All the world's a bed in Lucy Bailey's terrific 40s production of The Taming of the Shrew. At times the entire stage is filled with a massive satin counterpane and pillows. At others, Ruth Sutcliffe's design covers the floor in a sand-coloured sheet under which characters crawl towards each other: you can see the lumps trying to hump.
This world is also a whirl: always on the move and changing shape, emotionally and physically. David Caves is a commanding, leaping Petruchio who wants not so much to subdue Kate, certainly not to damp her down, but to get into bed with her; as a groom he turns into an antic Bacchus figure, with a huge bunch of grapes as a codpiece. As Kate, Lisa Dillon is first led on in shackles. Unleashed, she is a maenad: not crabby but sardonic and perpetually restless, she scrambles over the stage, squaring up to several men at a time; she drinks from a hip flask; she wees; she smokes – and she fumes. Making an impressive RSC debut as one of the insipid Bianca's lovesick suitors, Gavin Fowler spins round as if caught up by great gusts of romantic feeling; disguised as a tutor, sinking meekly under the weight of his satchel, he makes you realise how central to the play is his pseudonym: "Cambio".
This is the first time I have been able to enjoy Shakespeare's most scantily written drama. Rarely can it have been so dynamic and rarely so feral. On the one hand, the shrew; on the other Nick Holder's lumbering, hog-like Christopher Sly, who when set on by roisterers looks like a part of some yet larger grunting monster. On all sides, people tumbling into bed.
Introduced by the Christopher Sly prologue (often cut), so that it is presented as a dream or story, the main action has some of the curse lifted from it. The prologue also makes the play look less merely misogynistic. Many are misled, manipulated, jeered at, played with here. Sly himself is a lout persuaded that he is a lord.
Still, it is only Kate who is tortured: quite literally, since she is deprived of food. And it is only Kate who is required to change. Nothing can make the speech (really the only proper speech in the play) in which she asks women to put their hands under their husbands' feet either sympathetic or good sense. Yet in Bailey's production something mysterious happens. Dillon speaks it with such careful consideration – ironic, gentle, with a thrill of anticipation – that it becomes truly moving. This is Dillon's triumph but it is Caves's too: they act together as if they are reaching not a truce but an understanding, as if dominance and submission were a tease taken seriously only by the dullards around them. They have been partly playing, trying each other out, and now can go to bed in earnest. Bailey has made this ill-natured drama look as if it has a heart. And loins.
Cleverly thought out, meticulously staged and bloodless, Katie Mitchell's staging of The Trial of Ubu doesn't so much chill your marrow as leave you cold. Alfred Jarry has a lot to answer for: his Ubu Roi (1896) ushered in a fleet of absurdist dramas, beginning with Ionesco and ending (I hope) with the Goons. This tale of a murderous dictator had its origins in a play Jarry wrote as a teenager to satirise a schoolmaster – and that is what it sounds like: tirelessly rejoicing in bums and squelches and self-suckings off. It is staged here as a puppet regime Punch and Judy show (Jarry favoured the use of marionettes), a prequel to Simon Stephens's new play, which shows Ubu – a composite of all psychopathic despots – appearing in an international court, put on trial for war crimes.
The segue between the two plays is brilliantly contrived. Lizzie Clachan's design creates in a hemispherical wooden wall a navy-blue window in which the puppets can strut their stuff; when the walls around this peel back, the real flesh-and-blood actors are encased in larger boxes, as if everyone were on trial. What's more, these characters talk in stylised marionette manner: the speeches of defendant and witnesses are ventriloquised through the voices of interpreters who, played with exquisite precision by Nikki Amuka-Bird and Kate Duchêne, are blandly mechanical. Still, however skilful, this is a contrivance. Stephens has written a tribunal play which has been turned into a theatrical showcase.
Another kitchen sink, another sharp-edged, finely acted new play at the Bush. First there was the triumph that was Tom Wells's The Kitchen Sink, which last week won the writer the Critics' Circle most promising playwright award. Now here is Nancy Harris's Our New Girl, also set entirely in a kitchen. This one is full of shiny surfaces, gleaming pans and long knives.
Harris takes the much-examined figure of the nanny – who usually enters the fiction of middle-class life as either saint or demon – to create a picture of distress. A pregnant mother with a mostly absent, self-regarding husband is sinking gradually into disorder. Charlotte Gwinner's production makes the most of some neat plotting – involving sharp edges, a nasty secret pet and some treacherous-looking chairs – which ensures that this domestic dismay is teased out with frissons of alarm. Still, the real power of the play lies in the subtle inconclusiveness of the character studies. As the child, Jonathan Teale has a Midwich Cuckoos stare which frightens his schoolfriends, but perhaps he's just lonely; Mark Bazeley has the least interesting part as the good-works, selfish daddy swishing out of the house in his Palestinian scarf. Denise Gough's nanny is desolate, needy and capable: compelling because she is so unguessable.
As the mother, Kate Fleetwood unravels – not hysterically but without much hope. She surfs on the riffs of the play and she winkles out its humour.She also sports the most convincingly pregnant stomach ever seen on stage. It is convincing because you see her belly button. That was Fleetwood's idea.
