The Mandate
Cottesloe, London SE1
Becket
Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London, SW1
Love Me Tonight
Hampstead, London NW3
There's a doleful lodger with a saucepan of noodles on his head, who's hiding under a sheet wrapped around a naked servant girl who is being mistaken for the Grand Duchess Anastasia. There's a two-faced picture on the sitting-room wall: if the guests are bourgeois and Tsaristly inclined, they'll see a landscape, but if Bolsheviks turn up, it can be flipped over to show a grey portrait of an ultra-bushy Karl Marx. There are ragged street musicians happy to serve as rent-a-proles for a family looking to ingratiate themselves with the new regime, and a cloche-clamped representative of the old order with fur tippet and cigarette holder.
The Russia that Nikolai Erdman put on stage in his play of 1925, The Mandate, is so knocked for six by the Revolution that it doesn't know whether it's coming or going. Declan Donnellan - the artistic director of Cheek by Jowl, who has done much of his recent work in the former Soviet Union - projects the nervy, fractured nature of the place in a production which moves in fevered bursts. Characters skitter across Nick Ormerod's chestnut-coloured set as if they were under attack by a swarm of unseen bees, or gyrating to silent ragtime rhythms. Donnellan has also supplied a new English version, a very well-written one, which scores a number of direct satirical hits: painting, a man of infinite pretension explains to his puzzled sister, is 'the soul's deep moan when pleasured by the organ of sight'.
All the augurs are good. But. Despite fine performances (has the congenitally witty Deborah Findlay ever been dull? Will Sinead Matthews get signed up perpetually, after her subtle, sexy appearance as a maid-turned-aristo?), this production is not light enough on its feet to be giddily funny, nor dark enough to give a political point to all the racketing around. Plays had consequences in the Russia of the Twenties and Thirties. Despite early success, Erdman - who finished another play, The Suicide, in 1928 - was sentenced to three years' exile in Siberia and banished from the capital for a further 10 years. Many of the characters in The Mandate would have been killed by Stalin.
Donnellan's production would gain from the dark fringe provided by retrospective knowledge. But even without this, even imperfect, it has an interest: it is bringing news from a forgotten place. John Caird's production of Becket is a much creakier and theatrically inturned affair.
It begins with what could be a scene from Blackadder, with a naked, bollocks-clutching Jasper Britton earnestly quizzing Dougray Scott: 'Did you love her, Archbishop?' Britton is speaking as the king of England, Henry II; Scott is Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. In this new adaptation by Frederic and Stephen Raphael, Jean Anouilh's play declares that Becket was no saint, and that the king, no hero, had a huge crush on his Bish.
It's hard to believe that these suggestions ever generated much excitement. Twenty-five years after the play was first staged, they look not only footling but self-serving: there's a tang of bad faith about the enterprise. These guys are supposedly being cut down - in the king's case, to infantile size; but the play is stuffed with episodes glorying in their boyishness, in their lashing, joshing, sweating, sulking, misogynist selves. It's been a long time in the theatre since a scene in which a man trashing his wife for being dull was treated as a triumph of comedy: but anyone who's been feeling the lack can see one here.
The medieval is heavily present in Stephen Brimson- Lewis's design (cavernous cathedral arches which diminish the characters and never suggest that there is a country hanging on what they do) and in some cod-historical touches: belching barons with carefully mud-smeared faces. It is absent in awkward scenes featuring iron horses on castors, which are pushed along by black-clad figures: in a play that supposedly deals with questions of supremacy - church versus state, Saxon versus Norman - surely we should know who's pushing the royal bottom. Are these monks or serfs? Or perhaps wives? And there's no more than a smidgen of period savour in the Raphaels' fidgety, facetious translation, which continually winks away at the audience, with shoehorned references to the war in Iraq and heavy-handed ('chucking it down') way with slang.
In the past, Becket has been carried by actors and stars: Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Robert Lindsay and, in the 1964 film, Peter O'Toole (being regal) and Richard Burton. But this latest pairing is dangerously lopsided. Jasper Britton puts in a performance of considerable fizz and force, and does so despite the fact that his character is defined only by the dreary repetition of his Becket fixation. But Dougray Scott does little to fill in the blank which is Becket. He occasionally adopts a look of mild anxiety, and from time to time spreads his arms towards the audience: the rest of the time he might as well be a decorative cathedral pillar.
Kathy Burke has proved herself a talented director. But she's picked a bummer in Nick Stafford's new play. Love Me Tonight is a relay-race of cliches. It's a post-funeral wake play, so of course everyone spills their beans. It's a play in which a middle-class family dissects itself, and of course finds itself wanting, with the parents accused of not speaking up enough (they speak all the time) and the children found guilty of talking too much - which they do, and it's drivel. Every time anyone wants to say anything Deep (and this play has gifted actors, Linda Bassett and Nicholas Tennant, among them), he or she gazes out into the middle distance as if in the depths of hypnosis. And when a laugh is needed, the words 'camper van' are produced, no question of a pun, just a way of provoking a snobbish snigger. This is not the play that the recently troubled Hampstead Theatre needs.
