Hamlet Old Vic, London SE1
M.A.D. Bush, London W12
Coyote on a Fence Duchess, London WC2
He's 23, a year out of Rada and the youngest person ever to play Hamlet at the Old Vic. Ben Whishaw is a true discovery. He's a verse speaker who can make Shakespeare's lines sound as if they were the most natural and effective way to examine a sinewy thought. He moves so lightly that you feel he half-wants not to be, even before he says so.
The thought of Hamlet in a beanie may make your blood run cold, but the first sight of this spindly waif in Trevor Nunn's modern-dress production leaves an indelible impression, and a certainty that a youthful Hamlet can take the part into a different register. Dwarfed by John Gunter's design of grim, towering, parking-lot-grey, Whishaw comes on as completely vulnerable and thoroughly adolescent, holding himself apart from everything around him and yet disturbed by it all. He can't stop wringing his hands; he flops down as if it were too much effort to stand up; when he pleads that his solid flesh would melt, he does dissolve - into tears. You know he won't be believed. And yet he speaks steadily and clearly.
There are the beginnings of other notes in his performance: when he mugs it up for the players, he gets the grandiloquence just right, breaking out of the shell of his depression with big, balletic movements; he can mince and, maybe, bellow; he shows himself as someone who may be inhabited by different selves. But these are, at the moment, only hints. He's earned himself a memorable place in the history of Hamlets with his impressive early scenes, but he doesn't much develop in the course of the play: he always looks in need of protection; he's always - unusually among Hamlets - endearing. Whishaw is both beneficiary and victim of Trevor Nunn's idea - or wheeze - of a youth Hamlet . The poignancy of the prince's position is increased in this interpretation; its consequences are diminished. There's very little sense of political decline, of a whole country rotting because of these putrid princelings. The force of the production is emotional rather than intellectual.
Nevertheless, the ripple effect of Hamlet's youth is amazing. No one can be thought of as safe, or Establishment. Laertes becomes not just plausible but vital: a strong, fiery Rory Kinnear plays him as a character who is bashing his way into adulthood; Samantha Whittaker's Ophelia, an hysterical swallower of words, and a bouncer on beds when mad, looks as if she's barely out of the classroom (the actor is in fact a student at University College London), though she's a knowing little piece. Everyone is on a hormonal roll.
Most fundamentally, Gertrude doesn't have to be a matron. Imogen Stubbs (white pleated skirt, blonde chignon, a touch of the young Grace Kelly and a touch of the old Diana) impressively remakes her as a self-conscious, wry, passionate figure - practised enough in the ways of publicity to know that she's running a risk in presenting herself to the crowds with her new husband, and yet too sybaritically self-absorbed to stop drooling over him. With her son, she is indulgent, anxious: you feel this is how McEnroe mère might have behaved: in public with one eye trained to spot the habitual bad behaviour; in private, maddened, affectionate and quick to forgive.
Another query is raised. Was Gertrude a drunk? It's not exactly a textual query on how-many-children-had-Lady-Macbeth lines: more one of Nunn's novelistic subplots. Accused by her son, Gertrude reaches for the whisky bottle on her dressing table, hugging it to her like a lover when her husband asks for her support. Which puts a different spin on the final scene. When Claudius begs her not to drink from the poisoned cup, she does so in defiance of a partner who's nagging her about her bad habit.
The reverberations of Hamlet are infinite. When David Eldridge adapted Festen for the Almeida stage, he made a feuding Danish family seem more resonant because its conversation echoed Shakespeare's plays. He's not brought the same dynamism to M.A.D. , his new study of a family tearing itself apart. A precocious small boy in the Eighties, the son of a market trader - obsessed with the Cold War and the idea of mutually assured destruction - watches his parents squaring up to each other, and draws a heavily underscored parallel between domestic and international fighting.
Despite the ferocity of feeling here, this is dramatically slumbersome. But Hettie Macdonald's direction helps to make it an immaculate piece of naturalism. Jonathan Fensom's design is sharper than any set on a telly soap. Each detail bears scrutiny as an inventory of shared lives: from the scuffed cardboard carton where the young boy hides and overhears his parents' desperation, to the shoes - everything from gold pumps to trainers - scattered around the kitchen that reveal the nature of the market stall. On a Subbuteo table, the family put down their flowered placemats and on them, the hero's fave dish: fried egg with dunked custard creams. There are perfectly tailored performances from Jo McInnes and Lee Ross, and a promising debut from Lewis Chase. Here are the ingredients of a play without a recipe.
A bit more naturalism would slip down well at the Duchess, where Alex Ferns's acting career is assuming an unusual shape. For years best known as the wife-bashing Trevor in EastEnders, nine months ago he played a tapeworm in Antony Sher's I.D., and now, in Coyote On A Fence , he takes on the role of a bigoted, possibly brain-damaged arsonist who, while held on Death Row somewhere in the southern United States, amuses himself by doing impressions of seals and iguanas. Ferns lets loose an impressive artillery of blazing-eyed stares and rigid shoulders: he creates a character who is wounded and terrifying. Ben Cross is equally able as a literate fellow-prisoner who documents the lives - and particularly deaths - of inmates in his one-man newspaper: his glowing obituaries are his journal's glory. But though Bruce Graham's play is based on a real-life case, its combination of bland anti-capital punishment message with hoedown philosophising means that this anxious piece ends up feeling like a piece of folklore rather than a shocking truth.
