Theatre: The theme of this play is acting

Antony and Cleopatra RST, Stratford Rose RNT Cottesloe, London Soul Train Victoria Palace, London Perfect Days Vaudeville, London

Perhaps the cast of Antony and Cleopatra were thrown by sharing the on-stage and off-stage areas with so many clever ideas. On the first night it seemed the actors were hanging in there, and projecting their own individual characters as energetically as they could, without relaxing enough to connect with anyone else's. But if it was hard to get a handle on the main relationships, the clever ideas were pretty easy to grasp.

Steven Pimlott's production presents Antony and Cleopatra as a self- consciously theatrical couple, constantly aware that they are living up to the roles they have been given. This is most explicit at their deaths: when Antony and Cleopatra die the bodies do not remain on stage. Alan Bates and Frances de la Tour simply get up and walk off into the wings.

All the world's a stage, especially for those who rule it: this is undoubtedly a theme in this play (as indeed it is in plenty of Shakespeare plays). Cleopatra knows that, soon, "The quick comedians/ Extemporally will stage us ... " It's just a bit clumsy to turn it into the central thesis. There's so much else we need to see.

Pimlott undercuts the pomp, beauty and breadth of the play by pushing the informal, bantering aspects to a new low. We see Bates first engaged in a fleeting moment of cunnilingus with de la Tour. But after that gimmicky opening, it's the slackly-staged moments which follow that show up what the production is missing. There is no sense of location or hierarchy or grandeur (or its flipside, terror). You have to guess at the massive world-changing power these two people possess.

De la Tour wanders the stage in a white linen wrap-around, like a mum holidaying beside the hotel pool. Pimlott would have done her a service if he'd built up her regality: so much else might have fallen naturally into place. When de la Tour tells us that the servant has seen some majesty, we wonder where the servant might have been to see it. Half-way through, she notices that there's "no more ceremony". There never was. Only in the monument scene, as de la Tour prepares for her death, does Pimlott allow the time and space for her talent to fill the auditorium.

Regular theatre-goers will have the uneasy feeling, watching this Antony, that a Simon Gray character - alert, ironic, punctured - has strolled into the first century BC. After the battle of Actium, Bates tells us "I am full of lead". He was half full of lead from the start: the first Antony I've seen who knew the result before he went off to battle. Bates is much better when handling melancholy or whimsy: joking about a crocodile or pointing out the shape of clouds.

As Octavius, Guy Henry goes halfway towards giving a fascinating performance. He's a sonorous beanpole figure who could easily double as an undertaker. In his first encounter with Antony, he's poised and lucid and holds thoughts back, knocking spots off Bates, who fidgets unnecessarily with his napkin. Fans of Bates, who long for him to pare his performances down, to reveal something plainer and richer than mocking self-awareness, must wait till a director drums out his familiar traits.

Half-way through Rose, someone murmured to me that it was a bit static. He was wrong. It was completely sedentary. Olympia Dukakis, who won an Oscar for best supporting actress in Moonstruck, plays Rose, a Jewish woman in her eighties, who is "sitting shivah", a period of mourning, in which the bereaved take off their shoes and sit for seven days on a low bench.

Martin Sherman's one-woman play is an absorbing anecdotal account of Rose's journey from a shtetl in Ukraine, through the ghetto in Warsaw, to a new life in Atlantic City. Along the way, Rose loses family and husbands, loses her faith in God and - eventually - loses some of her pride in her own people.

The play draws its strength from her longevity. This perspective allows the questions of Jewish identity to return again and again in a new light. Today, amazingly for a character who had grown up in a shtetl, the Yiddish language is dying out. The ironies are cumulative. After the war is over, the British Foreign Minister turns out to be the "goy from hell". When Rose's son marries, his new wife converts to Judaism and becomes, to Rose's horror, a stern Zionist. Dukakis fights, movingly, with her memories and the tricks of memory. Rose is a sharply imagined, perfectly detailed story. Nancy Meckler directs it with an admirably invisible hand and Dukakis performs it with enormous skill and sensitivity.

Glance at the number of songs listed in the programme for Soul Train - 27 in Act One, 20 in Act Two - and you'll think that this new compilation musical will take longer to complete its journey than the milk train. Thankfully, this breezy show races through its numbers, dispensing with any plot after the opening minutes. I hope I'm not giving it away, but the storyline goes like this: once black people sang gospel, then they ripped off their cassocks, showed us they were wearing sexy dresses after all and sang soul.

Soul Train is a high-speed trawl through the back catalogue. From the outset it is explicitly aimed at getting everyone to clap their hands above their heads and stand up and dance. If you don't, they'll come down and get you. It is only really theatre because it's taking place inside one. Soul Train sets out to be a party.

Only it pulled up at the wrong platform. I blame the theatre managers. They should have ripped out the first 10 rows of seats at the Victoria Palace and provided some space for people to get up and dance. They should have extended the stage out into the auditorium and made the audience part of the action. They should have sold cheap standing-room only tickets and erected barriers outside the theatre with bouncers letting people in for free if they had really dressed up. The atmosphere should start in the foyer. The drinks should be in plastic glasses. In the present circumstances - of a formal West End theatre - one's heart goes out to the performers.

Liz Lochhead's Perfect Days moves into the West End, thanks to the improbable beneficence of the Peter Wolff Trust, which aims to promote family entertainment by giving it a West End platform. Perfect Days presents the highly talented Siobhan Redmond as Barbs, a carrot-haired celebrity hairdresser approaching her 39th birthday and wanting to have some family entertainment of her own: Barbs wants to have a baby. The trouble is, she needs a bloke. Of course he doesn't need to be around for very long: these days, he doesn't even need to be there for the conception.

The strength of Perfect Days lies in its central character, rightly welcomed on these pages by Maggie O'Farrell as an "everywoman for the 1990s". Lochhead and Redmond catch her modern dilemmas with great warmth and humour. On the smaller stages that it has played - the Traverse and Hampstead - Redmond wouldn't have had to work her undoubted charm so hard. Nor would Lochhead's relaxed approach to stagecraft have looked as harshly exposed.

`Antony and Cleopatra': RST Stratford (01789 403403) to 7 Oct. `Rose': RNT Cottesloe, SE1 (0171 452 3000) in rep to 8 Sept. `Soul Train': Victoria Palace, SW1 (0171 834 1317) to 28 Aug. `Perfect Days': Vaudeville, WC2 (0171 836 9987) booking to 25 September