Cymbeline, Shakespeare's Globe, London<br></br>The Noise of Time, Barbican, London<br></br>The Fire Raisers, BAC, London
The innocent have bells on, but the wicked go bang
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Your support makes all the difference.Shakespeare knew about noise pollution. The Globe's original neighbours were bear-baiters, and one Renaissance punter had to be booked for persistent trumpeting. Glancing at Mike Alfreds' charming and ingenious new Globe production of Cymbeline, you might suspect revenge. On stage stand gongs, ethnic glockenspiels, cymbals and gourd maracas. However, Alfreds is quietly "sounding" souls here, giving his six actors expressionistic percussive props.
Princess Imogen (Jane Arnfield), forgiving heroine of the Bard's late romance, is accompanied by celestial, tinkling bells. Some hang from the bracelet her husband Posthumus (Mark Rylance) gives her before he unjustly supposes her a jade. Imprisoned and guilt-wracked, his fetters are grimly rattling shells.
This production's Indo-Japanese influences chime with Cymbeline's folkloric roots, even though it's set in Ancient Britain and Rome. The cast, in white silk trousers, are also clowning pierrots. Rylance, as the spurned dolt Cloten, brandishes a slapstick for a sword, while the doubling cleverly suggests Cloten is Posthumus's Freudian id, giving this sprawling play close-knit coherence.
There are slack patches, and John Ramm's Iachimo is a barely threatening seducer. But Abigail Thaw is an amusingly wicked queen, all teeth when she smiles. Arnfield is a vigorous innocent, and Rylance, as usual, makes weakness nasty, pitiable and hilarious.
At the Barbican, more instruments litter the stage for The Noise of Time, a part-theatre, part-concert hybrid directed by Simon McBurney for Complicite in collaboration with the top-notch Emerson String Quartet. It weds an off-beat biodrama about Shostakovich with his String Quartet No 15, regarded by many as his troubled requiem and composed in 1971 when he was fatally ill.
Shostakovich's life embraced epic upheavals: the Russian Revolution and Hitler's siege of Leningrad. Under Stalin, he was both denounced and fanfared. How corruptingly he towed the party line is contested. McBurney works in some of those facts yet only in slivers. Vintage radios glow and dance in the dark. We hear a broadcast about the human ear interrupted by snatches of historic news bulletins and interviews about Shostakovich. Photos of the composer are projected on a cello, which shatters in slow motion when we learn of Shostakovich recanting past works. Four mute actors wander round displaying a penchant for mime and alternative puppetry.
These overlaid elements can be visually arresting and suggestive but also precious and muddled. The cast look like a perverse removals firm, stroking and aimlessly reconfiguring stacks of chairs. Still, McBurney is in tune with the haunted music, and the Emerson Quartet are thrillingly virtuosic, eventually coming together centre-stage. The music says it all with its grief, drifting old melodies and its funereal pomp plagued by a nagging buzz, like blowflies.
At BAC, a big bang is imminent in The Fire Raisers (1958) written by Max Frisch and revived by Orla O'Loughlin – winner of this year's James Menzies-Kitchin Award for young directors. In this black farce, a well-heeled home-owner called Biedermann condemns city-wrecking arsonists. Only he's soon offering fawning hospitality to Jo and Bill, supposed paupers who stockpile petrol under his nose.
You may glean The Fire Raisers is a cryptic parable about the Nazis' rise, Soviet Czechoslovakia or nuclear arms. With O'Loughlin's update to contemporary Britain, one notes the topicality of Biedermann fraternising with the Semtex-juggling Bill and dithering in the face of anti-capitalist terrorism. In the end though, Frisch's meaning and own moral stance seem damnably slippery. His faux-archaic chorus is tiresome, too. O'Loughlin's cast – especially James Hyland's Jo – admirably combine naturalism, satire and near-Pinteresque menace. Nonetheless, you've mentally put a bomb under this play long before Bill's predictable, final detonation.
Cymbeline: Shakespeare's Globe, SE1 (020 7401 9919), to 23 Sept; The Noise of Time: Barbican, EC1 (020 7638 8891), ends today; The Fire Raisers: BAC, SW11 (020 7223 2223), to 29 July
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