Poor old Michael Sheen then, because Michael Sheen’s Hamlet doesn’t feel like Michael Sheen’s Hamlet at all – it’s the Young Vic’s Hamlet.

It’s not that Sheen isn’t good. Far from it. He spits and sweats his way through the lines impressively. He might lack the energy of Tennant, the melancholy grumps of Kinnear and the cardigans of Law, but this is an extremely accomplished performance. Earnest is probably the adjective I’d attach to him most. But enough about him, let’s talk about the theatre…

So the Young Vic – as always – looks completely unrecognisable from any time I’ve been there previously. The entrance feels all a bit punchdrunk – long clinical corridors with vaguely indecipherable paraphernalia scattered around – and my constant companion, who is usually game for theatre but has an abiding hatred of audience participation, was scanning for the exits. But never fear: eventually we found our way into something resembling a theatre with a large but surprisingly intimate thrust stage.

The concept behind this production of Hamlet is that it is set in a mental institution. Claudius is the Chief Psychiatrist, Polonius and the various guards are the warders and everyone else is presumably an inmate.  It never quite stacks up (if my psychiatrist insisted I call him the king and brought his wife to work with him the whole time I might have a few issues) but there is enough there to make an interesting aesthetic and forms a nice play on the old debate over “antic disposition” vs actually properly crazy.

Photo: Simon Annand

Overall, this is an interesting production. The cast are all solid and Sheen is very good indeed, but it is the building which is the star. The minimal set is evocative and the wonderful lighting design is impressive, particularly (and this is going to sound like ironic praise for a lighting designer) how dark it is at some points. It’s extremely rare that you get pitch darkness in a theatre but here it is incredibly affecting when not even the emergency exit lights are glowing. I mean in a fire we’d have been fucked but top marks for theatricality.

(If you’re expecting Martin Sheen, you’re going to be disappointed. I didn’t make that mistake, of course. Just that someone else might have.)

And then people went to see the play – and it turned out that it wasn’t a disaster. He wasn’t terrible. He was actually pretty good. The idea of him being a real actor wasn’t some weird joke cooked up in Yorkshire to squeeze pennies out of punters. It transferred to London. And he got some pretty good reviews even if their tone – perhaps mine included – was slightly haughty, praising him for “extending his range” but making it clear that his success was due only to pretty low expectations going in.

Here we are two years later, and Lenny Henry is back – in Comedy of Errors at the National Theatre. And this time there can be no suggestion that the casting is cheap or opportunistic; the expectations going in will be higher. Thankfully, this production and everything in it – including Lenny Henry – soars.

It’s an absolutely baffling play on paper (I’m not even going to attempt a precis here) and as such a production concept has to work and work hard – thankfully, Dominic Cooke’s focus on the city and its teeming anonymous multidude works beautifully. It’s a concept-heavy production (the Duke is a east-end gangster – that sort of thing, you get the idea) but it never feels weighed down by it nor does it ever feel like the play is bending to fit the theme. Having seen it done this way, it becomes impossible to imagine that any other interpretation could work.

The entire production feels infused with energy, life and comedy. Whether it’s the arrival of the Corinthian ship in the prologue or the full energy comic chase scene, there’s never a missed opportunity to surprise and delight. Even in this preview performance all of the complex physical comedy is slick.

Cooke’s work is made a lot easier by the design by the ever-excellent Bunny Christie. We’d expect nothing less than superb from her and the National team, but this design is really quite something. Vast but nimble, it effortlessly evokes everything from disused warehouses to yuppy flats, and red light districts to Harley Street grandeur.

The actors playing the Antipholuses (Henry and Chris Jarman) and Dromios (Lucian Msamati and Daniel Poyser) have most of the hard work to do here – and they do it very well – but it’s most obviously an impressive ensemble piece. Claudie Blakley and Michelle Terry particularly spring to mind for their TOWIE-style turns as Adriana and Luciana; and Amit Shah and Silas Carson as the Angelo and Balthasar double act were also fun to watch.

Which brings us back, I suppose, to Lenny Henry. What’s notable about his performance here is that it doesn’t feel out of place at all. It’s not a celebrity on stage playing a role clearly too big for him. It’s just an accomplished actor delivering a very credible performance in an excellent production.

(PS This was a preview)

Before we go any further, I have to confess I’m Northern. That means proper Northern, as in, from Yorkshire. (For those of you that don’t know, it’s past Watford). Despite spending my youth skipping amongst the moors and the shopping malls of Leeds, I never managed to make it to Sheffield, not once in all my twenty something years and I admit I was prejudiced about it. I know about Sheffield from The Full Monty, the fact that it produces steel and that it has dark sooty towers at the edge of the M1.

Well, it also has the Crucible Theatre and it is well worth a visit.  I can’t believe it has taken me this long. (I would also advise you to get the train so you can see the lovely water feature by the station, which we greatly admired despite running late and then quite literally running up a steep hill to make it in time.)

Othello has always been a corker in the Bard’s canon and Daniel Evans has pulled off a genuine casting coup for his production – a staging that forms the centrepiece of the Crucible’s 40th birthday celebrations.  For Dominic West and Clarke Peters, Sheffield is quite a schlep from the mean streets of Baltimore but you’d never know it.

Peters, quite simply, is the best Othello I have ever seen. At 59, he has the right stature and seniority but it is his subtly nuanced performance that proves so powerful. He exudes gravitas and largeness of soul – and this makes his gradual descent into jealous madness so believable. We see a man pushed over the edge who, as he falls, becomes someone else. His voice becomes breathy and faster, his movements become sharp instead of languid. I particularly admired the moment when he first sees Desdemona after the seeds of jealousy have been planted. There is a new coldness – slight but unmissable – in his face. On occasion, he had a tendency to rush the verse and could be slightly indistinct as he plays with an African accent but this did not lessen his performance and I’m not ashamed to say I was moved to tears at climax. Desdemona’s death – Othello strangles her with a long white curtain – is the most upsetting I have ever seen.

West breaks the mould of creeping, sinister Iagos of late with an ebullient, strapping brute who you could imagine leading the charge into battle and cracking jokes with in the pub afterwards. With his forthright approach and strong Sheffield tones, he brings out the humour of Shakespeare’s text that is so often overlooked. The choice of accent is inspired because it sounds so trustworthy. Noisy comedy is this Iago’s cover: it makes his undercurrent of cold manipulation all the more powerful, particularly in the Second Act when the impact of the devastation he has wrought becomes apparent. Even as someone who knew the play incredibly well, there were moments that chilled me, such as when he advises Othello not to poison Desdemona but to strangle her in her wedding sheets, as though it were just a helpful piece of advice about a small marital spat. Throughout you can see he has an angry edge, a chip on his shoulder and the hint that psychosis is not far away particularly in his scenes with Emilia where the cruelty in their marriage is starkly apparent. It is a terrific interpretation: original and convincing. At the end, Iago seems not an evil enigma which I have so often thought him but an inadequate with nothing to say who has already tried to make an undignified run for it. You are left feeling betrayed and bereft for ‘the Noble Moor.’

There is not a feeble performance anywhere in this production. Desdemona (whom I freely admit to often thinking of as a sap), in Lily James’ hands is a young and beautiful heroine who retains, throughout her ordeal, traces of the spark and mettle that led her to defy convention in the first place. She is perfectly partnered by Alexandra Gilbreath, whose Emilia has clearly been starved of every kind of affection in her marriage to Iago and whose bawdy comedy and sound common sense provide both light relief and moments of extraordinary tenderness. Gilbreath’s real strength comes in the final Act when, fuelled by loyalty to her dead mistress she floors the men around her by her potent rage and grief, giving a woman who has never truly had a voice, real depth and feeling.  Her death came as an almost equal blow.

Often overlooked characters were brought to the forefront by a combination of great direction and performances in particular Brodie Ross’s Roderigo – a hilarious wimp, blubbing into his hankie, insisting on repeated hugs from Iago and so pathetically funny that not only were the audience chuckling consistently for the first ten minutes but my companion (who was unfamiliar with the text) asked me if I was quite sure Othello was a tragedy.

Evans’ production goes to show that a ‘conventional’ production – in period dress, minimal line pruning, sparse set – need not be reverential to the point of dullness. It can be fresh, funny, violent and moving… even to someone who studied the heck out of it in sixth form. I just wish I’d been able to see it pre A-Levels.

Must see.

Bonus points for purists: Lodovico’s rarely used and now-unfortunate line on Othello’s suicide, “O, bloody period!” (in the sense of a violent full-stop to the chain of tragedy)

Bonus points for Wire fans: McNulty takes his shirt off after the interval. Yes indeed.

I’m embarrassed by it, and I’m not even Simon Callow, so I can only imagine how much he must cringe when he sees it in the fringe guide. You can imagine the meeting with his producers, his great booming voice asking “But isn’t star billing in titles a little bit 90s? Won’t it make me, and you and everybody concerned look ridiculous?” They presumably told him that if David Leddy can get away with it, when nobody’s ever heard of him outside of Scotland, then it’s all fair game.

In case you’ve missed Simon Callow then he’s most famous for appearing in films such as Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love and Gerard Butler in The Phantom of The Opera.

So what do we make of Simon Callow in Tuesdays at Tescos?  Well, Simon Callow in Tuesdays at Tescos is a monologue about Pauline (Simon Callow), a transvestite who cares for her elderly father on Tuesdays by, amongst other things, taking him shopping in Tescos. The text of Simon Callow at Tuesdays at Tescos is best described as interesting, although it’s far from compelling. The character of Pauline (Simon Callow) is sympathetic and engaging, but the text feels like a character poured out on stage rather than a performance. As for plot – anything actually happening – you can pretty much forget it until the last few minutes, and this “twist” when it comes feels forced and unnatural in the context.

There’s also a LOT of repetition, which is a annoying at the best of times but fairly unforgivable in Edinburgh where the format in my mind has always been about short and crisp plays, even if not everyone agrees.

The stage is largely bare except for a huge glowing neon oblique ring which encircles the entire stage (and presumably further inhibits the room’s already difficult sight lines for parts of the audience) and a dress hung in glass case. The dress I get – Pauline (Simon Callow) is a transvestite, you see – but I’ve no idea of the symbolism of the huge glowing ring. Maybe the whole play is set on Saturn and I just missed that bit of the text.

The musings of Pauline (Simon Callow) are accompanied by the occasional tappings, clankings, potterings and strummings of an on-stage musician who appears to be composing a piece of music. No idea why or what this means.

Simon Callow. Simon Callow. Simon Callow. Simon Callow. Simon Callow.

Simon Callow’s performance in Simon Callow in Tuesdays at Tescos is clearly accomplished, but it never truly engages and left me largely unmoved. Pauline (Simon Callow) is potentially an interesting enough character to sustain an entire play but the text of Simon Callow in Tuesdays at Tescos and Simon Callow’s performance in Simon Callow at Tuesday at Tescos do not do enough to engage or take the audience anywhere.

★★

As such, it’s difficult not to back them and of all the plays I was excited about for this year’s festival it was The Wheel at The Traverse which seemed to offer the most potential.

Played out on an incredible multi-level set resembling a bombed out building, this play starts simply enough: two sisters are preparing for a wedding when an invasion by foreign troops brings soldiers to their door. One of the sisters takes an abandoned girl off in search of her father. But that’s where the straightforward part of the plot finishes.

What follows is a magical realist tour of war zones across the world and across eras, ranging from the Peninsula War of 1808 to Nazi occupied Poland to Agent Orange-scarred Vietnam to an unnamed desert conflict fought by British troops. Our heroine troops ever onwards in her quest to find the girl’s father and thereby free herself from responsibility, collecting stray children as she goes like a Mother Courage in reverse.

Along the way she discovers the girl has mystical and perhaps malevolent powers, or at least the power to make others believe she does, leading them all to material wealth and unending misery in which the only solution is death.

It’s all a bit of a downer really.

I liked this play more writing about it now than I did watching it at the time. Intellectualised, it’s a fine piece of work but it didn’t raise the same questions on the stage as it has for me here on the page.

It’s not that it’s a bad production. Far from it. In technical and production terms it’s not a fringe effort at all and would sit at ease on any London or Edinburgh stage even if it weren’t August.

But there is something lacking: character. Why does our heroine behave as she does? Don’t know. What drives the malevolent force in the child? I can offer you a range of plausible and interesting potential answers, but I’d be guessing because there’s never enough flesh on the bones to back any of them up – which feels like a missed opportunity.

★★★

Thankfully, The Ginge, The Geordie and The Geek have enough good ideas to make it worthwhile. This is rapid fire comedy with 35 sketches packed into an hour long show and the pace is formidable: music and lighting cues are deftly managed and business with costume changes and set moving around is kept to a minimum. This is clearly a highly practiced and polished comedy show.

The three performers (you can probably guess what they’re like from the title of the show) cover everything from garden gnomes to mime addicts and werewolf carebears to vegetarian lions. Not every sketch hits the bullseye (the Chief character was due for retirement from the very first sketch) but there is enough here to make it impressive and there are a few real gems: the final sketch, in which one man’s relationship with food is played out through the medium of Dirty Dancing, is truly superb.

★★★★

This is the story of two Canadian bankers who become urban legends after surviving a joint suicide attempt. Along the way they go to heaven (I think), meet the devil (probably) and do A LOT of miming.

What I think the performers are going for here is the creation of a web of interlacing images and themes, the hope being that the loss of the details or the lack of any sort of coherent plot or characterisation will be less important than the overall effect created. This doesn’t work. For one thing, the performances are simply not strong enough in a physical sense to paper over the gaping cracks in the text: standing on stage and waving your tie around might give a cursory impression of flying or falling, but if that’s what you’re relying on to carry your show then it’s going to be a long hour.

The end result could sympathetically be described as baffling; if I were being less polite then “incomprehensible” would be a more accurate adjective and if I were really upset – as I was when I emerged from this waste of time my life an hour shorter – I might even add the word “drivel”.

★

It’s a short and compact little play, just thirty minutes long and with only one actor (the very good Martin Miller), but it works brilliantly. It remains more clever than chilling – there is none of the sort of shocks you might expect from The Woman in Black – but it is an engaging piece and Miller is convincing both as the luvvy actor and the increasingly terrified victim.

Altogether, this play just clicks. It’s short, concise, funny, well thought out and well performed. What more could you ask from a show at the fringe?

★★★★

After some negotiation we managed to secure seating in a less conspicuous setting leaving the seats of misery, doom and inevitable pisstaking to be taken by any proper late comers – poor sods – but as it turns out we needn’t have worried. Because Stuart Goldsmith is pretty much the nicest comedian in Edinburgh.

Goldsmith comes across as almost infectiously good natured, not only not picking on what were some pretty fair targets (a stag do, people walking across the stage to go to the toilet, etc) but going out of his way to put his audience at ease. Which is just as well, really, because this show is really quite difficult to watch.

It’s not that Goldsmith isn’t funny – he is, he’s very funny. But the content comes across as intensely personal and he himself comes across as deeply vulnerable. The subject of the show is anxiety and his own struggles with it, ranging from the elaborate strategies to deal with fear of flying to being paralysed by choices in a camping shop – in marked contrast to his ability to cope well in a crisis.

Goldsmith doesn’t come across as a basket case – far from it, he’s likeable, charismatic, funny and clearly successful – which makes his routine and what he reveals about the internal struggles he faces more poignant than you would expect going in.

This is an entertaining routine but what makes it interesting is the level of self-doubt that the comic is willing to admit to – which, ironically, shows the greatest confidence of all.

★★★★

But what you do get from the Penguins is the chance to spend an hour with three guys who are pretty likeable, seem like a lot of fun and get a ten out of ten for effort. And for less than £10 and one hour of your time, that’s pretty difficult to not recommend.

This year’s show started somewhat haltingly, perhaps because I had higher expectations following last year or perhaps because they seemed to be trying too hard. The show comes into its own when they, and the audience, give up on any pretence of a script or coherent narrative and abandon themselves to the chaos and amateurism that is fast becoming their proud hallmark.

This year’s addition of Aaron Heffernan as a fully-fledged member is welcome, although there is the potential for his brand of enthusiastic/hyperactive/borderline psychotic comedy to overshadow the more subtle (well, slightly more subtle) efforts of Ross Dungan and Matthew Smyth.

The Penguins are never going to cause a revolution in modern comedy, but they very clearly enjoy what they do and their enthusiasm is infectious.

★★★

PS. I omitted to mention that this year also contained not a single penguin.