The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 73

Mm 4rfe 9 29 MAY4994 1 evz.fzfc&ttfri'vi vvMiaxi yy.v ozdlpnpn fcomcim the tale of Greta's return to her Belfast 1 1 VJ441VJ id'-(Motto: Here's some Shakespeare- itwon't 'hurt? a bitf)r I are battling for i piayeaswtncj rramiucentKpp visiop ropmxurjanis: 5 yem: Oxford? If ss rl 1 J- wlrrl SI MUTVICT UTTA PrlTIP' ImMflTTlS father suffers Vheart a popular hero with no popular boy (IiM'O'GaUaian) nses tion'bulsates with' the relicdous. Pcnte- cofhi'aiidme olav. uccyiuca aiiuuuy loveandrearirnihi -Michael, Attenborough's -iu-iiSj wtcck -quauneijveiy, runny. 4 On'the Stratford stack 'Doci a produc-tor Feelgoc pleifioraof: has 'become 1he-RSC's 'warm glow'' wth VRnecinIiiri -shift -n gjMCOIMUUiUMUai WWUI lllKUl' 15 tt U1UU KoaafandegbudqrnenapSpK touch. Photograph by Neil Libbert Count of Monte Cristo in the Royal Exchange.

Threlfall was the unforgettable Smike in the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby, a project to which this adaptation by James Maxwell and Jonathan -Hackett, in Braham Murray's production, obviously relates. Dumas is not Dickens, however, and the episodic story is thinly characterised. But Threlfall holds everything together with a brilliant performance as the icy, revenging Edmond Dantes, a man hardened and improved by 14 years in prison on the false charge of being a Napoleonic agent. Tom Stoppard's dazzling Arcadia is now at the Haymarket, and Trevor Nunn's production benefits from being seen in a proper theatre, as opposed to the concrete mausoleum of the Lyttelton. The new cast, with Roger AUam, Joanne Pearce and Julie Legrand, is excellent.

They all appear to. understand every word of the text, which is a good deal more than I do. smtmtomedvofbrrors (not? running at the Barbican). agicallywasheiupiiva ciner' Ar.IllimM'.: i 1 i i. i It a iMi fcrr i tjl) I )'l 1 1 II IMI I IF iiH Si a swaggering leer, a popular hero with no popular touch.

Everything in David Thacker's noisy; energetic production conspires eventually to overcome the fatuous design imposition of the French-Revolution Delacroix's bare-breasted libertar ian bursts through a broken brick wall. The costumes are Napoleonic in both Rome and Antium. So are the Vol-scians royalists? And are the thuggish tribunes of Linal Haft and Ewan Hooper meant to be Danton and Robespierre? None this fits, and all of it is fussy and distracting. However, Philip Voss is a wonderful Menenius, and there is a dark, brooding Aufidius from Barry Lynch and a sh'ghdy hysterical Volumnia from Caroline Blakiston. The rabble rouses all over the Swan's galleried interior.

For an authentic Napoleonic background, we must go to Manchester, where David Threlfall is leading a two-part, six-hour version of The 0 sot mmmrmmmmmmmm iiniiiuiBurin 'I'liJ Warwickshire. John Gunters beguil ing-design (with fine costumes by Deirdre Clancy and superb lighting by Hersey) places Clive Wood's a tapestry-walled enclave candelabra; and: Olivia's; palace; nambifniouslv, on Shakespeare's home patch, with a tantalisine pros pect of the medieval guild chapel, timbered facades of Scholar's Lane and, in the gulling of Malvolio, the barren, wintry flower beds of the knot garden in New Place. Frost and snow coat the Stratford rooftops. Judge, like Kenneth Branagh in his 1987 Renaissance Theatre production, is mindful of play's tide. The cosiness might be cloying without the sulphuruous Welsh Malvolio of Desmond Barrit, for the melancholic strain below stairs is missing to such an extent that when we learn that Sir -Toby (Tony Britton) has married Maria (Joanna McLallum), no-one gives hoot.

Despite this vague and regrettable Chichester Festival tendency, Judge supplies several elements missing from recent RSC Twelfth Nights: a Derek Griffiths, who is a genu-ine singing clown; an Aguecheek, Bille Brown, who can cut a ridiculous a -Viola; you can hear; and a -Malvolio who is easily the best since Donald Sinden's. in a bald wig smeared with vBobby CharltonrStyle strands of greasy hair, grinning rand cross' gartered in pair of painfully dainty boots (later spotlit in the prison), ap' pears before the Olivia of Haydn Gwynne Uke a huge, flashing bumblebee. He finds the tragic dimension in the comedy of Malvolio's self-delusion. The misapprehended bedroom invitation propels him across the stage, rolling his tongue lasciviously around his slack chops. The performance is one of abject and hilarious physical decline, scrambling on his knees in a pathetic pout of sensual surrender before quivering in tepid isolation in the cell.

The intention of revenge is announced with sad and menace and a defiant gesture of pride as he rearranges a dangling across his boiled-egg pate. You laugh, and you cry. Stratford audiences already love this performance, and a similar triumph attends, young Toby Stephens as Coriolanus in the Swan. Stephens is a handsome, sardonic dynamo with 0f II 11 MliO III I 'HI' if Mtti I i it 111 Hit.