Theatre: Daddies, we hardly knew you

Chimes at Midnight

Chichester

A Mad World, My Masters

The Globe

Loot

Vaudeville

There are two notable aspects to Chichester staging . Orson Welles wrote and adapted the play and film by combining bits of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, with a scene from Henry V, and snippets from Shakespeare's source, the historian Holinshed. By doing so, he underlined the personal story of young Hal, the future Henry V, caught between two father figures, Henry IV and Falstaff. At Chichester, the Welles role, Falstaff, is played by one of Welles' recent biographers: not the IoS's David Thomson, but the other one, Simon Callow. Henry IV is played by Keith Baxter, the original Hal in the 1960 stage version and the 1966 film. If Callow and Baxter don't know how should be done, you imagine, no one does.

From the moment the Chorus (Michael G Jones) enters in period garb, reading out helpful chunks of history from a book, Patrick Garland's production transports us to the olde worlde of repertory theatre. This is pageant drama - the sort Baldrick and Blackadder ought to have killed off in the 1980s. It's soon evident that we'll be gripped less by the conflict of lifestyles than the conflict of acting styles. In this atmosphere, the choice for Tam William's Hal becomes a simple one. Does he want to grow up to act like Callow or like Baxter?

If Hal follows the route mapped out by Callow, the young prince will go for exterior details. He'll jut out his jaw, slide his lower lip sideways and send eyebrows popping up to his hairline. His hands will flutter, his shoulders heave, his tummy wobble. A fruity patrician voice will deliver line after line in capital letters. Halfway through each sentence the face will turn from pink to red. No one could wonder at the size of his paunch. It comes from making a meal of everything.

This Falstaff approach certainly goes down well with the audience - happy to be mugged by a well-known actor. Filling in this cheerful outline, Callow has little time to dwell on pathos, melancholy or the uneasy sense of vacancy and dependency. Falstaff becomes a turn and his relationships with other characters at best tangential. It's odd that this bulky figure has so little room for an interior life. Odd too, that Callow, who explores characters penetratingly in his biographies should settle for a lightweight reading of a complex person.

If Tam Williams's Hal rejects the indulgences of Callow's Falstaff and follows instead the purer path of Keith Baxter's Henry, he will act on the inside rather than the outside. He'll think, he'll wander in an aloof distinguished manner and he'll listen to his own voice. A cerebral, anguished figure, he'll convince us that he is troubled by issues, weary from authority, wan from the guilt. We will see how uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. (Sleeping pills will be essential.) He won't seem the strong warrior and autocrat. But he will look and sound beautiful.

As it is, in Garland's dismally heterogeneous production, Tam Williams's Hal follows neither the Callow path nor the Baxter one. He comes up with something of his own.William's Hal is a febrile teenager, who throws away lines with an easy-going naturalism. With his cute looks, Williams could be a one-hit wonder on Top of the Pops. His casual slouch suggests the most he needs from Dad is to borrow the car for the evening. Nor has his voice the strength for the Chichester stage. When he comes to fight Tristran Gemmill's robust and forceful Hotspur it's impossible to believe that Hal will win.

Luckily, in William Hobbs's stage fight, after an unenthralling slow- motion sequence - yes, they're still doing those baffling ineffective slo-mo bits - Hal manages, almost accidentally, to get his axe between his opponent's legs. Gemmill has an infuriating stammer. It's a character detail he's picked up from Lady Percy's description of Hotspur as "speaking thick, which nature made his blemish". If anything will cure him, it is a blade in the balls.

The script's other main selling-point, the low-life scenes, remain resolutely under-charged. The blocking is static and weakly animated. The characters look like characters you see in plays. The cumbersome scene changes involve folding back panels to create the tavern floor at the Boar's Head. This allows a modest table to come up through a trapdoor. (Quicker to bring it on.) By the final scene they give up on the panels and table altogether. Perhaps sensing the flatness of the evening, some of the cast - notably David Cardy's Pistol - throw themselves at their roles as if they are doors that need breaking down. But no amount of energy can compensate for the centre not holding.

The journey from the boyish Hal crouching at Falstaff's feet to Falstaff prostrate in front of the newly crowned Henry V is never satisfyingly charted.The episodes hurry by without us participating in the emotional discoveries along the way. The point of Welles streamlining these plays was surely to highlight the relationship between three figures: what's so disappointing in this production is that these three could be in different shows.

The Globe's lively policy of reviving Shakespeare's contemporaries continues with an adult production of Thomas Middleton's 1605 comedy A Mad World, My Masters. This is no slavish nod to heritage lovers. As the programme points out, Middleton's satire would originally have been performed in a small indoor candlelit theatre by a company of children.

In Sue Lefton's entertainingly raunchy production, periods are neatly mixed with some cast members in velvet flares and frilly shirts looking like strays from a Sixties night. The brass band, which provides a witty slinky accompaniment from the balcony, wear Day-Glo wigs. This attractive jumble matches the multiple plot about a grandson trying to gull money out of his grandpa - only to find the woman he wants to marry is his grandpa's courtesan.

Jonathan Cecil is delightfully daffy as the bumbling and trusting grandpa, Sir Bounteous Progress, and John McEnery is a vivid picture of pinched and cadaverous suspicion as the husband, Shortrod Harebrain, keen to spy on his wife and catch "the slippery revolutions of her eye". While the women - Belinda Davison's Lady Gullman and Tonia Chauvet's Mistress Harebrain - are refreshingly full-blooded figures.

Middleton runs the comic gamut. He has a talent for double entendres (lines about organs, etc), jokes about asking a doctor to be patient (he can't, he replies, be physician and patient) and strong farcical scenes. Here verbal comedy joins hands with physical comedy in an unpompous way that's seems not to have dated.

There's little that would surprise Middleton about human behaviour in Joe Orton. Skilfully taking his cast from the existing pool of actors at Chichester, David Grindley's funny and fast-paced production of Orton's Loot arrives at the Vaudeville, London. At two hours, with an interval, the show is short and you wouldn't want it any longer. The plot is essentially an excuse for Orton's epigrams, which are first rate. The cast deliver the dialogue with just the right arch intensity that teeters on camp without becoming indulgent.

Thirty years on, the frequent jokes about police corruption are greeted with knowing delight by the First Night audience. When everyone in a West End theatre chuckles merrily - and a little smugly - about bent coppers, you wonder what the next Orton will need to say to be subversive.

'': Chichester Festival (01243 781312), to 5 Sept. 'A Mad World, My Masters': Globe, SE1 (0171 401 9919), to 19 Sept. 'Loot': Vaudeville, WC2 (0171 836 9987), to 17 Oct.