Don Carlos
Crucible, Sheffield
Don Juan
Lyric Hammersmith, London W6
Brighton Rock
Almeida, London N1
Michael Grandage has created a tremendous Don Carlos. In the past five years, as associate director of Sheffield Theatres, he has made a visit to the city essential for anyone who wants to see the best of the British stage: never has the Crucible seemed so well-named. In this, his valedictory production, he is at the top of his powers.
No director takes an audience so directly to the heart of a play. Schiller's 1788 drama has always been a revered Enlightenment text, but its plot is a twisted, doubling-back-on-itself matter, involving the tyrannical King Philip II of Spain and the Netherlands; his son, Don Carlos - in love with the stepmother to whom he was once betrothed; and the idealistic Marquis of Posa, determined to liberate Philip's oppressed peoples. Here it's made to seem intricate, rather than awkwardly knotted; fired by intimate as well as political feeling.
Christopher Oram's design is, as always in a Grandage production, crucial. It's transparent, never intrusive but, together with Paule Constable's crepuscular lighting, it steers the story, clarifying and deepening, without ever merely duplicating the dialogue. This is a production which drives without interruption from scene to scene but in which some moments are underlined: spotlit, and intensified by Adam Cork's ecclesiastical music.
The ponderous pressure of the Church is established before the play opens, as a huge silver censer swings across the darkened stage. Terror takes on a physical form as Peter Eyre's Grand Inquisitor looms above the stage like a giant wasp, a hallucinogenic figure who might have buzzed down from a Mardi Gras float. The repression of the Court seeps from every perfectly judged movement of Claire Price's sad, poised Queen and her ladies-in-waiting: starchy, conventional Una Stubbs and the conniving, desperate Charlotte Randle. When they first come forward out of shadowy depths they glide like automata, each snap of a fan and swish of a skirt contributing to a complicated formal dance.
There are fiery soap operatics in here: watch Randle's face as she slowly realises that her lust is unrequited. Mike Poulton's fine new translation echoes, without labouring, 21st-century arguments about terror, despotism and individual liberty. But it's the pinpoint characterisation that's most impressive. It's not only Richard Coyle's affecting Don Carlos who's troubled. Derek Jacobi's King Philip is equally disturbed: an autocrat whose ferocity feeds on sycophancy but who can rise to magnanimity when challenged. Jacobi gives one of the most subtle and commanding performances of his career.
Neil Bartlett, artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith for the last 10 years, is also bowing out with a Don. Bartlett has made a specialty of showing the subversive currents in familiar material: he's revealed a torrid Somerset Maugham, produced a sobering Oliver Twist .
He directs his own translation of Molière's Don Juan with his feel for the voluptuous and decadent, relocating the action to an opulent hotel, a fin-de-siècle affair of crimson carpet (handy for the Don's descent into hellfire) and glittering black marble. This design (Bartlett's own) fits easily into the Lyric's curvy Edwardian frame: as the deflating Sganarelle, Paul Ritter, who boldly sounds throughout as if he's ad lib bing, takes a moment out to admire the gilt moulding of the proscenium arch.
James Wilby's Don is elegant but too languid to provide excitement. His bravura defence - that hypocrisy has become fashionable - now seems not so much outrageous as untrue, in an era when wrong-headed sincerity is a more lethal attribute. But there are pungent Bartlett touches, both sardonic and magical. As the Don writhes towards death, two maids he has seduced come forward to drop him down a trap door; their task accomplished, each primly smoothes out the seat of her uniform. The arrival of the Statue - a huge and glistening grey equestrian, with hollow voice - is thrilling as it takes shape from a black background as if conjured by a wizard.
There's another descent into hell at the Almeida, where the story of Graham Greene's infernal hoodlum Pinkie has been adapted by Giles Havergal and set to music by John ( Goldfinger , Midnight Cowboy , Body Heat ) Barry. The question is why.
Brighton Rock - with its startling evocation of a dark and decayed seaside town, and its dubious better-damned-than-a-doubter theology - was a sensation when it appeared in 1938. It was made into a stage play and filmed unforgettably with an impassive Richard Attenborough, a riveting, wild Hermione Baddeley, and a host of threatening noir images. Now Attenborough's son Michael has directed this further version - brisk and clear, but far less so than its predecessors.
Lez Brotherston's pretty design is some way short of seamy: the pier, with its lacy ironwork, droopy lamps and a fuss of period shop signs looks slightly foxed rather than irreparably tarnished. Barry's music - descending chords on clarinet and sax, a prancing deckchair number performed by bouncy Cockney coves - is never dangerous enough, and never rises to a big number: for much of the time a television might have been left on inadvertently in the background. But the real offender is Don Black, whose lyrics clump along, continually dragging the emphasis from the interesting gangland aspect of Greene's tale to the default mode of all musicals - romance: 'As soon as our eyes met, I didn't think what was right_'
Havergal (hot-footing it from Don Juan , where he appears as a sepulchral dad) has done a neat job of filleting the novel. Michael Jib son is a memorable Pinkie, waxy-faced and intent, looking as if he's barely out of short trousers; as Rose, the waitress who falls for him, Sophia Ragavelas sings and moves with sweetness; Harriet Thorpe gives Ida - the blousy force of nature who saves a life (though it's creepily not clear how creditable Greene considers this is, compared to saving souls) - gusto and creamy allure. But nothing can disguise the fact that this is one makeover too far.
