Gaslight, Old Vic, London Macbeth, Minerva, Chichester

It's hard to say which is creakier: the Old Vic's rickety seating (which artistic director Kevin Spacey should oil immediately) or the rusty vintage play up on stage. Don't get me wrong. I was quite looking forward to this rekindling of Gaslight, Patrick Hamilton's pseudo-Victorian thriller (from 1939), where the young wife, Bella, is nearly persuaded that she is insane by her covertly criminal spouse, Jack. He persistently tells her that she is imagining things while he is pretending to go out every night - only to prowl around in the house's mysteriously locked upper chambers.

In Peter Gill's period production, we see Rosamund Pike's elegant Bella being mentally crushed by Andrew Woodall's Jack in a claustrophobic parlour. The cat-and-mouse games played by the psychotic patriarchal husband are engrossingly horrid, and Woodall is always compulsive viewing. His towering, moustached Jack exudes scarily brooding violence. When he cups Bella's chin in his hand, you know he would love to break her neck.

However, Pike needs to be more shaky and wan to make Bella's credulity credible. She conveys nervous excitability but, with scarcely a hair out of place, hardly looks as if she is verging on a nervous breakdown. So when Kenneth Cranham's Detective Rough suddenly turns up like her guardian angel, confirming all her suppressed suspicions, it seems unfeasible that he could be a figment of her imagination - as she later believes.

Cranham is earthily likeable with flashes of exuberant humour. However, most of the time, the plot revelations are ploddingly drawn out and Rough's showdown with Jack degenerates into ropey melodrama. The fact that this raises indulgent laughter from the audience, along with panto-style hisses for the villain at the end, indicates the company has not managed to make this psychological drama look like much more than B-rate pulp.

Rupert Goold's new production of Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart, is far more chilling. Blood gushes nightmarishly from scullery taps and battlefield body-bags suddenly writhe with supernatural life. Goold is a fast-rising young Shakespearean director who thinks through his innovative concepts with exciting intelligence. Maybe the video projections need more work, but setting the action in a grim tiled basement with a clanking industrial lift works brilliantly. At first we are in a war-zone hospital, with the Weird Sisters hovering around the screaming and dying, disguised as nun-like nurses. Then we're transported to the dour, hellish kitchens at Glamis where the witches have transformed into the serving maids preparing Duncan's last supper, busily cleavering into dead birds.

Stewart's Macbeth is like a sergeant major who has fought his way up to officer class and who, once ensconced as a murderous dictator, starts looking alarmingly like Stalin. This is the Scottish/Soviet Play, courtesy of a few textual cuts, with Martin Turner's Banquo assassinated by undercover agents in a jolting train carriage which then turns into a long, desultory banqueting table. Kate Fleetwood is also a bewitchingly Slavic Lady Macbeth: an electrifyingly fierce femme fatale who tragically represses her vulnerability. Here's hoping this production transfers to London for a longer run.

'Gaslight' (0870 040 0046) to 18 August; 'Macbeth' (01243 781312) to 1 September