LONDON — Let all credit go to the director Phyllida Lloyd for embarking upon a particular way of doing Shakespeare and seeing it through. Two years ago, Ms. Lloyd mounted an all-female production of “Julius Caesar” at the Donmar Warehouse that transfixed London and went on to acclaim in New York. Ms. Lloyd is back at the intimate Covent Garden playhouse with a second exercise in gender-bending bravura, this time with “Henry IV.”
Several of the actresses from “Caesar” are on board for this latest venture, and the earlier conceit — female prison inmates acting Shakespeare’s play as a way of, well, acting out — has been ramped up a notch. Playgoers upon arrival are directed across the street to a sort of holding pen before being invited back to enter single-file through a side entrance past theater attendants dressed as guards. They take their places in a harshly lit room that offers none of the comforts (padded bench seating, for one) associated with this theater.
So far so gimmicky, you might think, and I did wonder at the outset whether all concerned hadn’t fallen a little too in love with their maverick approach. But once the play starts (and proceeds across two tightly paced hours, no intermission), the cavils for the most part fall away. As was the case before, there’s an exhilaration that comes with watching a gifted cast of women tear into the male preserve of these texts. It’s telling that Ms. Lloyd has in both instances chosen plays with notably few female parts so that the gender reassignment is doubly repaid.
And just as “Julius Caesar” interrupted the Bard’s speech to make room for the prisoners’ own words, here, too, the performance is halted on occasion to allow glimpses into the inmates’ individual circumstances. Clare Dunne’s fiery Irish Prince Hal, for instance, is revealed to be an inmate on the verge of release, the new life ahead of her tallying presumably with Hal’s own maturation within the play. This “Henry IV” consists of much of Part 1 but folds in the celebrated scene from Part 2 when the prince banishes his roisterous pal Falstaff. That grievous act brings to an end a once-deep friendship that leaves Hal on the way to becoming Henry V and his onetime drinking buddy forgotten.
Some of the fascination comes from body gestures: Harriet Walter’s King Henry of the title sits with her legs apart as if she owns both the play itself and the women involved in it. And when Ashley McGuire’s aptly fleshy Falstaff gets to the scene of this great Shakespearean layabout’s rejection, she is shown taking that act personally, as if unable to separate out the world of Shakespeare’s history play from that around her, where allegiances matter just as much. It’s in such smaller moments of revelation that this large-scale project — Ms. Lloyd and Ms. Walter have a third Shakespeare play in mind, as yet unnamed — most fully comes into its own.
Two other revivals revisit their source material to bumpier results. “Uncle Vanya,” at the St. James Theater through Nov. 8, marks the third time the dramatist Anya Reiss, only 22, has adapted a Chekhov play, though I missed her versions of “Three Sisters” and “The Seagull,” both for Southwark Playhouse.
And “version” is very much the word for an “Uncle Vanya,” designed by Janet Bird, that appears to be set in a corrugated shack somewhere in the north of England. The language is rife with nods to Shariah law, diazepam and the Internet, which sit uneasily with more customary talk of peasantry and the use of carriages as the preferred mode of transport.
Still, if Ms. Reiss and her director, Russell Bolam, are busy tinkering with textual specifics, they nonetheless honor the fraught spirit of what often seems the most knowingly bleak of the four great plays that came at the end of the Russian master’s career. (Chekhov’s final play, “The Cherry Orchard,” is playing now in a new production at the Young Vic.)
A tragicomedy about misplaced affections and wasted lives, “Vanya” brings together on one rural estate a house full of people all but hollowed out by mutual recrimination and shared regret. “I’d be a minor character in a play about my own life,” says Yelena (Rebecca Night), the youthful wife of a far-older professor, Serebryakov (Jack Shepherd, excellent), as well as the object of devotional yearning from the senior pedant’s brother-in-law, Vanya (John Hannah), who speaks of it being “a nice day for hanging yourself.”
So abject a presence that he (famously) can’t even shoot a gun correctly, Vanya is doomed to an existential despair that is amplified by his awareness of the short straw that life has dealt him — or that he has made of life. And though the traditional references to the Nietzsche and Schopenhauer that Vanya will never be have been changed to T.S. Eliot and George Eliot, Mr. Hannah (of the movies “Sliding Doors” and “The Mummy”) captures precisely the character’s simmering rage. The actor almost never stands upright, as if to hold his head high would mean meeting the world head-on, and that he cannot do.
The rest of the cast is a mixed bag. Joe Dixon’s Astrov — a doctor who also happens to be the play’s resident eco-warrior — is burdened with a post-intermission drunk scene better off left in the rehearsal room. Playing the professor’s daughter, Sonya, whose own pining for Astrov will never be repaid, Amanda Hale might have been advised to hold in the tears that she sheds copiously at the end. If Chekhov in performance is properly delivering the goods, then the audience should be welling up way before the characters do.
To that end, I recall being greatly moved, and charmed, by “East Is East,” Ayub Khan Din’s debut play, when I first saw it at the Royal Court Theater in 1996, three years before it was made into a successful low-budget British film. Its West End revival at the Trafalgar Studios until Jan. 3, by contrast, prompts a gathering irritation that the heroine, Ella Khan (Jane Horrocks), doesn’t scoop up her sizable brood and get out of the house she shares with her bullying Pakistani husband, George (played by the author, returning to his origins as an actor).
One of the Khans’ seven children has already fled the family home, though the playing space is so confusingly apportioned that it isn’t always easy to tell what is happening where, or who is capable of overhearing whom. And while we’re at it, what is it with all the doors toward the rear of the set? “East Is East” is a serious comedy about cultural assimilation, not a French farce.
The draw of the director Sam Yates’s production is Ms. Horrocks, a theater and television name (she was Bubble in “Absolutely Fabulous”) who lands her punch lines without entirely conveying the riven emotions of a loving English wife nonetheless accustomed to being her Muslim husband’s punching bag. Mr. Khan Din for his part projects so bearishly volatile a presence that he forestalls any sympathy we may have for a father and spouse who has grown in years but not in wisdom. A closing gesture — not to be revealed here — may imply better times ahead, but I’m not so sure.
Henry IV. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd. Donmar Warehouse. Through Nov. 29.
Uncle Vanya. Directed by Russell Bolam. St. James Theater. Through Nov. 8.
East Is East. Directed by Sam Yates. Trafalgar Studios. Through Jan. 3.