace.

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