Julius Caesar; Hello, Dolly!; Peter Pan – review

Donmar, London; Curve, Leicester; Bristol Old Vic

Always fascinating, sometimes infuriating, Phyllida Lloyd's all-female production of Julius Caesar is one of the most important theatrical events of the year. It shows that the stage has been starving itself by allowing only men to speak most of Shakespeare's lines. It proves yet again that theatre can be an eye-stretching medium in which disguise may be simultaneously penetrated and believed. It hits the stage with real urgency.

The justification for casting one of the most male of Shakespeare's plays – light on women characters and heavy on assassination and oration – is provided by a framing device well suited to the old warehouse that is the Donmar. The idea is that the production is being staged in a women's prison, designed by Bunny Christie as a monochrome, clanking, grey-dribbled space with walkways and CCTV cameras.

Inmates' characters map on to those in Julius Caesar. Frances Barber is a swaggering Caesar. As a thug who seems (the narrative is not always clear) also to be a warder, she draws on the ripeness and abundance that has made her so sensuous as an actress and turns it into violence. She is not nuanced but compulsive; this is a Caesar whom people would follow out of fear and would want to kill. Jenny Jules's Cassius is wiry, fervent, focused. The cast also includes actors from Clean Break, the theatre company that works with female offenders.

The setting doesn't have the political resonance that the RSC's production, with a cast of black actors, had earlier this year. But prison is a strong metaphor for the constraints of tyranny and exclusion, and here it carries a further echo. It was to Julius Caesar that Nelson Mandela turned when incarcerated on Robben Island: in his copy of Shakespeare he marked the lines that begin "Cowards die many times before their deaths".

All this is powerful enough not to need pushing, but Lloyd cannot leave things alone, and interrupts Shakespeare's play with jail bulletins. A fight between Romans turns into a vicious fisticuffs between inmates, distracting and muddling when we've been wired into the heart of the arguments and action.

Yet some obtrusive directorial touches are strikingly effective. Caesar is choked to death in the front row of the stalls, so that the audience are in the position of a crowd at a real-live event, being confused, having to crane to see, or follow the action on monitors. Cush Jumbo's radiant Mark Antony delivers "Friends, Romans" flat out on the ground, surrounded by a circle of guns. The speech turns from a piece of dazzling rhetoric into a desperate plea for the life of an individual and a state.

The triumph is to steer the action through the incandescent Brutus of Harriet Walter. Often picked out by Neil Austin's chilling lighting, she is utterly concentrated and increasingly riven. She suggests in one person the conflict of a nation. At the end, destroyed both as con and conspirator by her own actions, she is crumpled and diminished and self-knowing: the very texture of her skin seems to have changed.

The matchmaker star of Hello, Dolly! is the most unusual of musical roles: a not-youthful comic heroine who is used to arranging everything – "furniture and daffodils and lives" – and who carries business cards advertising her ability to replug pierced ears. On stage Ethel Merman squared up to it; on screen Barbra Streisand sashayed through it. In Regent's Park Samantha Spiro flew and cackled like a tiny cockatoo.

Janie Dee, well, she can't help herself: she charms. Yet she does so with nutcracker sassiness. While her face dimples away so that even her teeth seem to wink, she has grit in her voice – if not gravel, certainly shingle; her shimmying and cleavaging (especially when offering more dumplings) is flagrantly seductive. You really see the room swaying as the cast bend and melt around her: she's like a welcome breeze.

Paul Kerryson's production, the big show in a terrifically varied line-up at the Curve, lives up to Dee. It is buoyantly orchestrated, strong-voiced and wonderfully fluid, swept along by David Needham's finely choreographed dances. Before the Parade Passes By comes up new minted. The tray-dancing waiters are nimble with their splits and leaps, though their restaurant looks understaffed. Laura Pitt-Pulford as the hat-hating milliner beguiles. Sara Perks populates the stage with gorgeous, wasp-waisted, mutton-sleeved costumes. The crimson and scarlet, velvet and satin flounces in which Dee appears for the title number makes her look like a live coal in a fire: the whole of the stage becomes flushed with red light.

Bristol Old Vic's Christmas shows are an essential part of the non-trad identity of this theatre. Devised by the company, directed by Sally Cookson, they have a weave-your-own element. In Peter Pan you see the strings and slings that propel the cast through the air and bounce them towards the stalls. Captain Hook (Stuart McLoughlin) wears a kilt and DMs. He enters by bashing his way through a brick wall, and while planning revenge on Peter Pan gleefully dismembers a teddy bear. He himself ends up munched by an alligator made from a go-kart whose tremendous orange and white snapping jaws have been jaggedly cut from a traffic cone.

Tinged with JM Barrie's own darkness and dismay, Tristan Sturrock's Peter is a youthful teddy boy who is said to be cocky even when asleep, while Tinker Bell (Saikat Ahamed) is a crosspatch in gauze and trainers whose speech is just on the brink of intelligibility, as if she (well, he) were speaking under water. Nana the canine nanny is a fat beardy in a pinny (Howard Coggins) who gets very annoyed when instructed to sit.

It's the mixture of right-on and far-out that produces a distinctive tang. Wendy (Madeleine Worrall) is instructed that she will only take off into flight with the help of some wonderful thoughts, so she remembers sitting on her brother's head until he passed out. That same brother is given a Chinese burn by Peter Pan because he says his sister is "only" a girl. Girl power really is reaching through the theatre.

Contributor

Susannah Clapp

The GuardianTramp

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