Thomas More Swan, Stratford
Pyrenees Chocolate Factory,London SE1
The Girl with Red Hair Hampstead, London NW3
This is one of the few stagings ever of Thomas More, which was written in the 1590s. No surprise there, if this is thought of as a play by Henry Chettle and Anthony Munday, names that have never sent people scurrying to the stalls. But considered as a work with a scene that may be by Shakespeare, its non-production becomes startling. And since that scene pivots on a plea to a ravening mob to treat immigrants kindly, Robert Delamere's staging begins to look like something of a coup, or a really canny piece of timing by the RSC.
Not that it's all that terrific as a play. It comes and goes without very clear development and with smudgy explanations, as you'd expect from a drama thought to be the work of five playwrights, including Shakespeare. It makes Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons look like a structural masterpiece.
Still, the career of More, elevated by Henry VIII, later killed by him, has an inherent tension and the character he's given here is surprising. He's a merry fellow with no suggestion of the martyr. He doggedly makes tedious practical jokes; Erasmus has to guffaw when he discovers that the venerable scholar has swapped costumes with his servant. He goes to his death making cracks about forgetting his head.
Nigel Cooke plays him wonderfully: his More is never merely pious; he just enjoys being genial. Lightness of touch makes his fervency the more compelling; a scene in which he parts from his wife, before his execution, in shadows and silence, is perfectly judged; he delivers his speech to the roaring crowd with total assurance.
That speech - compassionate, rational, far-sighted - is the sort of thing every Shakespearean fan would like him to have written, and it's the sort of thing he did write. But you'd be hard put to say that the verse has his swing.
It was the inflammatory sight of xenophobes on the march that caused the play to be censored at the time of writing and which gives it particular resonance now. Gregory Doran, who has done so much to salvage the reputation of the RSC with his seasons of Shakespearean contemporaries, uses Thomas More to inaugurate a new series. This one is the most incendiary to date: it marks the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, aiming to show the consequences of that rebel act, and will include a new play by Frank McGuinness on the background to the conspiracy. But it goes further, intent on discovering modern parallels: Doran is talking about 9/11.
This spring sees a London blossoming of work by Scottish dramatist David Greig. Later this month, the Donmar stages an early play; first, at the Chocolate Factory, is Pyrenees, a mesmerising tale of an amnesiac man, an epileptic girl and a wife whose husband is missing. It's hard to imagine a better production than Vicky Featherstone's.
Greig is prolific, varied and bold about working on a grand scale. He's written a romantic saga set in the Highlands and sketched the history of capitalism; he's provided a new version of Camus's Caligula and dramatised the diaries of a Palestinian lawyer under siege in Ramallah. Sometimes, his stuff is so abstract it doesn't come into focus, but Featherstone and her unbeatable cast pull this one off. They prove that the stage is the natural place to ask how you decipher a character and wonder how much you can know about someone from what they say.
Everything here has a shadowy other dimension: the absences and fits which engulf the characters; the mountains that are a mental as well as physical landscape. Neil Warmington's design, flooded by Natasha Chivers with snow-white and gold-tinged light, suggests this dimension; its pale, louvred doors, which could belong in any European hotel, are perched on pale cliffs.
There's a mystical miasma around the edges of Greig's play, which slurps when there is talk of spirits and pilgrims. The production cuts through that, emphasising the eerie, spry quality of the dialogue, played with pinpoint precision. It's no surprise that Paola Dionisotti provides two moments which are alone worth climbing a mountain to see. One lasts a second, but tells for a lifetime, as she quells a younger woman with her extended quaver - a cross between an Edinburgh biddy and Lady Bracknell - on 'tone'.
But Dionisotti isn't a lone star. She's matched by Hugh Ross's doleful wanderer and Jonathan McGuinness as the sinister waiter who patrols the action like a droll policeman. She's echoed by Frances Grey, a find as the earnest, disturbed civil servant, with her hands making little jabs at the air and her mouth a comic circle of dismay. Together, they manoeuvre the play from mystery through semantics to romance. They transport you.
Sharman Macdonald, author of When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout (and mother of Keira Knightley) has produced an impeccably written drama. It puts on stage something that has probably never been seen so truthfully before: an elaborate game acted out by teenage girls obsessed as much by tragedy as by sex.
But it drifts, meanders, and ends up dancing on the spot. Several different couples, transfixed by early deaths, are separately sad and witty. There are adroit performances, the most natural being by Joanne Cummins, in her last year at the Royal Scottish Academy. But these characters don't so much explore grief as wistfully revolve around it.
'Things get smaller as you get older,' grumbles one beady old girl to another, eyeing a schooner of sherry in The Girl With Red Hair. But they can still have more kick than this.
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