By the Bog of Cats, Wyndhams, London <br></br> Grand Hotel, Donmar Warehouse, London <br></br> Anna in the Tropics, Hampstead, London

Scrawny, feral, dangerous... this Holly has spikes

From the moment Holly Hunter's Hester Swane appears, dragging a black swan's corpse as if it were her shadow, you hardly need be told that By the Bog of Cats - Marina Carr's modern variation on Medea - is heading for a mournful conclusion. Dominic Cooke's ultimately harrowing production is set in a ghostly impressionistic landscape where a grey lake of ice stretches away to a gloomy forest. Even as Hunter's ragged Hester lugs the bird towards her gypsy caravan, she sees a stranger in a funereal topper who says he's a ghost-fancier, has followed her for a while, and will return at dusk.

It must be said the portents are laid on with a trowel - as Hester then runs into Bríd Brennan's Catwoman, a blind crone who can see the future and bodes at length about the devastation this day will bring if Hester doesn't decamp as the land-owning villagers are demanding. During its weakest scenes, By the Bog... is stuck in a Yeatsian Celtic twilight full of hokum. It can also be Irish Twee, with Catwoman's habit of drinking milk from a saucer definitely tilting into the whimsical. Hunter's Irish accent can go askew, too, so she occasionally sounds as if she's from Louisiana and struggling with false teeth.

Still, this production does become gripping thanks to the actress's visceral intensity. All scrawny sinews, with long matted hair, Hunter looks both worryingly underfed and dangerous. She is unforgettably feral, gnawing at a handful of wedding cake from the festivities where her ex-lover, Gordon MacDonald's Carthage Kilbride, is marrying a rich girl. MacDonald's physical struggles with Hunter switch between potent bitterness and longing. Her young daughter - who is torn between her parents and eventually dies in her mother's arms - isplayed by Kate Costello with lovely naturalness. Hunter's scenes with her are full of a profound tenderness that is yoked, in the end, with a violent desperation which leaves you choked with shock and grief.

Quitting rural Ireland, we fly to 1920s Berlin and Grand Hotel, directed by Michael Grandage. The Donmar has a penchant for staging musicals where the generic upbeat grins and glitz come with an edgy, dark side. It's not a Sondheim show this time round, but designer Christopher Oram still lets us know it's going to be glamorous and grim. The hotel name hangs over us, forged in gigantic steel letters, seen from the wrong side and unlit. Underneath, a clutch of residents - the dapper baron, the ageing prima ballerina, the big businessman - mill round in front of a mural showing grotesque caricatures from the Otto Dix school.

There is, of course, comedy and romance, a happy ending for some, and swinging numbers including a storming Charleston by the whole troupe. But it's also 1928, the swish clientele are secretly on the skids and their underlings are financially compromised. What's most exciting, visually and musically, is the weave. The jazz-based numbers - with score and lyrics by Robert Wright, George Forrest and Maury Yeston - thread in and out, overlaid with Luther Davis's dialogue, and Grandage's production is correspondingly fluid. Adam Cooper's choreography is particularly exciting when the throng criss-cross in circles, and Helen Baker's Flaemmchen, the flirty stenographer, is a slinky mover.

However, the stomping dance of the angry lower orders lacks conviction and, finally, there's something plodding about this show. It's not just the repetitively thrumming double-bass, or the simplistic contrast of a birth and a death at the end, it's that everything is over-clarified. The 1932 (non-musical) film of Grand Hotel is intriguing because you're not sure what Joan Crawford's Flaemmchen or John Barrymore's louche Baron Von Gaigern are up to, whereas here Baker and Julian Ovenden can't stop bursting into song and revealing all.

Also circa 1928 but across the Atlantic, a Cuban family has settled in Florida and established a cigar-making company. In Nilo Cruz's play, Anna in the Tropics, Diana Quick's Ofelia and her husband, Santiago, are proud of their traditional manufacturing. She and her daughters, Conchita and Marela, spend their days with the other workers, hand-rolling tobacco, and they're thrilled by the factory's newly-arrived lector, Juan Julian (Enzo Cilenti). Indeed, Cruz would have us believe the ladies find this literary fellow so awesomely attractive that, on first meeting him, Ofelia can't speak and Marela pees her pants.

That aside, lectors were a fascinating feature of the Cuban cigar industry. They would sit in the middle of the shopfloor in a kind of secular pulpit, reading out great literary works as disseminating local and world news.

Regrettably, little of the lector's political significance comes across in this B-rate romance which unbelievably won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Cruz has, perversely, chosen to make his drama little more than a Mills and Boon with any hints of industrialising dark satanic mills being, essentially, sidelined. His characters' only serious worries concern their love lives. So the only international events that Marela and Conchita get to debate are the throes of passion in Anna Karenina. The snippets recited manage to make Tolstoy sound like Russia's Jilly Cooper.

To be fair, this play's romantic speeches, strewn with poetic imagery, might be more persuasive if performed by a wholly bona fide Cuban-American company. In this British production, co-produced by Sam Mendes's company Scamp Film and Theatre Ltd, Indhu Rubasingham's cast aren't helped by orchestral strings accompanying their slushiest lines, or by the gauze backdrop which - painted with a grey street and blue sky - contrives to look dreary and sugary.

There are several powerfully tense scenes and some fine performances. Quick has warmth, humour, and steely strength. Lorraine Burroughs portrays the naive, smitten Marela with vigour, Peter Polycarpou's stolid Cheche becomes a predator with a surreptitiousness that's truly creepy and Rachel Stirling's Conchita confronts her unsatisfactory husband with ferocious ardour. Still, that can't conceal the choppy plot and schematic parallels with Tolstoy which Cruz spells out as if we are dimwits. Unlike the original lectors, he has surely underestimated his audience.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'By the Bog of Cats': Wyndhams, London WC2 (0870 060 6633), to 26 Feb; 'Grand Hotel': Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (0870 060 6624), to 12 Feb; 'Anna in the Tropics': Hampstead, London NW3 (020 7722 9301), to 8 Jan