Underneath the Lintel
Duchess Two stars

Behold the Flying Dutchman in pursuit of the Wandering Jew. Glen Berger’s 90-minute monologue could have been co-authored by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jorge Luis Borges on an off day. A Dutch librarian notices a book returned after 113 years and sets out to find the borrower, who signed himself as “A”. He could be the man who left a pair of trousers with a cleaner on the Holloway Road in 1913, or the man called Joshua, who collapses with a cross outside a Jewish cobbler’s shop. Richard Schiff, formerly of The West Wing, gives a virtuoso performance, a dreamer-detective, dogged and mesmerised by this moderately entertaining, pseudo-metaphysical, pseudo-psychological mystery punctuated with showbiz jokes. Ninety minutes of nonstop fantasising delivered without a flaw. Some writers are lucky with their actors.

Othello
Tobacco Factory, Bristol Three stars

Like many of Andrew Hilton’s productions, this comes across almost like a new play. Roderigo, for example, is usually played as a gullible dimwit. Here, Byron Mondahl comes on indignant and aggressive: promises have been made, and Iago had better keep them. Iago (Chris Donnelly) gradually becomes more and more sinister because there’s nothing sinister about him: a quiet,

thin-lipped, open-faced fellow, amenable, matter-of-fact, calm. Never underestimate a quiet man. On racism, Hilton takes a moderate line, though it’s clear that the duke and senators are not above patronising Othello. But Leo Wringer plays an assimilated Moor, soft-spoken, calm, almost casual. He knows that he belongs. It’s this quiet confidence in himself and in his place that makes his disintegration so pathetic and moving. In moments of anguish, Wringer’s voice tends to break up, so you’re not sure whether it’s the actor or the character who is out of control. Indeed, most of the cast sound indistinct when they face away from you. Saskia Portway, as Desdemona, delivers her best performance for this company: a warm, playful, sensual woman, dignified even in death.

An Oak Tree

Soho One star

Tim Crouch’s “play” is about the theatre. Please note the quotation marks. This is a play only in the sense Herbert Morrison meant when he said that anything a Labour government did was socialism. Crouch plays himself, and a hypnotist. Another person, who has never seen or read the “play”, is the other character, playing a man whose daughter was killed by the hypnotist’s car. Invisible people are brought on, and the other character plays them all, reading his/her lines from a storyboard provided

by the hypno. This suggests that characters are the creations of hypnotists: they exist in a kind of non-creation, speaking only as they are told. But then the hypno contradicts all this by saying “Give me a piece of your mind”, suggesting the ponderously daft idea that playwright and character create each other.

If so, both fail. This is a pretentious, self-admiring, pseudo-intellectual model. Some people will do anything to avoid writing a real play, possibly because they’re not sure they can.

Stacy

Arcola Three stars

Fanny And Faggot

Finborough Three stars

Jack Thorne hit town two years ago with When You Cure Me; he now has two new plays running in London. Stacy is a 65-minute solo piece, brilliantly performed by Arthur Darvill,. Cheap suit, tie, barefoot. W, works at Vodafone. Rob is an adult adolescent, besotted, he thinks, with one Stacy. He’s short on feelings, though, and though he doesn’t know this, touchingly incompetent in bed. Ordinary chap, boring as hell. He chatters away innocently; only when the police arrive do you realise what’s been going on. Fanny and Faggot, at the Finborough, is about Mary Bell (Elicia Daly), who, aged 11, murdered two little boys. She’is rather simple, and she and her sister Norma, 13 (Sophie Fletcher), innocently re-enact their trial. In the second- half, Mary, 21, has escaped from an open prison with an older inmate, Lucy (Diana May); they are entertaining two squaddies in a scruffy Blackpool bed-sit. Sex is on the agenda, and Mary both longs and fears to lose her virginity:. Her squaddie is as fearful and inexperienced as she is.

Thorne neither condemns nor acquits. Both plays are about innocence: what it fears and what it’s capable of, specifically Mary’s and Rob’s kind, which is both lonely and dangerous. I can’t wait for Thorne’s next play.

John Peter

The Glass Menagerie

Apollo Three stars

In looks, style and years, Jessica Lange would seem a natural for Amanda Wingfield, Tennessee Williams’s first fading Southern belle in reduced circumstances. However, when Lange played the self-deluding, domineering mother on Broadway, reviews were mixed. On the evidence of Rupert Goold’s production, familiarity hasn’t provided her with more of a handle on it. Seemingly uncertain as to her approach, Lange sort of sidles up to the part, trying it this way and that, and thus appears awkward. She doesn’t move so much as position herself, and her accent, surprisingly for an American, veers across at least two seaboards. More important, in conveying little sense of the character’s fragility, she makes it hard to win our sympathy. This picture of a worn-down woman who continues to reach for the light should be touching, but instead we’re irritated by her ridiculousness. Fortunately, vulnerability is amply supplied by Amanda Hale’s gentle turn as Laura, the damaged, chronically shy daughter, based on Williams’s schizophrenic sister Rose. The play has more than just this autobiographical tinge to it, and as the son, Tom/Tennessee, who dreams of breaking free, Ed Stoppard broods self-effacingly from the sidelines. But it is Mark Umbers, as Laura’s gentleman caller, who sets the thing alight. Handsome and in command of his swaggering yet disappointed character, he is the most memorable thing about this cramped, self-conscious production.

Peter Whittle

Editor's choice

• Burning Bush with W
• Greatest movie partnerships
• Nicole Kidman returns to Australia