Tamar's Revenge Swan, Stratford
Don't Look Back Somerset House, London WC2
My Arm BAC, London SW11
What a waste. The Spanish Golden Age Season, one of the hopes of the restyled RSC, began gloriously two months ago, with Lope de Vega's fascinating The Dog in the Manger. But some of the season's most promising blooms have withered: Craig Raine's version of the de Vega play was considered too free; a Bryony Lavery adaptation has fallen by the wayside. And now its second production, Tamar's Revenge, falls flat on its face.
It's not the play that's to blame: the biblical story of Tamar, the girl raped by her brother, is full of power and has always attracted imaginative treatments, from Dan Jacobson, who turned it into a novel in 1970, and from Peter Shaffer, who put it on the stage in 1985. Tirso de Molina's 1620s drama draws on this power and is worth attempting.
It's not the fault of James Fenton's supple new version, which moves easily from prose to rhyme and snatches one heartstopping moment from a chaotic occasion: Tamar's beautiful love lament, sweetly performed by Katherine Kelly to Neil McArthur's melancholy melody, deserves a separate life outside the play.
But Simon Usher's production squanders the talent at its disposal. Visually and verbally, it's a hyped-up monotone: it is glaringly overlit; it is notably under-inflected. There's a ridiculous muddle of costumes, with Kelly, who simpers when she's not singing, in a miniskirt, and shepherds (rather too many of these) in school Nativity-play sackcloth robes. The pacing is haywire, with the action seizing up when it needs to glide. Few of the cast can hold a tune.
Matt Ryan plays the incestuous brother as if he were undertaking commando training. Time and again, he shows he's upset by hurling himself blank-faced halfway up the wall at the back of the stage. Time and again, he uses the verse in much the same way, going at it full tilt as if it were an obstacle course. He's not the only offender; there's not an actor who runs on a line as the sense of the verse suggests. Not so much Tamar as Trauma.
With Don't Look Back, Dreamthinkspeak has found a far more successful way of staging myth. Going to the heart of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, it uses it to show the impossibility of recapturing the past and the trickery of memories.
A wing of Somerset House, a place dedicated to the idea that the outlines of human lives can be recorded, becomes an arena for scenes which glow and fade in front of your eyes. Dusty figures, dressed as undertakers in tails and top hats, point a promenading audience along disused corridors and stairs.
Attracted by music, you look into a darkened room and glimpse a woman turning towards you at an open window; as you watch, she slowly vanishes, obliterated by the dimming of lights. Beckoned into a tiny lift, you ascend to a floor which is revealed as no floor at all: the sliding door opens to reveal your own face in a mirror.
And then you see behind you the image of a woman, coming from nowhere, beckoning. Squashed into a small room, you look up to see a glass ceiling and, through it, a top-hatted figure scattering roses. As the lid creaks down, you realise you are in your own coffin. The company redesign the journey for different, forgotten places. On 3 and 4 July, it will be at the Art Deco splendour of the State Cinema in Grays, Thurrock.
That modern equivalent of myth, celebrity, is examined by Tim Crouch in his sharp and original one-man show. The story of an obsessive, as well as a clever satire on the art world, My Arm relates the biography of a boy who, insufficiently noticed by friends and family, decides to make himself stand out.
At the age of 10, he sticks his arm up in the air and refuses to take it down. Ever. The limb atrophies, rots and begins to stink. It is killing him. At which point an art gallery makes him into the subject of a chic show, called 'Man-i[n]festation'.
Both the history and the means of telling it are arresting, continually turning the implausible into the convincing. Crouch acts out his drama as he speaks. He uses a plastic doll as his star; the rest of the characters - and here things get truly bizarre and truly improvised - are cast from items collected from the audience at the beginning of each show. On the night I went, one bristling parent was played by a toothbrush, a pencil-case stood in for a car and a bunch of keys became a very credible bronze sculpture. As the hero is turned into an installation, the objects around him become more animated and individual.
Three to see
Cruel and Tender Young Vic, London SE1
Luc Bondy's dazzling mix of Ancient Greek and modern Brit.
Guantanamo New Ambassadors, London WC2
The triumphant Tricycle documentary.
Iphigenia at Aulis Lyttelton, London SE1
Katie Mitchell's version of Euripides.
