Clive Davis

What a frustrating evening. Jez Butterworth’s eagerly awaited new drama comes tantalisingly close to sweeping us off our feet: Laura Donnelly’s hypnotic central performance as Veronica, matriarch of a Blackpool guesthouse, will certainly linger in the memory. Yet in the end, the director Sam Mendes hasn’t been able to impose enough discipline on Butterworth’s penchant for baggy, poetic speeches.

Are the VIPs any good? The audience at the performance I saw had already made up its mind on that score, breaking into prolonged applause, Broadway-style, when they made their entrances in the first instalment, which explores what happens when a dowdy, middle-aged wife discovers that her workaholic husband is having a dalliance with his secretary.

Absurdity is piled on absurdity. Some of the jokes at Jay’s expense reminded me of The Strike, that marvellous little Comic Strip film in which a fictional version of Al Pacino sets about rewriting the miners’ strike when he plays Arthur Scargill on the big screen. Ireland’s writing isn’t as ingenious as that, but Harrelson gives such a winningly preposterous display, flouncing around Max Jones’s sleek set in a pair of outrageous pantaloons, that you’re willing to overlook the implausibilities. The moment when Jay, who delivers a few slaps at theatre critics, reveals that he is just as desperate for acclaim as any of his fellow thespians provoked a storm of laughter.

If you had doubts about whether the actor-director has the gravitas to take on one of the great Shakespearean roles, you’d have them confirmed here. At 62, Branagh has entered bus pass territory, yet there is still a hint of the unruly colt to the king who announces his decision to divide his domain between his daughters. For all the solidity of his verse-speaking, it’s hard to believe that this glossy-haired patriarch is really on the verge of mental and spiritual disintegration.

Very occasionally, a play comes along that is so weirdly inept that you don’t quite know how to respond. If you were to stumble across Penelope Skinner’s new drama in a thinly populated corner of the Edinburgh Fringe, you would put it down as an undergrad experiment. To find it in the West End, with Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily James in the lead roles, is bizarre.

Sondheim may have acquired the reputation of being the high priest of well-heeled Manhattan angst, but this show offers a reminder of what fun company he can be too. The irreplaceable Janie Dee reprised the pert bossa nova parody The Boy From . . . , Joanna Riding was memorably flustered on Getting Married Today, and the sight of Damian Humbley, Gavin Lee and Jason Pennycooke upstaging each other with feather dusters on Everybody Ought to Have a Maid was an absolute joy. If you care about musical theatre, you cannot miss this show.

You could sense the audience willing on the gutsy performers on press night. Yet it was just as hard to ignore the nagging impression that the project is several rewrites away from the finished article. The rock score by the debutant composer Nick Butcher aspires to be anthemic, but drifts into U2-lite territory. There’s not much cheer in the lyrics either: Butcher and his co-writer, Tim Ling, string together solemn platitudes as they piece together Fraser’s recovery after a beach accident which left him paralysed from the neck down when he was just 17.

The play, inevitably can only deliver a precis of a book that sprawls over some 700 pages. Sometimes the pace reminded me of the unhappy stage adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor epic The Mirror and the Light. The other obvious problem is that the storyline — including the bleak twist at the end — is so implausible. Strip away the gore and the gossip about Norton’s private parts, and what do you have? A stylishly mounted, second-rate melodrama.

This is no ordinary revival. Daniel Fish’s Tony award-winning production, which crossed the Atlantic to the Young Vic last year and now gets an upgrade to a traditional proscenium arch, is just the kind of experiment to set musical lovers at each other’s throats. Some will praise it as an audaciously grungy reinvention; others will call it sacrilege.

Sylvia is the show that came back from the dead. When it was presented at the Old Vic five years ago, the project suffered multiple crises and opened as a work-in-progress. Prince, founder of the ZooNation dance troupe, subsequently described herself as “embarrassed and out of my depth”. Now after rewrites the piece has been pared from three hours to just over two and a half. It’s still messy, but the good news is that the soul singer Beverley Knight returns in the role of Emmeline. Her voice, when you get to hear it, remains spine-tingling. There just isn’t enough of it.