A wet and wonderful farewell to magic

Perverse though it may sound, it seems fitting to begin with an ending this week. In Act Five of The Tempest, Prospero famously prepares to break his magic staff and quit his enchanted isle. And through him, Shakespeare was (many believe) symbolically saying his goodbyes to the theatre.

Perverse though it may sound, it seems fitting to begin with an ending this week. In Act Five of The Tempest, Prospero famously prepares to break his magic staff and quit his enchanted isle. And through him, Shakespeare was (many believe) symbolically saying his goodbyes to the theatre.

How appropriate then that an excellent staging of this late romance should be the final production at the Almeida in Islington, before the venue closes for a much-needed refurbishment. Actor-manager Ian McDiarmid is indeed playing the departing master-wizard, even as his company get ready for an adventurous bus station residency in the brave new world of - erm - King's Cross.

Resisting a sentimental farewell, director Jonathan Kent's vision of the play is forcefully bleak and alludes to the Almeida's own crumbling, leaky architecture. The island (designed by Paul Brown) is a ruin-cum-demolition site. The stage is a heap of rubble. Rain buckets down through the roof.

McDiarmid's Prospero, a scrawnily weathered and windswept old man, makes sense of this scenery psychologically: we have entered the realm of his imagination and since he has been cast out of his rightful kingdom of Milan by his usurping brother, his outlook is scarred by depression and bitterness.

Kent's cast point up the hierarchies of power on the island, too. Prospero spitefully torments his native underlings, Ariel and Caliban; they are also representative of the sexual urges he struggles to suppress.

Some performances don't quite make the grade. Aidan Gillen's bottle-blond Ariel - perhaps meant to be a punky catamite - looks more like a reject from a bland boy band. He sings less than ethereally. Nevertheless, he's an extraordinary, dream-like vision, dropping from the skies upside down. Anna Livia Ryan's Miranda embodies innocent optimism with energy. Moreover, great comic relief is provided by Alan David as the soused butler Stephano, and by Adrian Scarborough as his sidekick Trinculo, consummately playing the twerp and falling headlong into rock pools.

At Stratford, there are more bloody power struggles in the Bard's early clutch of history plays, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 & 3. These are the latest installments in the RSC's epic project, This England, which is charting the nation's troubled years from Richard II to Richard III.

Directed by Michael Boyd and centring round the Wars of the Roses, this trilogy is a marathon per se. Part 1 starts at 10am with quarrels breaking out over Henry V's corpse. Part 3 ends around 10.30 at night with Aidan McArdle's crook-backed Richard of Gloucester cooing over Edward IV's new-born heir with a nasty grin.

Unearthing these rarely seen plays and presenting them uncut is a bold, exciting idea. Gaps in the story are illuminatingly filled in, and this text - though not so poetically or intellectually rich as Shakespeare's mature plays - strikingly contains the seeds of Macbeth, the wife of young Henry VI's Protector ambitiously dabbling in black magic.

Tom Piper's set turns the Swan into a dynamic crossroads with battling factions (French versus British as well as Yorks versus Lancasters) storming through the audience on fanning walkways. They fly down acrobatically on ropes and trapezes - a circus of war with a touch of grim humour.

Boyd's ensemble are fierce and well-drilled. Clive Wood's crown-claiming Richard Plantagenet is outstandingly craggy and brooding. David Oyelowo as the boy-king Henry VI conveys both gentle dignity and quaking nerves. However, the development of his character ultimately seems arrested. Fiona Bell makes a riveting Joan of Arc, half righteous maid and half devil. But reincarnated as Henry's bride, Margaret, she becomes a wearing harridan. Boyd, bringing in ghosts who haunt about the living, highlights that England is caught up in cycles of vengeance. But with innumerable sallies and rallies, history seems to be not so much tragically repeating itself as going nowhere on a loop tape.

The clock is spinning backwards in Stephen Sondheim's lesser-known musical, Merrily We Roll Along, directed by Michael Grandage for the Donmar. This is the show's British premiÿre almost 20 years after its Broadway debut, but I'm not convinced it's an overlooked gem. Flashing back through the life of Franklin Shepard, a mega-popular fictional composer of Broadway hits, we see how youthful dreams and good friendships are destroyed. Julian Ovenden's handsome young Franklin is seduced by the glitterati and sells out artistically. He busts up with his lyricist, Daniel Evans' stubbornly experimental Charley. His marriage to Beth (Mary Stockley) is blasted by an affair as well.

Sondheim's back-to-front structure searches for a past age of innocence. However, this is a slushy, shallow affair compared to Pinter's similarly reversing play, Betrayal. Bitty vignettes produce brash caricatures. The lyrics are hardly Sondheim's most witty and his jazzy score is more monotonous than interestingly edgy.

However, Grandage's youthful cast have panache and lashings of brio that paper over the cracks, and a couple of numbers are arrestingly mournful - Evans' gently ironic "Good Thing Going" and Stockley's wounded yet devoted rendition of "Not a Day Goes By".

Finally, at Hampstead Theatre, Shelagh Stephenson's new seriocomedy, Ancient Lights, shares Sondheim's worries about people who don't stay true to themselves. Tom (Don McManus) has become a Hollywood celeb, appearing on tacky chat shows. He comes to stay for Christmas with his old English drama school chum, Bea (Joanne Pearce) - now a pushy PR. The festive mood is particularly under strain as they are joined by another old pal, Kitty (Gwyneth Strong). She's a supposedly hard-bitten journalist who has turned into neurotic jelly; everybody's lives eventually prove to be tissues of lies.

Ancient Lights is not Stephenson's most brilliant play. Often it's strained sitcom with overwritten repartee. Peace's pat delivery doesn't help and Strong is painfully rigid. But McManus is excellent - lankily loveable as well as horribly spoilt. Dermot Crowley is also charmingly funny as Bea's partner, a whimsical Irish novelist with a secret.

For all its faults, Ancient Lights has some startling plot twists and, even as the characters are trapped in a snow-bound mansion, their conversation expands to embrace profound questions - from how we manufacture our identities to what we will have faith in in the future.

'The Tempest': Almeida, N1 (020 7359 4404). to 17 Feb; 'Henry VI Parts 1, 2 & 3': Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon (01789 403403), in rep to 10 Feb; 'Merrily We Roll Along': Donmar Warehouse, WC2 (020 7369 1732), to 3 Mar; 'Ancient Lights': Hampstead Theatre, NW3 (020 7722 9301), to 6 Jan