Pause for applause

No Man's Land is slow-going but Michael Gambon is worth it, and David Tennant shines in Stratford

No Man's Land
Duke of York's, London WC2

Love's Labour Lost
RSC, Stratford

Almeida, London N1

Radio Golf
Tricycle, London NW6

Rupert Goold's production of No Man's Land is bejewelled with promise. It has the surprise of Little Britain's David Walliams as one underling, and the skill of Nick Dunning as the other. As the two main codgers - who may or may not have met before, and may or may not be steering each other towards death - it has the man whom Ralph Richardson described as 'the great Gambon', playing opposite the practised rasping of David Bradley. It has the imagination of Goold himself, slipping in one more production before his Liverpudlian King Lear. Most vitally, it has some of the most riff-laden dialogue in recent drama.

Seven years ago, Pinter, directing Corin Redgrave and John Wood in parts first played by Richardson and John Gielgud, showed how his 1974 play can deliver continual shocks and a stream of laughs. It wasn't exactly casual, but it was often conversational; for all the dips and changes and gaps and intricacy it was recognisable. The baroque burst out of the staid.

Goold has over-Pintered his production. Each distinctive feature is underlined. The first act is so full of significant pauses that it crawls. David Bradley is an arresting scarecrow intruder but he overdoes the sonority: he often sounds as if he's at a seance. Walliams lets an insinuating, lipsticked smile and rigid mannequin arms do his acting.

This is a play which draws on cricket as well as The Four Quartets: it can take speed and lightness. It can also take naturalism. When Goold gives us these qualities, the play flies. Dunning is neat, thuggish and understated. Gambon gives a series of magnetic cameos: first, a scary-haired drunk so stiff he seems to have prosthetic legs; then bouncing and raffish; finally sinking into his dewlaps with melancholy rolling off him like fog. No Man's Land isn't often staged, and for the non-credit-crunched, these extraordinary flashes are worth the price of a ticket. For the rest of the punters, there should be a new ticket policy: pay half price and go for the second act.


Still, what's happened to the rest of Love's Labour's Lost? A play which gets a large part of its point from mocking at and exulting in 'taffeta phrases' is, in Gregory Doran's production, clobbered with comic antics and funny voices, some of them roof-raising but cumulatively effortful. Part of a speech is turned into a rap, the audience clapping along. Joe Dixon's Spanish lothario fans his codpiece as he watches a milkmaid churning between her thighs. There's a limp-wristed dancing bear and one of those now more-or-less obligatory (do they have some sort of union?) puppet birds. The whole thing is overstuffed. Down in Bristol, another dedicated out-of-London Shakespearean company, the excellent Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, has been keeping Bristol theatre going pretty much single-handedly since the closure of Bristol Old Vic. What couldn't it do on this production's budget?

Written in 1907, Waste was for years kept off the stage because the Lord Chamberlain objected to 'extremely outspoken reference to sexual relations' and to 'a criminal operation' (an abortion). Harley Granville Barker's play, which features an implausible plan for the disestablishment of the Church of England, and a politician brought low by an affair, was ahead of its time in its preparedness to air these matters. Yet even in its revised form it is resolutely Edwardian: deliberate, self-assured and male-centred. It's a play rather than a work of art.

Samuel West's production is precise and deluxe: Peter McKintosh's sumptuous design stars gladioli, fringed lampshades and a rather too prominently symbolic waste-paper basket. Will Keen, level-voiced and meagre in gesture, as if he were saving himself for life in office, captures the clenchedness of the shrivel-souled hero, but not - he is too low-key - his potential grandeur. It is Phoebe Nicholls, as his sister, who most powerfully projects a sense of waste: first sharp and reedy-voiced, she melts for a minute, putting out a tentative sympathetic paw; then she fades. Strangely, the most gripping episode is the most apparently dry. A conclave of Tory grandees - with Hugh Ross notable as a suave and vulpine Prime Minister - discusses a cover-up and the salvaging of reputations. The scene is so skilfully staged, arranged, as Granville Barker specified, around back-to-back sofas, that it seems to make visible the ebb and flow of their debate.

August Wilson's cycle of plays about African-American life - one for each decade of the 20th century - is one of the great theatrical projects of the past 50 years. Radio Golf, staged in the States shortly before Wilson's death in 2005, is not the strongest of the plays: at their best, they have an extraordinary jazz-like movement. This account of the pressures on an aspirant middle class is patchily characterised and marred by folksiness. Yet it nails a particular moment: the one in which a picture of Tiger Woods is hung alongside Martin Luther King. When someone stages the 10 plays together, Radio Golf will gain from the supporting earlier stories. And if we can have a day of Alan Ayckbourn's white wit (see below), why not a few of August Wilson's black passion?

Three to see

Oedipus Olivier, London
Ralph Fiennes stars, with Clare Higgins and Alan Howard

The Magic Flute: Impempe Yomlingo Chichester Festival Theatre
Glowing marimba-filled South African version.

Creditors Donmar, London
Alan Rickman's forensic production