Yes of course he’ll be missing the finesse of many of the lines but the core of the emotions comes raging through the

Yes, of course, he’ll be missing the finesse of many of the lines, but the core of the emotions comes raging through, the oddness of the verse forgotten among the magical pictures. He keeps asking to watch it again.It takes an Australian film-maker to show us how good Shakespeare can be. Yet so much British staged Shakespeare is still Doublet and Hose It’s theatre as heritage park. Or is it, even worse, a lamentable desire to reassure ourselves by endlessly revisiting the Olde Worlde, instead of ploughing energy, cash and imaginative risk-taking into the New?. Like an Olympic high-diver, each joke breathes deeply, pads forward for its run-up, does its little toe-stretch hop on the springy tip of the board, pirouettes in the air, and then our laughter explodes as it majestically hits the water. Like an Olympic high-diver, each joke breathes deeply, pads forward for its run-up, does its little toe-stretch hop on the springy tip of the board, pirouettes in the air, and then our laughter explodes as it majestically hits the water.

Time and again, Simon sends his jokes on to the run and watches them perform different-yet-identical twirls The laughter inevitably follows. But like the Chinese diver who too comfortably sweeps up all the gold medals, where’s the drama, why watch? Don’t you find you’ve zapped over to the news, just in the hope of variety?
Neil Simon’s 1985 rewrite of arguably his greatest hit feels like your chance to attend a masterclass in comic writing given by the god of American stage sitcom. Each gag is carefully prepared ­ off-hand reference, set-up, run-up, punchline ­ and shazam! But too obviously, so mechanically. Any chance for characterisation is hastily abandoned to enable each smooth pirouette, any possibility for depth or sensitivity is squandered in the scrabble for the next pay-off.

Lifelong friends ask each other basic questions to engineer each gag run.You can guess the plot: Olive (Jenny Seagrove) is a news editor, a slob who smokes cigarettes under her hand, basically a man; Florence (Paula Wilcox), fuss-budget elbowed by 5ft 3in toupee-wearing husband, is offered refuge by her closest pal. She then sets about tidying up and cooking and cleaning until slobby Olly can take it no more. In between, there are weekly games of Trivial Pursuit with the four other girls from High School, and games of optimistic pursuit with the two unattached, barely bilingual Spanish brothers from the apartment upstairs.That’s it. It’s the sort of play where the banter is so unremitting (the Trivial Pursuit acts like a feed-line conveyor belt) that a short sequence of dumb play at the top of Act II comes as a godsend. It’s the sort of production where overcooked capons belch enough dry ice to quell a May Day protest, and Spaniards pull handkerchiefs from their pockets and weep in foetal positions. You know you’re in New York because the curtain goes up on an apartment featuring a Budweiser box, a Red Sox pennant, a giant Coors bottle-top on the wall, and, yes, a Stars and Stripes on the hall wall.There’s little subtlety about Elijah Moshinsky’s production, but what choice did he have when confronted by this juggernaut of joke contrivance? The six actresses and two actors do their best to bring characterisation to characterless chunks of dialogue, but too often resort to talking out of the side of their mouths to prove they’re American. I’m not saying I didn’t laugh, but we all walked away knowing we’d watched something unenlightening and desperately old-fashioned.Booking to 16 June (020-7494 5070)..

Dark in both senses, Wycherley’s first play is set in candlelit rooms and in St James’s Park at night ­ where, in the late 17th century, masked ladies and gallants made the shrubbery rustle. But Sir Simon Addleplot and Lady Flippant have, like the other characters, no need to visit the park to put on false faces. He has disguised himself as a clerk in order to woo his rich employer’s daughter, and she, though desperate for marriage, disdains it, “because the widow’s fortune (whether supposed or real) is her chiefest bait; the more chary she seems of it, and the more she withdraws it, the more eagerly the busy grasping fry will bite.”Darkness and deceit aren’t the only cause for confusion. One has to fight one’s way through not only a complex plot with numerous similar characters (two greedy old bawds, three rakes on the make) but a thicket of 300-year-old slang.