Sleeping Beauty Young Vic, London SE1
A Christmas Carol Lyric Hammersmith, London W6
The Lying Kind Royal Court, London SW1
It should really be called Hyperactive Beauty. The Young Vic's rousing Christmas show tells us what became of the Princess after her doze. Rufus Norris, who directs his own script, has created a gruesome, ribald, twenty-first century sequel to the Perrault fairytale. Everything 'from villains to vegetation' is on the go. The heroine is supine only for a second: boisterous and non-virginal, she is less concerned with the prick of a spindle than with her prick of a husband.
Constantly inventive, sometimes indulgent, this is the work of a gifted young director determined to re-create the spinning wheel. Instead of a good and a bad fairy, Norris presents just one anxiously divided sprite, with lavatory-brush hair, contorted syntax and a chronic farting habit: every time she casts a spell, she drops a smell. The royals don't come off well: Beauty's father is feeble, and her mother (pet name 'Squidgy') is bad-tempered. James Love's terrific apple-cheeked Prince is a thigh-slapping, tally-ho hearty, who hates the idea of kissing and looks as if he might start throwing bread rolls at any moment.
Brilliantly, this Prince turns out to be a half-ogre - on his mother's side. And ogres provide the funniest, most original episodes in this (not for tiny tots) show. As the maternal ogre, Daniel Cerqueira is a magnificent, mountainous variation on the pantomime Dame. Preposterous and convincing, she lusts for human flesh. But she also has a caring side: she doesn't really want to eat her own relatives. It's a fine moment when Beauty's children are innocently introduced to their granny. And there is a lovely bit of camp when the Ogress, having yielded to her appetite and munched on what she believes is baby, declares with nonchalant majesty that a missing child 'might have got lost in the mêlée'. The most logical development in the now-politically alert world of panto is to rehabilitate the ogres, and give them a show of their own.
Every year, the Young Vic springs a Christmas surprise. This is not its most charming, but is one of the most radical. The action, set on a higher-than-usual drum stage, is distanced from the audience, though the nether-world activity this allows is considerable: babies and briars push their way into the spotlight, while servants are shovelled down the trapdoors. On high, the palace in which the Princess was incarcerated drifts around the ceiling - pink and purple and spiky with spires - like an exquisite lampshade.
There is another magical refashioning of tradition at the Lyric Hammersmith. Neil Bartlett, who has adapted and directed A Christmas Carol, sets his play to the rhythm of the book's prose: you get the roll of Dickens's repetitions (he meant the story to be read aloud) and the juiciness of his rare vocabulary. And Robin Whitmore provides a design of breathtaking beauty.
As in all the best realisations, nothing is literal. Bartlett doesn't simply dramatise Dickens's words - he edits them. And Whitmore doesn't merely visualise Dickens's episodes. His scenes from a toy theatre echo but don't copy the original illustrations of John Leech. Scrooge's office is cramped, dark and flimsy, the scenery is hand-drawn in black and white, and the waistcoated clerks scratch away with their quills like living embodiments of the inky wallpaper. The opening scene is a tad slow - some children start doing the wordsearch in their programmes.
But it's clear from the outset that Tim Pigott-Smith is a perfect Scrooge. At first, he is the incarnation of crumpled-up crossness, his back bent, his eyebrows in a fixed 'V' like a pair of flying ducks, his scowl both petulant and comic. When happiness begins to smooth out his body and brow, and he capers in his nightcap, bleating: 'I'm a baby', he looks more vulnerable than Tiny Tim.
This is an evening of strange shadows and changing shapes. A doorknob sprouts the face of Jacob Marley; a dressing-gown hanging limply on Scrooge's bedroom door waves a hand at its owner. A strong cast of eight transform themselves from Fezziwigs to Cratchits and from Portly Gentlemen to wraiths. It's enough to make you think the ghosts are running things. The spirit of Christmas yet to come is particularly imposing, a shiny granite giant who looms up like a cross between Don Giovanni's Commendatore and the pointing finger of the National Lottery.
There's not much of cracker and marzipan, but there are changes that make the heart quicken. Scrooge's poky room opens up with his memories into a melting cream-and-black vista of snowy hills. Crinolined women barge into each other 'and into the present century' with tinselled shopping trolleys in all-over crimson. There's no mistaking this Christmas Present when it bursts on to the stage.
The idea of a saccharine Christmas gala gets another knock at the Royal Court, where the festive offering, The Lying Kind, is a black farce with taboo-blasting in mind. Too obviously in mind for comedy to take wing.
A brace of policeman - boobies of bobbies in the old knee-bending style - arrives at an elderly couple's house to tell them their daughter has been killed in a car crash. The mother thinks they are talking about her missing labrador, and the plods are too tender-hearted to tell her the truth. Their attempts to cover up their cover-up are complicated by the confusions of a demented old woman, the certainties of a militant anti-paedophile ring, and the ambiguities of a vicar in black-satin corset and fishnet stockings.
The dramatist is Anthony Neilson, a writer of real power: there are pungent individual lines, an elegant snap of an ending, and one extraordinary comic riff squeezed from an unpromising humorous premise. But The Lying Kind is limp: the action is always deliberate; it never, as farce must, canters out of control. Neilson directs 'slowly'. It's a frustrating occasion, like watching an elegant sea creature waddling cumbersomely on land.
THREE TO SEE
THE TALKING CURE Cottesloe, London SE1 Ralph Fiennes plays Jung in Christopher Hampton's psychoanalytic drama.
CORIOLANUS Swan, Stratford upon Avon Greg Hicks is magnificent in David Farr's bold Samurai interpretation.
THE VORTEX Donmar, London WC2 Chiwetel Ejiofor and Francesca Annis star in Michael Grandage's first production as the Donmar's new artistic director.
