For once a production has earned the description "site-specific". To stage Steve Waters's new play about Olympic swimmers, the Bridewell theatre has been opened up, so that its origins are revealed. The audience sit on towels that are handed out at the entrance, looking down into a Victorian swimming pool. The lofty place echoes with amplified voices; its tiles gleam, its pipes are exposed. Though the basin is empty of water, the characters – in black cossies and condom-like white caps – who clamber out from under the stage seem to be emerging from some non-airy element. They scamper down the aisles as if in training; they crouch at the sides of the auditorium or behind the iron balconies, stretching, coiled, tensed for a race; they stand with their arms wishboned into a diving position.
Amphibians backstrokes its way through the careers of two one-time champs. Once lovers, and now separated, this young man and woman revisit a time when, as 14-year-olds, they made "the water boil", and each other simmer, as their coach snarled. Around them, former team-mates tell of lack of talent, loss of nerve, bad luck and injury. A beautifully voiced choric nymph adds a dubious metaphysical dimension. Waters's play is interesting but not startling. Cressida Brown's direction makes it extraordinary: both detailed and fluid. The lighting flickers and glares so that when a girl runs a razor over the hollows in her boyfriend's back, you feel you can see each speed-impeding hair. On stage, the swimmers bend and sway and flutter like a shoal of fish. It's total immersion.
Theatre Delicatessen, the company who act like travelling players, perching in various disused spaces, have commandeered for their productions first an old piano factory and now an old school, which was once the headquarters of Uzbekistan Airways. Here, Frances Loy directs – with no site-specificity – A Doll's House. It's a new adaptation by Sophie Reynolds that rams home the heart of the play. It does so against the odds. It's ridiculous to set a play that is so dependent on particular constraints on women's lives in an uncertain part (jeans, big jumpers, City-ish suits) of the 21st century. And at first blush it seems potty to have an all-female cast. Yet such is the vigour of the action, pent up on a catwalk that begins to look like a rat run, that the modern clothes quickly cease to be obtrusive. The girls (it's a young cast) make their cross-dressing point: gleaming and authoritative when they are in male attire – with men's shoes proving to be the tipping point in producing a manly look – they show how arbitrary authority can be. Amid a clutch of thoughtful performances, there's a particularly striking double whammy from Melissa Woodbridge, who is both an easy-going tousled maid and a silky, smouldering Dr Rank.
At the opening of the evening, the cast parade in Elastoplast-coloured, thermal-style underwear to the sound of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's gruesome "Wives and Lovers". From time to time, transparent panels at one end of the stage light up to disclose, like specimens or installations, male figures squaring up to the audience, or a woman slowly unlacing Nora from the corset and bodice of her fancy-dress costume. When Nora finally scarpers she leaves not the shock that she did when the play was first performed in 1879, nor the bewilderment that can follow a production in which her defiance seems to require her to have a head transplant: her exit seems simply appropriate.
Eight years ago, the then chairman of the board of the RSC declared Camden too dodgy a place for a Shakespeare theatre. That was daft then and appears double-daft now, when the revamped Roundhouse looks like a comfortable, expansive and adaptable London base.
Lucy Bailey's production of Julius Caesar, first seen at Stratford, has no difficulty in gripping the far reaches of this former railway engine shed. Her big, blood-boltered interpretation points to a grisly lineage. It begins by adding a prefatory tussle between Romulus and Remus, who look like two flayed foetuses fighting their way out of the womb, and goes on to present a spectacularly gory assassination: Greg Hicks, who throughout winces and flinches as a fastidiously aloof and convincing Caesar, makes his dying throes almost as long drawn-out as those of Bottom playing Pyramus.
As always, the death is the liveliest scene in this most disappointing of Shakespeare's plays. Despite its inspiring power on the page (Nelson Mandela drew on it when incarcerated on Robben Island), it's almost impossible to make Julius Caesar galvanic throughout: it's stiff at the beginning and messily episodic at the end. Bailey does everything she can to excite and ignite the drama. Too much at times. Accompanied by a rousing brass band, William Dudley's blood-coloured videos – of flames and the Capitol and a writhing, flickering, raging horde – are arresting but often self-defeating: they make the onstage crowd look puny, and miss the sense of a rabble being won over by rhetoric. The domestic scenes – the only real hope of inner, that's to say emotional, life in this most public of plays – are scanted, not by being underdone but by being overplayed: it can't be necessary for a Roman matron to roar on her knees.
Less than a decade ago it would have been a cause of wonder that all three of these plays are directed by – gasp! – women. Nowadays, thank goodness, this is not quite such a rarity: it's scarcely worth pointing out. So mum's the word. Though perhaps not quite the right one.
