Fiona Mountford

One aspect that cannot be faulted is the energy, stamina and athleticism of the performers, many of whom come from dance backgrounds. Carragher herself must run tens of miles during each performance; her indefatigability is commendable, even though McPherson’s bewilderingly clunky script leaves her with far too much exposition to plough through. This could have been, should have been, a grippingly urgent piece of entertainment to set the heart racing and mind humming with potential parallels between Panem and our world today. As it is, I was mentally planning my journey home long before the end.

It is very hard to care much about our bland and characterless hero, who has teeth of such dazzling whiteness that even the gods must be blinded. Anyway, he discovers the fact of his divine parentage and vows to return “home” to Olympus (another huge irritation is that almost all the characters have American accents, leading to excess, bizarre and culturally unfamiliar pronunciation. Zeus’s wife here, phonetically, is Hair-a).

The first half hour in particular is a dangerously low-fi grind, with the action coming over as laboured and effortful and the exaggerated working-class London accents a trial by glottal stop. The threat to young Oliver (at the performance I saw the part was played by the excellent Raphael Korniets, suitably pinched, pale and pure of voice) comes from the pantomime school of emotion.

Sean Foley, alas, is no Stanley Kubrick. This director has a dispiriting habit of reducing everything he touches to silliness, which he repeats once again here in an adaptation co-written with Armando Iannucci. Whereas Kubrick has pitch-black comedy intercutting a mood of gravitas, Foley unwisely has occasional serious moments raising their heads above cheap jokes, meaning that those unfamiliar with the film will quite simply wonder what all the fuss is about.

It says much about us – as human beings, as well as consumers of culture in which attractive women traditionally don’t fare too well in strangers’ apartments – that we are poised for the mood to turn and for something bad to happen to Irene. It doesn’t, but this is the sort of rare and delicious piece about which the fewer details we know in advance the better, so as to savour the mercurially shifting tone as it unfolds.

The role of the Captain contains the faintest echoes of Johnny “Rooster” Byron, the iconic part in Jerusalem that made Rylance a star, and he consciously plays to the audience, raising his eyebrows for comic effect and addressing various lines directly to us. He sails dangerously close to giving a “turn” instead of acting a part; his blustering innocent shtick and bent-kneed waddle of a walk is overdone, leaving the series of sucker punch revelations of the third act to land with too much of a discordant jolt.

For all the good intentions of the production, my reaction to the piece remains the same 18 years on. Time hangs heavy as one fast-paced escapade hurtles into the next, given that emotional engagement with these characters is vanishingly hard to come by. I found myself doing an excess of watch-checking during the 100-minute playing time interrupted by an interval that does more for bar takings than the storytelling.

This must have seemed like such a good idea on paper. Yet as the old saw goes, theatre does not happen on paper, but on a stage. If any theatre was going to attempt a fully integrated bilingual production using spoken English and British Sign Language (BSL) it was going to be the Globe, a venue always at the forefront of kicking down perceived barriers to access and equality. Unfortunately, the finished product is dismal, nigh-on incomprehensible and with almost no depth of characterisation.

Despite the import of the events recounted, Jez Bond’s underwhelming production makes it hard to care overmuch about the characters, as Esme drinks too much to mask her pain and slowly spirals out of control, while Tara herself makes some perplexingly rash decisions. On a bare set backed by a half-hearted tracing of the iconic New York skyline, Esme withdraws ever further into herself, with Day hunched and slouching as a pitiful concave shape of a person.

Harris touches skillfully on the issue of illicit sexual fantasy, of how what we desire might run entirely contrary to our “normal” world view, but he fails to convince us fully as to why at least two of these pairs might have thought such a high-risk gamble worth taking. “I read about this in the New Yorker!” squawks one character in distress when things don’t go their way.

Penhall and director Matthew Warchus present a highly slick, possibly too highly slick, 90 minutes, in a traverse playing space created by the addition of an imposing block of onstage seating. The script begs for the addition of a little judicious depth and breadth, to flesh out crucial backstories more convincingly.

For all these plays’ wider concerns about a divided kingdom beleaguered by factions and rebellion, Icke sensibly focuses on the all-important central issue: which of the two available father figures will wayward Prince Hal (Toheeb Jimoh) choose to emulate? Will it be distant, pensive King Henry (Richard Coyle), visibly buckling under the weight of majesty? Or will it be the roistering Falstaff, lording it over a den of low-lives in the scrappy taverns of Eastcheap?

Clarkson is magnificent, giving the performance of the evening, shaping Mary into a figure of almost ethereal radiance, present but also absent. She is, we gradually and painfully learn, a morphine addict, driven to drugs by grief and loneliness, while her husband and sons seek solace in long, whisky-fuelled sessions in bars.

Butterworth’s writing is resonant but proceeds at far too languid a pace. Mendes would have done well to have trimmed the three-hour running time, especially given that much is withheld for too long, until a fiery tumble of revelations in the final half hour.

And Triplett is convincing as idiosyncratic Gran, gruff but warm in equal measure. Meanwhile, Daniel Rigby is the frantic hotel manager who turns the Magnificent, in its riot of red and pink colouring, into a cross between Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel and Fawlty Towers. There is a decent amount to work on here – but also much to admire.