First Night: King Lear and The Seagull, The Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon

For the critics, the press performance of this production of King Lear, starring Ian McKellen, had a faintly surreal quality. The analogy is not exact but it felt as if the jury had finally been admitted to the court-room nine weeks into a heavily reported trial on which virtually everyone, bar them, had already delivered a verdict.

The first night should have happened on 3 April, but Frances Barber (who plays Goneril) injured her knee and the director, Trevor Nunn, decreed that professional reviewers would be barred until she recovered.

I wish I could say that I thought it well worth the wait, but I'm afraid that, with the exception of William Gaunt's piercing, beautifully spoken Gloucester, I found this an oddly unmoving production. The monumental wrecked balcony with red plush curtains that forms a permanent backdrop and the tumultuous organ chords and procession of prostrating courtiers at the start are pure Phantom of the Opera. Beyond suffering further damage during the storm and the explosive war sequence, the set for this turn-of-the-century Russian-style staging remains resolutely unused and looks increasingly irrelevant as the play moves away from the court.

McKellen gives a performance of great technical resource, full of those unpredictable shifts of tack and gear that betoken cracked wits and incipient senility. He can work revelatory variations on traditional line-readings. For example, in the final scene he carries the corpse of Cordelia and emits a couple of grief-throttled howls. Then he suddenly turns the word "howl" into a peremptory order to the onlookers. How could you be human, he implies, and remain silent at such a piteous sight?

Yet often the detail comes over as fussy and unfelt. Apart from in some of his tender moments with Sylvester McCoy's spoon-playing Fool and in the chastened, bashful quiet of his awakening to Romola Garai' s irritating Cordelia, I was more conscious of an actor making intelligent, surprising choices than of a tragic hero pushed to the limits of experience. McKellen's Lear may expose his genitals on the heath, but the portrayal is too calculated and unspontaneous to give us access to the character's naked heart.

The now-recovered Barber offers standard-issue stage-villainy, one step up from Cruella de Vil, as Goneril, and isn't hugely subtler depicting the actressy vanity and desperate sexual clinging of Arkadina in Nunn's account with the same company of The Seagull.

This production demonstrates all the disadvantages of performing Chekhov on an epic thrust-stage of such lofty height. As in King Lear, the effects are frequently bloated - where Nunn has the Fool hanged by sadistic soldiers at the end of the first half of Shakespeare's tragedy, at the same point in the Chekhov, he makes a comparable and unnecessary innovation by showing us Konstantin's preliminary botched attempt at suicide in a sequence of hyperactive melodrama.

McKellen delivers an exquisitely funny performance as Sorin. But Richard Goulding is so nondescript that he can only scrape the surface of Konstantin's oedipal neediness and desperate sense of failure.

Sadly, no compelling thematic links between the two plays are brought to light by their juxtaposition. For work by a director of Nunn's calibre, these paired, cross-cast productions emerge as a double disappointment.