Gone to Earth Lyric Hammersmith, London W6
Whistling Psyche Almeida, London N1
Cruel and Tender Young Vic, London SE1
If Natalia Tena never acted again, she would already have a career to be proud of. Tena is 19 and has just left school. She had a small part in About a Boy, but this appearance in Gone to Earth is her professional stage debut. And it's phenomenal. Fierce, graceful, apparently guileless.
Tena is the more impressive because she plays a character easier to overact than to perform. This early 20th-century heroine is a wild child: pure at heart (she's always nursing limbless rabbits), free of spirit, hedonistic but bewilderingly ill-informed (how does this country girl not know how babies come about?). She's drawn to a lusty squire who hunts her and rapes her; she's protected by a kindly vicar who marries her but doesn't sleep with her, and whose congregation cast her out.
She belongs to the world of Mary Webb, whose mystic novels, set in rural Shropshire, are now remembered only because Stanley Baldwin admired them and Stella Gibbons brilliantly parodied them in Cold Comfort Farm. Like DH Lawrence, Webb runs the risk of smouldering into ridiculousness with her nature worship and her sexual passions. But, like Lawrence, she creates her own intense, independent-minded world.
Under Nancy Meckler's direction, Helen Edmundson's vivid adaptation for Shared Experience goes right to the heart of the work, capturing its fervid, glowering atmosphere: Niki Turner's cogent design sets the action within prison bars. The unexpected subversions of this romance - whose half-gypsy heroine tears her hair at the thought of marriage and is frightened by the figure of Christ on the Cross - are emphasised. Written in 1917, the novel is full of outrage at the slaughter of innocents, but makes no overt reference to the Great War.
Meckler's production encapsulates Webb's revulsion when villagers club little creatures to death while the air turns blood-red and cannon sound in the distance. It goes inside the characters, too, with Olly Fox's wonderful music: its rough, wandering line, played to the lilt of a harp, has something of English folk song and of yearning flamenco.
Tena sings Fox as she does everything: as if it were a necessity, not a flourish. Her performance has the urgency of childhood: she stuffs food into her face like a little pig, while her suitor proses on about the beauty of the trees; she is never girlish, coy or watchful. Hers is not the only strong performance in Gone to Earth; Simon Wilson as the kind-going-on-milksop vicar and Michelle Butterly as the squire's straight-talking ex-mistress are particularly fine; and the whole company pull together. But Tena is the pole star.
It would be hard to find a more remarkable story than that of James Barry, a contemporary of Florence Nightingale's who campaigned as hard as Nightingale for nursing and sanitary reforms but who was never acknowledged, and who on his deathbed was discovered to have lived his life disguising the fact that he was in fact a woman.
Now the doctor's namesake, Sebastian Barry, has added a further layer of confusion: burying him under a midden of adjectives. Barry's new play, Whistling Psyche - two monologues overlapping only in the closing 10 minutes - imagines a posthumous meeting between Barry and Nightingale in which the two healers, hostile in life, soliloquise themselves into reconciliation.
Simon Higlett has created an impressive, ghostly station waiting room, with gilt on the ceiling and great puffs of steam outside. Under Robert Delamere's direction, Kathryn Hunter provides a feat of impersonation as remarkable in its way as the impersonator she's mimicking: no gesture is entirely relaxed or natural: the manly leaning of an elbow on the fireplace, the continuous sleeking back of her hair against her skull, look rehearsed. Her light, crackling voice sounds as if it were being played on an old phonograph. She's neither quite man or exactly woman, but like a figure who has blossomed into the androgyny of extreme old age. As Nightingale, Claire Bloom is given too little to do, other than look wistful and talk about nasty hospital smells: she does it elegantly.
But it's not easy to imagine that either of these people could actually organise anything. Their dialogue is so encrusted with phrase-making, so gilded with adjectives (a noun scarcely dare show her face without one) that any action is put into a straitjacket of ornament and self-regard. If someone goes into a rotting hospital ward and discovers the 'wild, broken music of that stench', is she going to deal with it?
At the soon-to-be-remodelled Young Vic, a great director breathes an extraordinary life through Cruel and Tender. Martin Crimp's free version of Sophocles's rarely performed Trachiniae has a soppy Mills and Boon title but its dialogue is shrewd and doleful and, as with most Greek tragedy, the plot needs no tweaking to give off 21st-century reso nance. A woman waits at home for her war-hero husband. He sends before him a woman and a boy: his lover and his son. News arrives which suggests that this hero's victories could also be considered crimes. Violence is in the air: the man hits out; the woman turns her hand on herself.
The least convincing aspect of a compelling evening is the most insistently modern - Crimp's notion that the play's major concern is terrorism. Certainly the image of the Hydra is potent. But this is actually a play about the horror not the terror of war, about what it leaves behind rather than what it does.
Which is finely realised in Luc Bondy's perfect melding of Ancient Greek and modern Brit. The play moves to an unusual contemporary beat, eased by doses of Billie Holiday and Bach; the characters engage with each other casually, acerbically, disastrously. The Greek chorus is brilliantly translated into a trio of women, one of whom, Jessica Claire, provides a dazzling comic turn as a beautician who uses her atomiser as a spray-gun. Richard Peduzzi's rectilinear design of eau-de-Nil marble traps the action in a gigantic Thirties fireplace: chilly and grand and not quite anywhere. Exactly right for a blood-freezing play.
